Author: Thomas Fleming

Adam Smith Adam Smith, perhaps the most influential political thinker produced by Britain in modern times, was born in 1722, a posthumous child of a customs collector from Aberdeenshire.  Smith’s interests in his early years were largely literary and classical, and his family had destined him for the Anglican clergy, though at some point he gave up both the career and religion of a Christian minister. He studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University and came strongly under the spell of Hutcheson’s anti-rationalist common sense philosophy that emphasized benevolence. He proceeded from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, where...

This series, in its unrevised form, was posted in Summer  2005.  I thought it was lost forever, but Allen Wilson has been kind enough to send me dozens of old pieces that have disappeared from the old website. Part One:  Capitalism 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, was marked also by the publication of Adam Smith’s path-breaking book on economics, The Wealth of Nations. This is no accident, according to a familiar myth put out by American classical liberals who call themselves conservatives, because America is a land of individualists who came to a New World seeking freedom...

Is anyone old enough to remember when it was not quite respectable to be in the news?   Of course, the doings of the great and the wise would have to be recorded—the birth of an heir, the discovery of a planet—but, otherwise, it  was better not to be noticed by the newspapers, which have always been properly regarded as scandal sheets.  And, of all classes of men who had to avoid notoriety, the clergy were at the top, and of all the Christian clergy, the Pope was chief among those who were wise enough to stay out of the...

Niki Haley is a disaster as foreign policy mouthpiece.  One might use of her what Mencken unfairly said of Bryan:  “a zany without sense or dignity.”  Of course she is a good deal more virile than South Carolina’s distinguished Senator Lindsay Graham, but that can be said of Chelsea Manning.  Butching it up for the press in difficult matters of war and peace is exactly what the United States does not need, and her recent ridiculous tirade gave the Russians one more opportunity to ridicule the cynicism–and amateurism–of the US foreign policy establishment. Serious nations do not act like North...