A Smithian Scholar Moves to Take Charge

A post on Macleans.ca Blog caught my eye (HERE):

“A lesson in Iggynomics"

"What does the new Liberal leader know about the economy?"

"Michael Ignatieff drags around the longest paper trail of any Canadian politician. As an author, professor, high-brow journalist and broadcaster, he wrote a stack of books, countless lectures, and many articles, not to mention documentary scripts, usually about human rights, foreign affairs, and security. But not much about the economy. And as federal Liberal leader—the job he landed sooner than expected at the end of the recent parliamentary crisis—economic policy is his first priority.

Ignatieff’s two-pronged prescription—stimulus based equally on compassion and competitiveness—might sound suspiciously like a politician trying to be all things to all people. But his interest in blending ideas about creating and spreading wealth go back to his early days as an academic.

In 1983, when he was a research fellow at Cambridge University, Ignatieff collaborated with economic historian Istvan Hont on a paper about the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, and icon of economic conservatism Adam Smith. They read Smith’s Wealth of Nations as more than the foundational work on how competition creates prosperity. “Our argument,” Ignatieff and Hont wrote in the introduction to an essay collection entitled Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, “is that the Wealth of Nations was centrally concerned with the issue of justice, with finding a market mechanism capable of reconciling inequality of property with adequate provision for the excluded.”

Ignatieff studied Smith at about the same time Harper was taking economics at the University of Calgary. Whether in England or Alberta, the academic atmosphere of the early 1980s was charged with the conservative doctrines of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. For Harper, that climate was formative, pushing him permanently to the right. Ignatieff remained a Liberal, but the era’s lessons weren’t lost on him. “If you’ve studied and written about Adam Smith, you’re a believer in markets,” he said. “But Smith always believed that markets had to be regulated. So I’m a market guy, and I think we’ve all discovered that light-handed, smart regulation by government is needed to keep markets safe, honest, fair and transparent—that’s the lesson of the past six months.”

Comment
Michael Ignatieff has a distinguished academic record among Smithian scholars. He co-authored chapter 6, “Needs and justice in the Wealth of Nations; an introductory essay” (pp 339-443), in Istvan Hont’s magisterial, Jealousy of Trade: internatiomnal competition and nation-state in historical perspective, 2005, Belknap Press, Harvard, which alone establishes the quality of his credentials.

That he now has a career in Canadian politics as the federal leader of the Liberal Party provides a unique setting for him to switch from an observer into a doer and from being an influencer to a legislator.

I shall watch his progress as an opposition leader towards government with close interest.