Adam Smith: A Bourgeois, Organic Intellectual?

This case study, the first of three such chapters, considers Adam Smith, a leading intellectual of the Scottish Enlightenment, as an example of a bourgeois organic intellectual, part of the strata of intellectuals whom Gramsci sees as providing an emergent dominant class with “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci 1971, 5). It explores how Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual might illuminate the role played by Smith, or more accurately, later representations of Smith’s thought, in the rise to hegemony of the bourgeoisie.