The Meanings of (The Word) Trade: Adam Smith’s Political Economy as General Grammar

Some mid-eighteenth-century Political Economists, among them Adam Smith, employed the conceptual and methodological tools from General Grammar. Instead of offering, at the outset, a set of formal definitions of their concepts, they departed from ordinary language’s words (‘popular notions’, as Smith puts it) and endeavored to map all the different meanings of a particular notion. The goal of this paper is to follow Smith’s efforts as Grammarian by offering a mapping of the meanings of the word trade in the Wealth of Nations. According to Smith, trade has (1) a proper and original meaning as occupation or métier, that is, a specific productive activity or branch of labor; (2) a derived meaning as business, when it involves the employment of capital in pursuit of profit; and (3) an abstract meaning as commerce, especially when referring to a sector of economic activity, such as domestic or foreign trade. The article argues that key Mercantilist errors also stem from a grammatical confusion between these meanings, illustrating the critical aspect of Smith’s Political Economy.