Abstract

This chapter considers the evolution of the way Smith presented his analysis of value and prices from the Lectures on Jurisprudence to The Wealth of Nations and its importance to understand the structure that that analysis assumes in The Wealth of Nations, where it pivots on the concepts of real price, real measure of exchangeable value, natural price, market price, wages, rate of profits, and rents. Special attention is devoted to the relationship between the concepts of quantity of labour employed in the production of a commodity and quantity of labour that the same commodity may command when exchanged in the market as well as to the possibility that this distinction is developed by Smith into an analysis which may appear either to put forward a labour theory of value or to deny its validity.