On Terry Peach’s Unconvincing “Reconsideration” of Adam Smith’s Theory of Value

In a recent paper Terry Peach argues that Adam Smith found no reason to limit application of the labor-embodied theory of value to the early and rude state of society. According to Peach, Smith—having found a problem in employing the labor-commanded measure of value in the case of the contemporary commercial economy—somewhat surreptitiously abandoned labor-commanded and adopted instead labor-embodied as a generally valid theory of exchange value. Peach shows a propensity to find what he considers “labor-commanded” usages in Smith’s work. However, I find Peach’s rather startling “Reconsideration” to be fatally flawed—for the reason that it derives from Peach’s evident misunderstanding of what is implied by the labor-commanded measure of value.