Adam Smith › The book, counted
The Wealth of Nations, counted
About three hundred and eighty thousand words. Here is what is in them, and what is not.
- monopoly, and its cognates208
- own interest36
- self-love2
- invisible hand1
- self-interest1
- laissez-faire0
- capitalism / capitalist0
Occurrences in the full text of The Wealth of Nations. Capitalism is not there because the word did not yet exist.
Two hundred and eight, broken down
- monopoly175
- monopolies16
- monopolists5
- monopolist4
- monopolised3
- monopolize3
- monopolizing2
What the numbers mean
The phrase that names a doctrine appears once, in a chapter against import duties, hedged in each of its four sentences. The word for the thing he spent the book attacking, a trade closed by law, appears two hundred and eight times.
None of that makes Smith an enemy of markets. He wanted trade freed. What he wanted it freed from was the privileges merchants wrote for themselves, and he told legislators to read any proposal from a trade with the most suspicious attention.
Check it yourself
Open the free text at Project Gutenberg and search. The counts here were made on a modernised text; none of these words is sensitive to old spelling, and anyone with a searchable copy can repeat them.
More about Adam Smith
- What did Adam Smith mean by the “invisible hand”?
- Did Adam Smith say “laissez-faire”?
- Did Adam Smith say greed is good?
- Did Adam Smith want small government?
- Was Adam Smith’s pin factory real?
- Did The Wealth of Nations change British policy?
- Why did Adam Smith burn his papers?
- The timeline
- The reading room: original sources online
The trial file
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