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[NOTE: The following summary is provided by Wendy Motooka, who organized 
this session. I asked her to provide a brief report on the session because 
some HES subscribers would be interested in the session, but few would 
have attended. -- RBE] 
 
The session on "Who Owns Adam Smith: Competition Among Disciplines" 
happened from 8:30-10:00 am last Thursday, in Nashville at the annual 
meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  The 
speakers were Robert Urquhart (Dept. of Economics, University of Denver), 
who spoke on "Who Wants to Own Adam Smith, Anyway?"; James R. Otteson 
(Dept. of Philosophy, University of Chicago), who spoke on "The Recurring 
'Adam Smith Problem'"; and Maureen Harkin (Dept. of English, Stanford 
University), who spoke on "Adam Smith, Literary Community, and 
Disciplinary Limits."  The respondent was David M. Levy (Center for Study 
of Public Choice, George Mason U).  The session was sparsely attended at 
first, owing I think, to the earliness of the hour, but filled up by the 
end.  What the papers brought out collectively, and in the discussion from 
the floor, was the fundamental difference between Newtonian and 
post-structuralist approaches to Adam Smith's work.  At issue was the 
differing conceptions of "truth" across disciplines, i.e., whether Smith 
is read as "science" or as "literature," and what constitutes the 
difference between these two categories.  The discussion was lively, and 
the panelists appeared to be enthused about the session. 
 
James Otteson's paper was recently awarded the ASECS prize for the best 
paper by a graduate student presented at the conference. 
 
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