Person-in-community in Whitehead, Smith and Marx: exploring Marx's concept of class through Smith's concept of social order

"We have one important piece of experience of the past 30 years: that is to ensure both the visible hand and the invisible hand are given full play in regulating the market forces. If you are familiar with the classic works of Adam Smith, you will know that there are two famous works of his. One is The Wealth of Nations; the other is the book on the morality and ethics. And "The Wealth of Nations" deals more with the invisible hand that are the market forces. And the other book deals with social equity and justice. And in the other book he wrote, he stressed the importance of .. the regulatory role of the government to further distribute the wealth among the people. If in a country, most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, then this country can hardly witness harmony and stability". Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo, September 2008.

In their ground breaking work Organic Marxism, Philip Clayton and Justin Heinzekehr develop "an alternative to capitalism and ecological catastrophe" by arguing that Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, was "wrong," and that his ideas have led to the economic and social crisis of selfish free-market capitalism guided by the oft-cited idea of "the invisible hand." In this chapter we argue that there may in fact be something far more interesting in Adam Smith's economic work than laissez-faire free trade. Rather than placing the blame squarely at Smith's door, a more balanced interpretation may lead us to conclude it is more accurate to suggest those who have sought to apply his thinking to develop modern economics have been less than fair in the selective way they have applied his thought. At the very least, the result is that these applications of Smith's thought have in turn led to very recent thinking being- entirely unwittingly- somewhat one-sided.