Not a book for Smith beginners nor likely to satisfy Smith devotees, Reading "Adam Smith" offers rich, scholarly, and provocative relocation of significant controversies in contemporary theory. Premised on the notion that "Adam Smith" is an important player in contemporary political discourse, Shapiro's book is less a close reading of Adam Smith than a late modern meditation on the ... Read moreproblems of sovereignity, history, value, subjectivity, the real, and the nature of the social bond. Erudite and economically written, this book contributes significantly to the effort to navigate the murky seas of late modernity.
Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley Michael Shapiro's Reading "Adam Smith" is a masterfully au courant dismantling of the linguistic conventions governing the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. Through a confrontation between the notion of sovereignity and the symbolic practices of exchange, Shapiro exposes the conceits that structure Smith's moral philosophy and political economy. But more than that, Shapiro deploys an impressively wide range of semiological, dialogic, phenomenological, and deconstructive theories to argue that Smith's texts are themselves constitutive of and constituted by the orders of sovereignity and exchange that characterize modernity and enforce particular subjectivities. Drawing on Lacan and Foucault, Shapiro goes on to offer a postmodernist conception of the malleable self that disrupts and transgresses these orders. The result is a book that itself disrupts and transgresses academic orders. This 'turning down' of disciplinary boundaries is long overdue and very welcomed.
Nicholas Xenos, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Shapiro invites his reader not to be interpolated by Smith's opus. [His] Smith is refractory and dissolving. Shapiro does not merely interpret texts, but reads them actively. There is an emphatic clarity and a lack of nostalgia.
Diane Rubinstein
The Journal of Politics
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