Rating: 
Summary: the best, but don't read it
Review: Unless you're into S&M, don't read it. Just read the one page summary ... it will be enough to pick up the most of the argument.Then again, if you love the historiography of economic theory, as I do, you can't miss this.
Rating:
Summary: Left Waged 200 Year War Against Capitalism. Capitalism Won.
Review: What more can anyone say about Adam Smith? Smith was right, and Marx and other socialists were dead wrong.
This book is tough reading, but when you read Smith along with scholars who have read him carefully (and are not enemies of the free market economy) YOU BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND WHAT A BOLD AND BRILLIANT PIONEER ADAM SMITH WAS!
SMITH IS NOT DRY WHEN YOU TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS AT STAKE IF SMITH IS WRONG. Supposedly, socialist Robert Reich wrote an introduction in another Modern Library edition. Reich thinks he knows Smith better than Smith knew himself, and Reich thinks conservatives who promote Smith need Reich to understand Smith.
AND HOW FORTUNATE THE U.S.A. WAS THAT HIS MASTERPIECE WAS PUBLISHED IN 1776! To get beneath the free market principles that sometimes are taken for granted, the Wealth of Nations is a gold mine.
In the old Modern Library edition, Max Lerner's introduction was either useless or maybe essential to read to see how modern intellectuals distorted Smith's theory as Smith originally understood it. Or how modern intellectuals use the non-political material in a text as a prop for their own radical political agendas.
I must acknowledge that I have not read Edwin Canaan's introduction yet. But judging from the several Modern Library intro's to philosphers that I have read in the past, I do not expect a positive endorsement of capitalism.
What is it about the Modern Library editors that they would Robert Reich to write the intro in another edition? Partisans of Reich's ilk are always blowing smoke about how Adam Smith's book has little or no applicability in a more "complex" world.
I suspect that the University of Chicago Press's (given their history) edition has a better editor and an introduction that actually seeks to understand things as Smith understood them.
Rating:
Summary: The only great seminal work I found lucid and persuasive
Review: When I was twenty I set out to read the seminal works of a wide range of disciplines. I read Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Plato, Aristotle, Levi-Strauss, Jung, Campbell, Freud, Frazer (abridged), Epictetus, Keynes, Adam Smith, and others I can't remember. In most cases I was disappointed. I realised that in many cases the first exposition of an idea is difficult and obscure, and that it is the later, summarising writers who collect the best and clearest explanations of profound thoughts. The exception was Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations'. Only later did I discover that he began his amazingly varied academic career as a teacher of English prose style. It came as no surprise. Smith's writing is a brilliant as Gibbon, but even more lucid. His insight is profound. And his marvellous style of explanation makes the reader feel like a genius. Somewhat to my astonishment, the only part of his argument that I found at all difficult was the section on international exchange, which I had to translate from terms of flow of specie to terms of exchange rates of fiat currencies. Of all that stuff I read that year, Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' was the clearest, most persuasive, and most inspiring. It is because of Smith that the next year I took up the study of economics at the Australian National University. I came first in my class: my prize? A copy of 'The Wealth of Nations', much appreciated.
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