The ESHET Best monograph award is for the best book (not necessarily written in English) in the history of economic thought published during 2022 or 2023. The author is invited to attend the Society Conference that follows the announcement of the prize to deliver the Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui Lecture. In 2024, the award was given to Glory LIU (personal website), for "Adam Smith’s America", Princeton University Press, 2022.
The Blanqui lecture is named in honor of Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, author of Histoire de l'économie politique en Europe depuis les anciens jusqu'à nos jours (Paris, Guillaumin, 1837), which may be regarded as the first textbook published on the history of economic thought.
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GLORY LIU is the Assistant Director for the Center for Economy and Society and Assistant Research Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins. Her research interests are in the history of political thought, intellectual history, and political economy.
Her book, "Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism" (Princeton, 2022) traces the reception and influence of Adam Smith's ideas in American thought, politics, and culture from the eighteenth century to today. Besides receiving the 2024 Best Monograph Award from ESHET, it was named a 2023 PROSE Category Winner in Economics from the Association of American Publishers and listed as one of NPR’s Books We Love in 2022. It was also named a Top 5 Biographies of Economists by the Wall Street Journal.
Her other research interests include feminist political economy, the political theory and politics of inequality, family and housing politics. She is currently working on a new project on Asian American political thought before the invention of “Asian America”
She received her PhD in Political Science in 2018 from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, as well as a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow, one of the University's highest distinctions for doctoral students. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Political Theory Project at Brown University from 2018-2020, and a College Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard in Social Studies from 2020-2023. She holds an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, a secondary MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in Political Economy and Classics from the University of California, Berkeley.
The title of the Blanqui lecture she will give at the ESHET 2025 Conference in Torino is “300 and 2 years of Adam Smith: looking back and looking ahead”.
Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.
Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher.
Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.
ISBN:
Published (US): Nov 29, 2022
Published (UK): Jan 24, 2023 Copyright: 2022
Pages: 384