Famine: Adam Smith and Foucauldian Political Economy

It is often assumed that the attitudes of the early political economists, such as Smith, to issues of scarcity and famine were dogmatically laissez‐faire. This view has been given fresh impetus by Michel Foucault's recently published lectures on the history of political economy. The article challenges this view. By examining Smith's texts and analyzing the way that Smith was received by critics in the century following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, the article argues that contemporary interpretations of Smith's views on scarcity and famine must be nuanced.