The Obama administration -- mostly because of The Great Recession -- is a profoundly Keynsian one. And, as we have written on this blog, Ayn Rand -- and her disciple, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan -- are on the outs. But what about philosopher Adam Smith? He is getting a re-reading and it is about time. Long considered the avatar of laissez-fair capitalism, the moral underpinnings of his philosophy -- long overlooked -- are gaining attention from high places. In a telling moment on Fareed Zakaria's GPS this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, ironically, lectured the CNN host on the works of Adam Smith, saying:

If you are familiar with the classical works of Adam Smith, you know that there are two famous works of his. One is 'The Wealth of Nations.' The other is the book on the morality and ethics. And 'The Wealth of Nations' deals more with the invisible hand, that is, there are the market forces. And the other book deals with social equity and justice. And in the other book he wrote, he stressed the importance of playing the regulatory role of the government to fairly distribute the wealth among the people.

If in a country most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, then this country can hardly witness harmony and stability.

"Harmony," granted is an organic part of Chinese thinking (as, say, "liberty" is a part of the American political vernacular). Still, Jiabao has a point despite his own country's profound deficits of freedom (Averted Gaze). This Sunday's New York Times Book Review also revisited Smith, noting, ".. as the historian Emma Rothschild has noted, 'The Wealth of Nations' uses the phrase 'invisible hand' precisely once. In the 1,231-page Bantam edition, it appears on Page 572." Only once! It is interesting that the "invisible hand" has, over the years, become an almost inarguable Archimedian point as to how human beings make economic decisions. Did that "invisible hand" simply vanish the Scottish author's other long-forgotten book, Theory of Moral Sentiments?

[Image: Artsentrepeneurship]