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                                      牛津大学出版百年旗舰产品,英文版本原汁原味呈现,资深编辑专为阅读进阶定制,文学评论名家妙趣横生解读。                 内容简介
     亚当·斯密是十八世纪中期英国负盛名的政治经济学家和伦理学家,他一生研究的学问涉及天文学、纯文学、修辞学、哲学、伦理学、政治学、法学和政治经济学等。《国富论》奠定了他作为英国古典政治经济学奠基人的崇高地位和名望。     作者简介
     亚当·斯密(1723—1790),被誉为“现代经济学之父”。1723年出生在苏格兰的柯科迪,青年时就读于牛津大学,1751年至1764年在格斯哥大学担任哲学教授。在此期间,斯密发表了他的*一部著作《道德情操论》,确立了他在知识界的威望。但是,他的不朽名声则得自于1776年出版的伟大著作《国民财富的性质和原因的研究》(简称《国富论》)。这部著作使其在余生中享受着无尽的荣誉和爱戴,并延续至今。     精彩书评
       回到经济学的基本问题,让我们重读亚当·斯密,不要再相信凯恩斯主义的那些政策。  ——张维迎
  虽然斯密也劝说放任自由,但他的论证却更多地是反对政府干预和反对垄断;虽然他赞扬贪欲的结果,却又几乎总是鄙视商人的行为和策略。他也不认为商业制度本身是完*值得赞美的。  ——谢宗林
  这本书需要人们聚精会神地去读才能读进去,而目前很少有人能坐下来专心读书,因而本书*初也许不会受到非常热烈的欢迎。  ——大卫·休谟     目录
   Introduction 
Note on the Text 
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Adam Smith and His Time
THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
Explanatory notes and Commentary
Index      精彩书摘
     The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consists always, either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.  According therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniences for which it has occasion.  But this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and , secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be soil, climate , or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must, in that particular situation, depend upon those two circumstances.  The abundance or scantiness of this supply too seems to depend more upon the former of those two circumstances than upon the latter. Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers,* every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself, or such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing, Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beats. Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.  The causes of this improvement, in the productive powers of labour, and the order, according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of men in the society, make the subject of the First Book of this Inquiry.  Whatever be the actual state of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which labour is applied in any nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must depend, during the continuance of that state, upon the proportion between the number of those who are annually employed. The number of useful and productive labourers, it will hereafter appear, is every where in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to the particular way in which it is so employed. The Second Book, therefore, treats of the nature of capital stock, of the manner in which it is gradually accumulated, and of the different quantities of labour which it puts into motion, according to the different ways in which it is employed.  Nations tolerably well advanced as to skill, dexterity, and judgment, in the application of labour, have followed very different plans in the general conduct or direction of it; and those plans have not all been equally favourable to the greatness of its produce. The policy of some nations has given extraordinary encouragement to industry of country; that of others to the industry of towns. Scarce any nation has dealt equally and impartially with every sort of industry. Since the downfall of the Roman empire, the policy o Europe has been more favourable to arts, manufactures, and commerce, the industry of towns; than to agriculture, the industry of the country. The circumstances which seem to have introduced and established this policy are explained in the Third Book.  Though those different plans were, perhaps, first introduced by the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men, without any regard to, or foresight of, their consequences upon the general welfare of the society; yet they have given occasion to very different theories o political oeconomy;* of which some magnify the importance of that industry which is carried on in towns, others of that which is carried on in the country, Those theories have had a considerable influence, not only upon the opinions of men of learning, but upon the public conduct of princes and sovereign states. I have endeavoured, in the Fourth Book, to explain, as fully and distinctly as I can, those different, and the principal effects which they have produced in different ages and nations.  