Adam Smith Did Not ‘Invent’ Capitalism

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy (Gavin Kennedy): Adam Smith Did Not 'Invent' Capitalism

…‘Capitalism’ as we know it was a phenomenon he knew nothing about. The word itself was not invented in English until 1854 by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel, The Newcomes, and then popularised by Karl Marx.

Adam Smith described his fourth age of man as ‘commerce’, which he didn’t ‘invent’. It operated thousands of years before the fall of Rome in the 5th century, and Adam Smith noted how commerce revived in Western Europe from the 15th century onwards from observing its effects in gradually widening social choice and promoting technological change.

Smith saw the revival of commerce as contributing to the spread of opulence in Britain which would have a dramatic effect on the living standards, health and education of the labouring poor. By 1800 (Smith died in 1790) the uninterrupted experience of humans in society (except for a small ruling elite), for the first time ever, were to live in conditions that were better than minimal subsistence of the grandparents. …