On Terry Peach’s Unconvincing “Reconsideration†of Adam Smith’s Theory of Value

Roy H. Grieve

History of Political Economy, 2019, vol. 51, issue 4, 753-777

Abstract: In a recent paper Terry Peach argues that Adam Smith found no reason to limit application of the labor-embodied theory of value to the early and rude state of society. According to Peach, Smith—having found a problem in employing the labor-commanded measure of value in the case of the contemporary commercial economy—somewhat surreptitiously abandoned labor-commanded and adopted instead labor-embodied as a generally valid theory of exchange value. Peach shows a propensity to find what he considers “labor-commanded†usages in Smith’s work. However, I find Peach’s rather startling “Reconsideration†to be fatally flawed—for the reason that it derives from Peach’s evident misunderstanding of what is implied by the labor-commanded measure of value.

Keywords: Adam Smith on real value; labor-commanded; labor-embodied; labor of acquiring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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