----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- ANYTHING is better than having the students read Heilbroner! (Or any other textbook for that matter, few of which are much better.) Of course university students should be expected to read primary sources from the first. But there's a problem. Thirty or forty years ago, men and women who came to university came -- for the most part -- from families where books were read and conversation fostered. In most cases they had a working knowledge of at least one modern language beside their own, and some training in the classical languages. And they were in contact with the past in a way that seems almost to have disappeared among present-day undergraduates, in Canada at any rate. Nowadays even the very bright and highly motivated 4th-year Honours undergraduates I normally teach are almost totally ignorant even of the recent past, not only of the world at large but even of their own local communities. And a consequence of the collective amnesia from which our society now suffers is that they have no language for understanding the literature of the past. So the problem in having freshmen read WN, as I see it, is not that they lack the 'specialised knowledge' in economic analysis that would enable them to appreciate Smith's economic theorising. Any analytical content in WN has long been either corrected and forgotten, or integrated into contemporary economics. (We don't read WN to learn economics: we read it to find out how our ancestors went about economic theorising, and why they thought it worth while to engage in this arcane activity.) The problem is, rather, that present-day freshmen lack knowledge (a) of the English language, (b) of the economic and political circumstances of the mid-18th C., (c) of the cultural matrix of the Scottish Enlightenment from which WN emerged, and (d) of the larger intellectual context -- theological, scientific, philosophical -- of 18th C. Christian civilisation in which all these things were embedded. What can we do about it? I should like to suggest that throwing our students in at the deep end may be just what is needed. At least we should be treating them as grown-ups, paying them the compliment of supposing that they come to university to enlarge their minds rather than to postpone adult responsibilities for a few more years. Instead of trying to 'teach' WN to freshmen, explaining just what (we think) it is all about and so doing their work for them, I suggest we present it to them as an historical exhibit: an interesting piece of evidence from the recent past of our civilisation that it might be worth while to take a leisurely look at. Take a whole year to do it. Make no attempt to 'cover' any pre-determined syllabus of canonical texts. Let the students' own curiosity lead them to follow up any of the hundreds of possible inquiries it suggests (which might well include a look around at Smith's predecessors such as Quesnay, Cantillon and Boisguilbert, and his successors such as Malthus, Chalmers and Marx). And if they evince no such curiosity and do no work of their own, let them fail the course clearly and unambiguously. If I am right in this, such a programme would go some little distance towards remedying all the deficiencies listed in (a) to (d) above. We should have helped to form at least a few men and women who might be properly sceptical about the prevailing anti-intellectual assumption of our time: that there is no causal connexion between the past and the present. Anthony Waterman ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]