To explain in what has consisted the revenue of the great body of the people, or what has been the nature of those funds which, in different ages and nations, have supplied their annual consumption, is the object of these Four first Books. The Fifth and last Book treats of the revenue of the sovereign, or commonwealth. In this Book I have endeavoures to show; first, what are the necessary expences of the sovereign, or commonwealth; which of those expences ought to be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society; and which of them, by that of some particular part only, or of some particular members of it; secondly, what are the different methods in which the whole society, and what are the principal advantages and inconveniencies of each of those methods: and, thirdly and lastly, what are the reasons and causes which have induced almost all modern governments to mortgage some part of this revenue, or to contract debts, and what have been the effects of those debts upon thereal wealth, the annual produce of the land and labour of the society.  BOOK I  Of the Causes of Improvement in the  productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order  according to which its Produce is naturally  distributed among the different Ranks of the  People  CHAPTER I  Pf the Division of Labour  THE greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.*  The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried further in them than in others of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to supply the small wants of but a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more, at one time, than those employed in one single brance.  ……      前言/序言
     Who owns the Wealth of Nations? Since the early nineteenth century Smith has been the patron saint of homo economicus. Victorian liberal economists invoked his work to justify the pursuit of individual self-interest in a free market. The political and economic trends of the more recent past—the drive to privatization, the concentration on the profit motive as the key to market effectiveness and economic co-ordination—in Thatcherite Britain and Reaganite North America (but also in St Petersburg and Moscow), claim descent from Smith. His name is taken by the Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing think-tank whose aim is to devise policy based on market principals; but his interpreters and descendants include Karl Marx. For not only did Smith view merchants and manufacturers with deep suspicion, but he considered the sigh of a properly functioning market system to be the maximization of material benefits to society’s lowest members. The comprehensiveness of his vision of a self –regulating market appears to confirm him as the founding father of economic conservatism; but against his celebration of capitalism as the surest means of wealth accumulation should be set a pessimism at the dehumanizing potential of industrial society which appears appears to anticipate Marx’s alienation theory. Nor should we too readily conflate Smith’s socio-economic prescriptions with conditions in the late twentieth century. His experience as an eighteenth-century citizen was of pre-industrial, small-scale technology, multinational interests of modern institutions the dangerous consumption of non-renewable natural resources, or the problems of post-industrial unemployment. Immediately relevant in the ideological climate of the late twentieth century , the Wealth of Nations is firmly embedded in a complex of assumptions surrounding the birth of a consumer society in the eighteenth century.  