Even on the eve of the Declaration of Independence, Smith famously predicted that America "will be one of the foremost nations of the world." It is also here that he develops the case for a limited state role in economic planning, notably to combat market failure and induce efficiency in areas such as education, public works, justice, and defense. His pioneering analysis still provides many subtle and penetrating insights into one of today's most vital and controversial policy debates.

    In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.Criticizing mercantilists who sought to use the state to increase their nations' supply of precious metals, Smith points out that a nation's wealth should be measured by the well-being of its people. Prosperity in turn requires voluntary exchange of goods in a peaceful, well-ordered market. How to establish and maintain such markets? For Smith the answer lay in man's social instincts, which government may encourage by upholding social standards of decency, honesty, and virtue, but which government undermines when it unduly interferes with the intrinsically private functions of production and exchange.

    Written in clear and incisive prose, The Wealth of Nations articulates the concepts indispensable to an understanding of contemporary society.

     As Condillac writes near the end of the work, the means to eradicate all the abuses and injustices of government is "to give trade full, complete and permanent freedom." In their preface to the 1997 edition, Shelagh and Walter Eltis wrote, "English language readers . . . will find . . . that the case for competitive market economics has rarely been presented more powerfully." Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac (1714-1780) was one of eighteenth-century France's preeminent philosophers of the Enlightenment, who had wide-ranging influence beyond metaphysics and epistemology to political thought and economics. He was a leading advocate in France of the ideas of John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and David Hume. Shelagh Eltis is a historian and graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, U.K. Walter Eltis is an Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Reading, U.K.