If there are any remaining doubts as to the catholicity of Smith's intellectual influence, they will be dispelled by this volume. The product of a 2004 conference, the collection contains (along with a foreword by Knud Haakonssen and an introductory chapter by the editors) fourteen essays by scholars who completed their doctoral work between 2000 and 2004. The subject fields of those doctorates sample a broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences: economics (5); philosophy (4); politics (2); the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (2); and comparative literature (1).

As one would guess from that enumeration, these “new voices” speak more to Smith's influence on philosophical reflection than on economic analysis narrowly construed. Thus, we have Robert Mitchell writing to remind scholars of English literature that it was Smith's analysis of the aesthetic and rhetorical character of “systems” that established the framework for the Romantic debate over the desirability of such systems in political and literary thought. Lauren Brubaker directs our attention to the content of Smith's system, reminding us that there is nothing inevitable in his “system of natural liberty.” To the contrary, since man's insolent disdain for “the good instrument except when he … dare not use the bad one” is as much an element of our nature as is our “desire of praise-worthiness,” the normal condition of Smithian society is marked by a continuing tension between these opposing passions. Ryan Hanley directs his “voice” at those working in the recent re-emergence of virtue ethics, introducing them to Smith's evident contributions in that direction, much as Deirdre McCloskey (Reference McCloskey2008) recently has done for economists, though Hanley emphasizes Smith's debt to Aristotle in this regard, while McCloskey sees a connection with Plato and Aquinas. Carola von Villiez likewise speaks to ethicists, arguing that it is the culturally contextual nature of Smith's system of morals that “explains the current relevance of his theory” to those seeking to construct a system capable of “accommodating that moral pluralism characteristic of modern societies” (p. 115). Here we find that contemporary relevance nicely illustrated by an illuminating parallel drawn between Smith's appeal to the impartial spectator and John Rawls's concept of an “initial position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” Eric Schliesser takes up a broader question yet, employing Smith's reply to Jean Jacques Rousseau's critique of commercial society to reveal Smith's view regarding philosophy's relationship with the society within which it operates. By Schliesser's reading, Smith sees philosophy as serving the larger society in two ways: as a source of counsel in structuring institutions to align the pursuit of private interest with the “general interest of society” and as a source of enlightened popular education in support of public order. In this way, philosophy promotes commercial development but in so doing advances its own progress as well since economic growth provides the security and material abundance necessary to philosophical contemplation.

Exegesis and contextualization of historical texts lie at the core of all these essays, of course; but Chad Flanders's reflection on part II, section iii (“Of the Influence of Fortune”) of Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) moves beyond this to an exercise in philosophical contemplation itself, going so far at one point as to advance an utterly un-Smithian, deontological standard insisting that we avoid harm to our fellows not so much in response to the “terrors of merited punishment” but from a conviction that such a stance is right in itself (pp. 205 and 207). Others direct their Smithian exegesis to concerns that have gained special prominence in our own time. Edith Kuiper, in a survey of Smith's “feminist contemporaries,” offers a brief but useful review of eighteenth-century feminist literature, arguing that, though we have no indication that Smith read in that literature, it nevertheless was “part of a discourse that [he] encountered,” though “Smith is silent … to a remarkable extent” on the issues raised therein (p. 55). Patrick Frierson writes to bring Smith to the attention of those seeking to construct a modern environmental ethics, insisting that while Smith “did not focus on human relationships with nature, [his] careful ethical reflection can be fruitfully extend[ed] to deal with … environmental issues” (p. 158). Finally, Fonna Forman-Barzilai nicely complements the Villiez essay by again giving special attention to the culturally conditioned nature of Smith's ethical system and arguing that, though “Smith might not have been troubled by late modern questions” of cross-cultural ethical judgment, it is precisely because the deeply contextual character of his theory “thickly describes … how difficult it is to cultivate a critical [cultural] distance from ourselves … , that Smith speaks most insightfully to moral and political theory today” (pp. 90 and 100).

Even those papers that speak to Smith's economics do so from a broad, philosophical perspective with little attention to particular points of analysis. Thus, Craig Smith offers a survey of Adam Smith's well-known observations on the acquisition and application of knowledge running from the astronomy essay, through the familiar “four stages” of social development in the Lectures on Jurisprudence (LJ) and The Wealth of Nations (WN) to remind us “that Smith possessed a clear appreciation of the role of knowledge in economic and social phenomena” (p. 293). Leonidas Montes's contribution is a slightly revised and more concise version of his earlier (2004, chap. 5) effort to properly identify the nature of Smith's methodological debt to Newton, which exercise leads Montes to join the growing chorus denying the claim that Smith's Newtonianism can be said to place him in the tradition of Walrasian general equilibrium. While one finds here a passing reference to Blaug's distinction between Smithian “process” competition and a Walrasian “end-state,” readers seeking clarification of the analytical issues involved will have to repair to Blaug himself ([1997] 2000) and Robinson ([1974] 2000) or to Negishi's recent brief summary (2004).