I  There is nothing which requires more to be illustrated buy philosophy than trade does. . . A merchant seldom thinks but of his own particular trade. To write a good book upon it, a man ust have extensive views.  (Samuel Johnson)  If the significance of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations has been too narrowly restricted to no more than the beginnings of technical economics, this is in  Some measure the consequence of his own famous exposition of the division of labour. As a plea for specialization, it is a theory which appears to justify modern interpreters in editing out of consideration Smith’s complicating deliberations on the nature of law, government, and social and individual morality as they affect the operations of a market economy. In the 1970 Penguin edition of the Wealth of Nations, for example, Books 1 and 2 form the substance of a work ‘solely concerned with Smith’s contribution to the principles of economics’, and Books 3 is included simply ‘in order to make the maximum use of the available space’. In justification, the editor, Andrew Skinner, anticipates his readers’ response by arguing that ‘[i]t would probably be agreed that the first two books contain the central part of Smith’s work as a theoretical economist, and the real basis of a profoundly influential system of thought’. With less tactical skill. The same argument is employed to explain the complete absence of Book 5 from the recent Everyman reprint of 1991: Book 5, the reader is assured, adds nothing new. D. D. Raphael concludes his Introduction by observing that: ‘Books I-IV do, however, contain the whole of what Smith had to say in carrying out his aim, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”.’  What both of these editions fail to acknowledge is the importance of that man of ‘extensive views’ whom Dr Johnson described in explaining Smith’s qualifications for writing on economics. It is the original embedding of the economic argument within a wider cultural, intellectual, and historical enquiry which the present selected edition attempts to reinstate against the more traditional view of the Wealth of Nations as the ‘classic’ economics textbook. By including large sections from all five books, the discursive context of Smith’s model becomes apparent. An enquiry in five books, the Wealth of Nations sites economic activity within the framework of a wide-ranging discussion of social institutions and human propensities. The effect of its extended description is to complicate and problematize economic analysis by driving the economic impulse deeper into the recesses of human personality as the nature basis of our psychological and social existence.  Book 1 is concerned to outline that division of labour which constitutes the wealth of nations, and to establish a new division of society into landlords, wage-earners, and capitalists, who in their various combinations activate and keep in motion the mechanism of the economic process. As Smith summarizes his argument so far in the ‘Conclusion to Chapter 11:  The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself. . . into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are three great, original and constituent orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived. (p. 155)  Book 2 is concerned with accumulation, I its economic and psychological aspects—with productive and unproductive labour, the virtues of parsimony, and the human urge to better our condition (that is, to amass greater and greater wealth).  Taken together, Books 1 and 2 do, indeed, form an economic treatise—Smith’s demonstration of what constitutes the wealth of nations, and in particular the wealth of the modern commercial nation. But without Book 3 their argument would lack the significant historical dimension which eventually reveals how it is that the humblest beneficiary of the division of labour, the ‘industrious and frugal peasant’ of the opening chapter, excels in his material comforts the African king, ‘the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’ (p.20).   