----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I agree wholeheartedly with David Mitch. I would add that there is good reason to assign Adam Smith (or Plato, or J.S.Mill's political works) to freshmen -- and it is precisely because they have not yet really studied contemporary economics, and so have ingrained in them a partial and (in some ways) a mistaken view of Smith, i.e., a view of Smith as filtered through contemporary economic theory. It is much easier to help the naive to see many points in Smith than to try to counter the layers of accepted interpretation of Smith that years of economics give. (Doubtless you do lose some central economic issues -- but you also gain some insights, I suspect.) (I write as a historian of political philosophy, not an economist; and in my intermediate modern political thought course I worry that some students who are well-trained in economics only see in Smith what modern economic theory accepts from Smith.) Peter G. Stillman ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]