Adam Smith and Whig Constitutionalism in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This essay deals with the influence of Adam Smith—at the end of the eighteenth century and during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—on the constitutional projects and public debates through which reformers of southern Europe tried to import and translate British society. I focus on the intellectual filters that affected the reception of Smithian thought, particularly the political and ideological aim to realize a Whig social order, that induced the Mediterranean elite to link the Wealth of Nations with the thought of Edmund Burke and Arthur Young. The result is a moderate and conservative profile of Smithian liberalism that was is in tune with the ideological trend of the nineteenth century.