期刊名称：Reason Papers : A Journal of Interdisciplinary Normative Studies
印刷版ISSN：0363-1893
出版年度：2011
卷号：33
页码：102-106
出版社：Reason Papers
摘要：We would like to begin by thanking Dennis C. Rasmussen for taking the time to comment on our little piece on Adam Smith.1 Rasmussen has a number of interesting things to say about Smith, and we have profited from them and his brief remarks on our effort. No doubt space limitations have prevented him from saying all he wanted to about issues in our article that troubled him, just as those limitations affect us to some degree in this response. Thus, even though space is valuable, we want to take time to express our sincere appreciation to Rasmussen for his comments. First, let us deal with the end of Rasmussen’s essay where we are accused of failing to refer to left-Smitheans in our analysis and of offering a “traditional, free market” reading of Smith when it comes to political economy (p. 98). This traditional reading quickly gets referred to as a “libertarian” reading, though Rasmussen does use scare quotation marks around the term “libertarian” (p. 99). First of all, we are not unaware of the left-Smithean reading. Fleischacker, for example, is mentioned in our text. Secondly, part of the point of what we were doing was to offer an account of how a free market reading might handle the very problem that Rasmussen and we are concerned to discuss—namely, Smith’s apparent love/hate relationship with commerce. Finally, we thought we had a good enough left-Smithean in Rasmussen himself. Should Rasmussen want to shy away from that ideological characterization, so would we when it comes to the use of the term “libertarian” as a description of a way of interpreting Smith. Though we ourselves are libertarians, we would not read Smith as being one,
