The reception of Adam Smith in Greece: a most peculiar metakenosis Nicholas J. Theocarakis*
[email protected] Department of Economics National and Kapodistrian University of Athens There is considerable scholarship on the dissemination of the economic ideas of Adam Smith to other countries (Mizuta and Sugiyama, 1993, Lai 2000, Tribe and Mizuta 2002). However, the spread of Smith’s ideas in Greece differs from that in other European countries largely owing to the fact that Greece became an independent country only in 1830, more than half a century after the publication of the Wealth of Nations (WN, Smith 1976). Indeed, before Greek independence there were already translations of the Wealth of Nations in German, French, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Portuguese and Polish (Tribe and Mizuta 2002). At the time of independence the pressing needs to educate the few literate citizens destined to run the fledgling state with some modicum of knowledge in political economy, made the translators of economic works look for the most recent and useful books, rather than books that were considered already surpassed and of theoretical interest only. These ‘modern’ books were found in the writings of the French liberal school with Jean-Baptiste Say being considered as the best author in the new science, intellectually equal but practically better than Smith. The translators of Say or of economists of his school make that clear in their writings. In fact, the diffusion of all economic ideas in Greece came late. There could simply not be any late-eighteenth century economic thought in Greece, as there could for example in Portugal (Cardoso 1990).