Jimena Hurtado-Prieto and Maria Paganelli bring us closest to a discussion of economic analysis. Hurtado-Prieto points out that Smith's critique of Bernard Mandeville went beyond the objection, familiar from TMS, that Mandeville failed to properly distinguish between virtue and vice. It is Mandeville's economics that is the object of criticism in LJ, where he is charged with adherence to the “popular notion” that associates national wealth with a rising domestic monetary circulation, leading to the conclusion that all domestic expenditure, luxury included, contributes to wealth—a conclusion obviously at odds with Smith's principle that it is frugality that spurs growth.

It is Smith's monetary theory that is at issue in the Paganelli essay, where we find him charged with the “failure” to “recognize the potential, either positive or negative, of using paper money as a policy instrument to gain control over the economy.” This alleged failure is explained, we are told, by appeal to Smith's ethical theory. While his “contemporaries … tend to use either benevolence or love of power to justify the positive or negative effects of using paper money as a policy instrument[,] Smith … considers neither … as fundamental motivational forces in human conduct.” It is this alleged Smithian “downplaying of benevolence” and “love of power” that “suggests,” respectively, his “downplaying the possible use of paper money to stimulate the economy” and “the possible misuse of paper money that causes hyperinflation” (p. 271).

To charge Smith (whose opposition to the inflationist “popular notion” of his time is a thing of legend) with analytical failure in “downplaying” any stimulating effect of paper currency emissions cannot help but strike readers as peculiarly ironic. The argument is made all the more curious by Paganelli's recognition (p. 283) that Smith's presumption of a strict specie convertibility necessarily limits the extent of any paper issue. The scope for discretionary monetary policy in Smith's world is further constrained by his conclusion that the international distribution of specie is determined endogenously by price level differentials: “Gold and silver, like all other commodities, naturally seek the market where the best price is given for them” (WN I.xi.e.34, 208). Hence, there is no failure to be explained here. We find in Smith no proposal advancing paper issues as an instrument “to fix and stimulate the economy” because, so long as he is dealing with a convertible currency, there is no scope for such stimulus beyond the well-known, capacity-enhancing effects following upon the release of idle specie balances (WN II.ii.30-36, 293-5; Paganelli, p. 276); even this benefit had been, on Smith's reckoning, fully realized long before the time of his writing (WN II.ii.65, 308).

As to the “misuse of paper” leading to “hyperinflation,” that of course is a risk commonly associated with inconvertibility. Here too Smith is innocent of the charge of failure to recognize such a risk. When Smith turned his attention to inconvertible currency, as in the case of the American colonies, he observed that, owing to “the quantity of paper emitted in the different colonies, … a hundred pounds sterling was occasionally considered as equivalent, in some of the colonies … to so great a sum as eleven hundred pounds currency” (WN II.ii.100, 327). An eleven-fold depreciation of colonial paper against sterling might be reasonably considered as approaching the threshold of “hyperinflation.”

Collections of essays drawn from multiple contributors are seldom designed to be read in their entirety, and it is likely that only reviewers do so. That is a pity, particularly in a case such as this where so many of the contributions treat closely related issues. In this instance, to read the collection in its entirety is to reveal the many points where a closer collaboration amongst the authors could have enhanced the quality of the whole. Readers will form their own judgments, of course, but I found the Villiez piece to be the jewel of the collection—one, indeed, whose brilliance illuminates a number of its fellows. As a brief, well-structured, highly enlightening exposition of Smith's system of morals, it is, to my knowledge, without peer. Many of the same points are reviewed by Forman-Barzilai on cultural context, Frierson on environmental ethics, and Hanley on virtue ethics. All these are improved by a reading in light of Villiez's excellent survey. Other missed opportunities for improvement through collaboration abound. Mitchell's treatment of Smith on “system,” limited as it is to a survey of parts IV and VI of TMS, could have been usefully embellished by reference to the Lectures on Rhetoric and to the astronomy essay—the first serving to elaborate the discussion of system as a “genre of literary production” and the second to illuminate Smith's view regarding the source of our aesthetic response to systems. Hints regarding the second of these at least are found in the Schliesser and Craig Smith essays. Similarly, Hurtado-Prieto's interesting review of Smith's larger critique of Mandeville could have cast yet more light on the relationship between the two authors had it addressed the contrast between Mandeville's exclusion of consequence as a standard of judgment for private virtue (p. 236) and Smith's opposing observation that we are drawn by an “irregularity” of sentiment to give telling weight in our ethical judgment to precisely those consequences Mandeville would have us ignore—a contrast made all the more prominent for the reader by the placement of the Hurtado-Prieto essay immediately following Flanders's discourse on that very “irregularity.”

These “new voices” have done much to further the current scholarly effort to extend Smith's voice to fields where recollection of his work has dimmed. We can now hope that the many fruitful lines of inquiry revealed in this collection will be taken up by these or yet newer voices.