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Introduction
Gordon Brown has described Adam Smith as his 'hero of the Scottish Enlightenment' for providing a conception of the just economy. On another occasion he identified Smith as the most important figure in the development of social liberalism, the 'golden thread which runs through British history' - in Brown's depiction, from the intellectual life of eighteenthcentury Scotland to the governing strategies of New Labour. He has also spoken positively of the vision of national renewal he takes from reading Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments alongside his more famous Wealth of Nations. This is a vision 'of competitive markets and social improvement underpinned by a desire for betterment and empathy, economic efficiency and social justice advancing together' (Brown, 2006b; 2005a; 2002).
Attempting to demonstrate the practical relevance of Adam Smith for contemporary politics, lain McLean provides substantive support for Brown's efforts to reclaim Smith for the British left. McLean's case emphasises three themes that resonate repeatedly within Smith's work:
(1) the fact that he argued for the institutionalisation of commercial society specifically on the grounds of its politically progressive effects in civilising individuals, their leaders and their nations;
(2) the fact that he linked the health of commercial society to its establishment within a political order founded on the principles of moral egalitarianism; and
(3) the fact that he envisaged an active role for the state in ensuring the provision of the public goods that guarantee the sustainability of the commercial society.
The image of Smith that emerges is very different to the intellectual poster child of 1 980sstyle Thatcherism. McLean goes as far as to assert that a social democratic reading of his work reveals 'the truest Adam Smith' (McLean, 2006, 1 38).
McLean arrives at his conclusion on the recognition that Smith is both an economic and a social liberal. There is nothing in the least inappropriate in this characterisation, but it can be shown to pose something of a problem for Brown once it is investigated further. What it means to be an economic liberal in Britain today is inflected with the connotations of an altogether different political settlement to that of what it means to be a social liberal. Despite eleven years of Labour government, the ideology of British economic liberalism...