Platypus UniMelb Reading Group

Our Reading Group continues on Wednesday, March 19 (Project Room 5, Ground Floor of the Baillieu Library)

As we didn't get to discuss all the prescribed sections of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Volume I last week, we are going to discuss this text again this week. So, the readings for this week are the same as last's. We read this text as a seminal work of "political economy", a discipline which we describe as the emergence of the bourgeois world's "self-understanding".

[Week G] Adam Smith: On the wealth of nations (Part 1)

March 19, 2025, 1-4 PM.

Primary Readings [with links to all texts]

• Adam Smith, selections from The Wealth of Nations (1776)

• Volume I [PDF]
• Vol. 1: pp. 1-4, 7-43, 53-110, 399-446
• Introduction and Plan of the Work
• Book I: Of the Causes of Improvement…
• I.1. Of the Division of Labor
• I.2. Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour
• I.3. That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market
• I.4. Of the Origin and Use of Money
• I.5 Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities
• I.6. Of the Component Parts of the Price of Commodities
• I.7. Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities
• I.8. Of the Wages of Labour
• I.9. Of the Profits of Stock
• Book III: Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations
• III.1. Of the Natural Progress of Opulence
• III.2. Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the Ancient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire
• III.3. Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire
• III.4. How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country

We also suggest the reading of this short excerpt from Marx’s ‘Grundrisse’ from 1857, which ties in nicely with how we were reading Rousseau last week:

• Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58)