For Book 3 is dedicated to historical explanation, to the historical and geographic relation of town to country, and in particular to the emergence of the ur-capitalist protagonist from the medieval contest for dominance between the town guilds and the feudal landowners. Smith’s subject, broadly historicized here, is the relation between those legislative and administrative institutions which constitute and protect human society, and that individual liberty from regulation which is the motor of economic development. Is society a community of private interests or public regulation?  Book 4 ranges widely while purporting to be a critique of two systems of political economy—Mercantilism, the still feudally minded philosophy of wealth through trade, dominated economic thought and practice between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. It recognized the need to safeguard a potent national economy through high import tariffs and state intervention. ‘Physiocracy’ is the label attached to the doctrines of a group of eighteenth-century French economists, led by Fran?ois Quesnay, who argued, in contrast, that mercantile stock is ‘sterile’, and that agriculture is the only source of wealth because it alone produces a surplus, other manufactures merely reproducing what they consume. Most of Book 4 is concerned to expose the flaws in the Mercantilist system, under whose intricate controls, it is claimed, the British and other European economies have been severely hampered.    
				
				
				
					穿越时空的思想回响:一部关于人类社会与经济秩序的宏伟画卷  书名: 启蒙时代的智慧:政治经济学导论与现代社会构建的基石  作者: [请在此处想象一位18世纪的哲学家、经济学家或社会思想家的名字,例如:詹姆斯·斯图尔特爵士 或 弗朗索瓦·魁奈 的继承者]  出版年份: [请在此处设定一个架空的年份,例如:1785年]  书籍篇幅: 约1200页,四卷本  ---  内容提要  本书并非一部探讨特定国家财富积累的经典文本,而是一部深入剖析人类社会结构、财富的本质、劳动价值的起源以及理想国家治理模式的宏大哲学与经济学著作。它诞生于启蒙运动的鼎盛时期,一个理性与经验并重,对既有秩序提出质疑的时代。作者试图搭建一座跨越纯粹政治思辨与粗糙商业实践之间的桥梁,旨在为理解一个日益复杂、充满变革的现代社会提供一套严谨而富有洞察力的分析框架。  第一卷:论人类存在的结构与分工的必然性  本卷着眼于对人类社会的起源和基本驱动力的哲学探讨。作者首先摒弃了关于“黄金时代”的浪漫想象,转而从经验主义的角度审视人类行为的基本动机:自我保存、增进福祉以及自然产生的互助倾向。  1. 劳动与能力的异化: 探讨了劳动如何从简单的生存行为演变为具有社会属性的经济活动。我们着重分析了技能的形成、知识的积累,以及当个人专业化于某一特定任务时,所带来的效率的指数级增长,同时也指出了这种专业化对个体心智可能产生的局限性——即“心智的狭隘化”。  2. 交换的原始冲动: 作者认为,交换(或称“以物易物”)是社会性的必然产物,而非偶然的权宜之计。通过对原始部落、手工业作坊的细致观察,本书构建了一个关于“需求差异性”如何驱动社会互联的模型。我们探究了信任机制在远距离和长期合约中扮演的核心角色,并初步区分了被认为是“有用”的劳动与仅仅是“耗费时间”的活动之间的区别。  3. 土地、自然资源与初始禀赋: 这一部分对自然资源的稀缺性进行了冷静的评估。与那些将土地视为永恒财富的传统观念不同,本书强调了环境对生产力的制约作用,并提出了一个关于“自然盈余”的概念,即在满足基本生存需求后,剩余可供社会分配的资源总量。我们严厉批评了将土地垄断视为社会进步标志的做法,认为它阻碍了更广泛的社会创新。  第二卷:货币的本质与权力的媒介  本卷的核心在于解构货币的神秘性,将其还原为一种社会契约的工具,而非自然产生的价值实体。  1. 从贵金属到信用票据的演变: 作者详细追溯了金属货币的起源,分析了其被选为交换媒介的社会心理基础(如其稀有性、可分割性)。然而,本书的重点在于对早期信用体系的分析。我们探讨了政府和早期银行家如何通过发行超出实际金属储备的票据来扩大流通,以及这种“信用的膨胀”对社会生产力的潜在双重影响——既能刺激大规模项目,也可能埋下通货膨胀的隐患。  2. 财富的真正尺度: 明确区分了“金银”(Nominal Wealth)与“商品与服务”(Real Wealth)的概念。本书断言,衡量一个国家真正的繁荣程度,不应看其金库中有多少闪光的金属,而应看其国民能够消费和使用的必需品与奢侈品的丰富程度。这种对“名义价值”和“实质价值”的区分,是理解后续社会经济运动的关键。  3. 资本的蓄积与风险投资: 资本被定义为“被用于生产而非消费的剩余价值”。本卷对早期冒险家、船东和工厂主的投资行为进行了伦理和经济的双重考察,试图理解他们愿意承担高风险以换取未来收益的心理机制,并论证了这种对未来收益的预期,是推动技术进步和市场扩张的核心动力。  第三卷:国家干预的边界与“看不见的手”的初步构想  这是全书最具争议性也最具前瞻性的部分,它探讨了政府在经济活动中应扮演的角色,并试图描绘一个自我调节的社会秩序图景。  1. 对重商主义的批判性审视: 本书对当时盛行的重商主义政策(如严格的出口补贴、限制进口)进行了全面的逻辑解构。作者认为,这种将国家财富视为零和博弈(你多得我必少得)的观点是基于对国际贸易本质的误解。  2. 自由流动与自然秩序: 在这一部分,作者提出了一个革命性的观点:当个体受自身利益的驱使去追求生产效率最大化时,如果缺乏暴力的强制和不正当的法律限制,其行为往往会在无意中增进整个社会的福祉。这种“自然倾向”的描述,为后世关于市场机制的论述奠定了哲学基础,尽管此时还未形成成熟的数学模型。我们强调,这种“秩序”的产生依赖于严格的法治和公正的仲裁机制。  3. 公共工程的必要性: 尽管倡导市场自由,作者并未陷入极端的个人主义。他清醒地认识到,市场机制无法有效激励某些必要的公共产品(如基础防御、司法体系、重要的交通设施)的建设。因此,本书为政府职能划定了清晰的边界:维护产权、执行契约以及提供无法通过私人激励实现的公共服务。  第四卷:道德哲学与经济行为的交织  本书的第四卷回归到作者的更广阔的道德关怀,试图将经济学的洞察融入到对“善的生活”的追求中。  1. 节制与长期规划: 探讨了过度消费对个人和社会长期发展的影响。作者认为,一个健康的经济体不仅需要高效的生产,还需要国民具备一种审慎的“延迟满足”的能力。本卷深入分析了储蓄行为背后的伦理动机,并将其视为社会韧性的重要来源。  2. 财富分配的伦理困境: 作者坦诚地面对了效率与公平之间的张力。虽然本书倾向于效率,但它从未忽视那些因自然禀赋不足或社会结构性劣势而无法参与有效劳动的群体。解决这一问题的方案,被置于谨慎的慈善和社会保障框架之下,而非激进的财富再分配。  3. 国际关系的理性基础: 最后,本书展望了一个基于互惠互利的国际贸易体系,认为只有当各国都专注于其相对优势,并通过和平贸易而非军事征服来获取所需时,才能实现真正的、持久的全球繁荣。  总结  《启蒙时代的智慧》是一部跨越学科界限的巨著,它既是对当时政治经济思潮的总结与反思,也是对未来社会形态的理性推演。它要求读者以批判性的眼光审视一切既定的权力结构,用理性和经验来衡量“财富”的真正含义,并最终引导人们思考:在一个日益专业化和互赖的社会中,如何实现效率、自由与道德责任的和谐统一。这部作品挑战了传统的阶级观念,为理解现代市场经济的复杂运作机制,提供了一份坚实而深刻的思想基石。