Restoring Adam Smith

What an association calls itself is the right of its members to decide. And a student activist, Paul Muirhead, explains that "Adam Smith did not represent the values a student association should stand for" because he is "associated with socio-economic policies that work against the people ... synonymous with Thatcherite and Reaganite governments". Smith, he claimed, "is linked to exploitation and greed".

Mr Muirhead bases his case not on what Smith wrote or lectured, or his correspondence, or his advice to government ministers while he was alive (1723-90), which are the only things he is answerable for. He takes his stance on what Adam Smith's name, in his opinion, has "come to represent" more than 200 years later, although not to anybody who reads his books.

Adam Smith never advocated, excused or endorsed "greed" in any form. Throughout his works he was contemptuous of the "vile" behaviour of the "rulers of mankind", the propensity of "merchants and manufacturers" to monopoly and to conspiracies "against the interests of consumers", and he described a government of such people as the "worst" possible. If he had a fault, it was his pessimism about how quickly these problems could be changed.

As the author of Adam Smith's Lost Legacy (Palgrave 2005), I challenge Mr Muirhead to identify which policies Thatcher and Reagan pursued in the 1980s that can be credited to Adam Smith and which (a much longer list) they pursued contrary to his works. A clue for the latter would include protectionist agricultural regimes and legal actions to weaken trade unions.

By naming the college in Adam Smith's name, they honour a world-renowned, local figure in the history of ideas and a leader of the European Enlightenment. Mr Muirhead should contemplate what Adam Smith and others, like David Hume, were fighting against in their advocacy of Enlightenment, a wholly radical struggle against the zealot forces of reactionary darkness.

(PROF) GAVIN KENNEDY

Caiyside

Edinburgh