Aruni Shapiro introduces Adam Smith to Sri Lanka's readers

ARUNI Shapiro, sociologist cum advocate for liberty, has published her 10th book introducing Adam Smith to Sri Lanka’s Sinhala readers under the title ‘Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations’.!

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A book on Adam Smith in Sinhala

Her previous books have been on diverse themes like guide to mental health, translation of fictions, translation of rare but valuable books on economics, and biographies.

In 2015, as I have explained in a previous article2, she publishe writings of the French economist and statesman in the early 19th century, Frederic Bastiat under the title Libertarian Economics. This was the first attempt to introduce Bastiat to Sri Lankan readers.

All the copies numbering about 2000 were distributed freely to interested readers by the publisher, Sri Lanka Frederic Bastiat Society, of which Shapiro was one of the patrons.

That shows the extent of her dedication for promoting sound and advanced economic literacy among the fellow Sri Lankans.

Writings by Adam Smith Two publications by the Scottish economist Adam Smith in the latter half of the 18th century have been responsible for carving out its own subject matter now we know as economics. One is The Theory of Moral Sentiments released in 1759 which critically examined the moral thinking of the time when he lived suggesting that conscience arose from dynamic and interactive social relationships which people sought to develop within themselves as a code of sympathy of sentiments. This was a philosophical work in which Smith explored the sources of the ability of the human beings, called Homo sapiens, to form moral judgments when they are born like blank slates without any moral sentiment at all. Hence, all the moral sentiments are acquired, argued Smith, by people while living as members of human societies through dynamic and interactive relations with each other.