ASTS reads (and is organized) like a devotional for Advent or Lent, with each reading consisting of a paragraph or two from Adam Smith, followed by commentary from Vernon Smith. This quality makes the book distinctive. Vernon Smith’s comments read like reflections composed at the end of an evening spent contemplating a certifiably great book with the benefit of decades of experience and careful analytical research. Much like Adam Smith’s works, ASTS is not a book to skim or power through. As Vernon Smith puts it, “Society and conversation are powerful means for restoring our lost sense of peace in mind.” That is what Vernon Smith invites readers into: a conversation about ideas that are genuinely, transcendently important.

The book is perhaps best understood as Vernon Smith’s extended marginalia to TMS. He once told me that the best way to read TMS is to write a summary of each paragraph in the margin. This book seems to be the product of that exercise. ASTS is not “research output” in the traditional sense. It is crystallized wisdom that brings the reader into conversation with one of the modern era’s sharpest and most distinguished minds over what is, in my opinion, the key text of the Enlightenment and the ensuing Great Enrichment.

Vernon Smith carefully and systematically walks through Adam Smith’s mental and moral world, with a structure and organization that reflect Vernon Smith’s own analytical architecture. He begins with sympathy and propriety, carries his reader through both merit and demerit, and explores how justice and beneficence contribute to the flourishing of the liberal order. It is a natural companion for someone teaching a course on Adam Smith or simply reflecting on him by the fireplace. Indeed, there is probably no better guide to his system than Vernon Smith.

Learning to be social / Scholars from across the disciplinary and ideological spectrum will benefit from this book, albeit not in the way they would benefit from more analytical contributions like James R. Otteson’s Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life and work by Eric Schliesser, Glory Liu, Daniel Klein, and Erik Matson. Economists will appreciate Vernon Smith’s emphasis on institutions, incentives, and exchange. Philosophers will recognize his attention to moral psychology. Anthropologists, jurists, political scientists, theologians, and others will recognize their own debates in Vernon Smith’s careful treatment of Adam Smith’s approaches to beneficence, justice, and so many other themes.

Throughout TMS, Adam Smith explains our search for a “mutual sympathy of sentiments” or a shared understanding—what we might today call “empathy” or the ability to enter imaginatively into another person’s situation. ASTS is a “great school of self-command” where we learn to do just that. As Vernon Smith puts it: “We are not born social. Rather, we are born with characteristics that allow us to learn to be social.” How our birthrights manifest will differ from time to time and place to place, but Adam Smith’s theory of society gives us a picture of a polylogue stretching across the many millennia since people first began to talk. Human sociality is not pre-programmed or part of a preexisting preference function. It is something we learn from regular consultation with one another and with the Impartial Spectator (who we will discuss in a moment).

Here is one of the most interesting contributions the Smiths make to our understanding of how societies develop over time. Adam Smith pointed out that people generally sympathize more readily with others’ misfortunes than their joys or successes. Envy, it seems, stands in the way of our ability to sympathize with another’s joy. This may make it easier for us to understand how inequality frays the social fabric and why the politics of resentment can be so effective. This, in turn, explains a foundation of liberal society: If we tend to resent others’ success more than we celebrate it, then creating political institutions that restrain this resentment rather than mobilize it is vital to a free and dynamic society. Remarkably, Adam Smith understood this before the two and a half centuries of careful social science that now supports it.

The hypothetical Impartial Spectator is always at work in Adam Smith’s system, as well as in Vernon Smith’s. It is a device that people can develop to offset their biases and evaluate their past conduct and plan their future conduct. It disciplines passions and provides a healthy dose of perspective. Adam Smith writes—and Vernon Smith quotes—that “we learn the real littleness of ourselves” through the Impartial Spectator’s eyes. The Impartial Spectator’s refusal to indulge our delusions of grandeur is not a regrettable feature of the life well-lived. It is a precondition for civilization: the notion that there is an “us” of moral equals. As the economist Paul Romer explained in his 2018 Nobel Economics Prize address, one of civilization’s greatest achievements has been expanding the definition of “us.”

Justice and beneficence / In TMS, Adam Smith carefully distinguishes between justice and beneficence, explaining that justice—treating others fairly—is strictly necessary for society to endure, whereas beneficence—caring for others—is not, though it is important. Justice, for the Smiths, means “not harming other people” and is enforceable at all times because people aren’t going to come together when they constantly stand ready to harm or be harmed by others. It arises, the Smiths argue, from people’s natural resentment toward intentional injury. Where justice is secure, it provides security for life and property. That, in turn, is the basis for all exchange. Beneficence, meanwhile, consists of voluntary and uninvited “good offices,” which by their nature cannot be compelled without destroying their virtue. Beneficence is praiseworthy and worthy of reward, but it is not enforceable, nor does its absence deserve punishment. Justice is necessary for a society to exist, while beneficence helps a society flourish. There is a simple Smithian formula: Justice prevents harm, while beneficence creates harmony. Without beneficence, society is miserable, but without justice, society is impossible.

Conclusion / Late in ASTS, Vernon Smith turns his attention to Adam Smith’s highest virtue: self-command. The Smiths carry us through the obstacles to self-command and how it grows as we vanquish those obstacles. One obstacle is vanity, and another is self-deceit. There are the false promises and perverse incentives of obsessions with status and rank. Combating them is the quiet heroism of people who attend to their own duties—who “cultivate [their] customers, neighbors, and soil,” in Vernon Smith’s words—rather than sticking their noses in other people’s business.

ASTS is a timely book for 2026, during which we will commemorate the 250th anniversaries of both Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and one of the Enlightenment’s signature political achievements, the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Both build visions of society that grow from the foundations of dispersed judgment, self-command, moral equality, and the rule of law—principles critical if we are going to expand the circles of people we include in “us.”

Few people understood the institutional and moral foundations of a free society better than Adam Smith. Few people have thought deeper and more carefully about how a free society works than Vernon Smith. ASTS invites the reader into a conversation with one of history’s greatest minds, moderated by one of today’s greatest minds. For scholars across the humane studies, it is a great scholar’s extended meditation on the principles that make something we can meaningfully call society possible. I expect to revisit it regularly.