Book forum?

[Bugbear]

Smith's Wealth of Nations pre-dates Marx's Das Kapital by a century.

Yes, of course. It was just nice to find a source to point to that counters Marx so well; at least the introduction does. Sadly, I did not have knolege of this book back in college, and all the better that it is from a Scottish author, and pre-dates Marx's work.

* Sorry, it's just exciting that I have access to some of these books now that they are being digitized and available to me on internet libraries. That was not the case when I was going to college. *

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

This is probably WAAAY off topic, even for an off topic discussion, but what I see as the difference between Smith's Wealth of Nations and Marx's Das Kapital is that Smith saw society as constantly evolving, where as Marx's philosophy did not take into account the fact that society would continue to evolve. Hence in the century and a half since Marx penned his manifesto we have seen the rise and demise of communism, while Smith's views of capitalism have continued to evolve to meet the changing needs of society, and have even been embraced by those nations which once extolled the virtues of Marxist doctrine.

[Bugbear]

Understood: emurgent complexity, and self organization. I see Smith come up a lot in the things I regularly read, and I wanted to see what your responce was. Sorry.
I did wonder to myself, as I was reading Smith's introduction, did the condition of the Highlands at the time play a small role in his description of the "savages," or any thing else. I guess I will need to look up the time frame of the writing of the book in relation to the history of Scotland and the Highlands as I read further.
My degree was in English, so I did not often get to hear the other sides point of view; it was frustrating, and I do wish I had been able to cite Smith's work.

I'll shut up now.

* I did get a chance to go over the book. It has been brought up so often in a lot of the other things I keep reading that I figured I should read it first hand. Thanks. *