P.J. O’Rourke, a political satirist and journalist, spoke at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives about economist Adam Smith on Jan. 29, giving a speech entitled “A Book that Changed the World.” O’Rourke is best known for his writing in “The Rolling Stone”,” “The Atlantic Monthly,” and “The National Lampoon.” He has also written 17 books including “Eat the Rich,” “Give War A Chance,” and “A Parliament of Whores.” The Collegian sat down with O’Rourke to talk about his career, and thoughts on Adam Smith.Hillsdale Collegian: Which job that you’ve held has influenced you the most?P.J. O’Rourke: Being a foreign correspondent. It’s the compare and contrast aspect of it. I’ve had jobs that were more fun and I had jobs that influenced my writing more than being a foreign correspondent. But when it comes to influencing my worldview, particularly being a foreign correspondent in the third world and doing a lot of war correspondence wakes one up to the virtues of America. No matter how badly behaved we seem to be here and at times it does seem quite bad. It’s just nothing compared to how badly behaved the governments and indeed sometimes the people of other countries.What was your best publication, book or article?My fairly youthful attempt and certainly inexperienced attempt to take on the government in “Parliament of Horrors” was probably the best thing I’ve ever done. But it didn’t reflect that well on me exactly. It was all about what a large slow moving target. And also the advantage of bringing a fresh pair of eyes to something like that. I’d already had a fair amount of foreign correspondence and to come back and look at our own domestic government through the eyes of somebody who’d seen some really stinky governments around the world, and also who had the advantage of having absolutely no Washington insider knowledge. I knew who the President was and that was about it. I really had not covered or paid close attention to American politics, which gave me the freedom to be upset at everybody without feeling like I was hurting anyone’s feelings or violating the confidences or wrecking any sources I would need in the future.How did you come to study Adam Smith?It was a fluke. There was fellow named Toby Monday who runs the British part of my publisher Scrooge Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Books UK. Toby came up with this concept of books that changed the world. He wanted interesting writers to write brief books about big books. So I had written this book about economics called “Eat the Rich,” basically asking the question why are some countries so poor and other countries so rich. Toby called me up and said, “Well, P.J. you’ve learned something about economics. You’re familiar with Adam Smith.” Sure. He said, “Why don’t you do one of these little books on “The Wealth of Nations?” He named a figure and it was a reasonable figure and I said sure. He said, “It won’t be take you long. It doesn’t have to be big. 50,000 words.” And he was right. It didn’t take me long to write. It took me two years to do the reading necessary to write it. “The Wealth of Nations” is not a quick read. Then I realized I had to read and read carefully “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” And plus whatever else I could find by Adam Smith and on Adam Smith. Fortunately, while there has been a lot of commentary about “The Wealth of Nations,” you could run through the biographies of Adam Smith pretty quickly. He did not lead an enormously eventful life, thank God!What statement from “The Wealth of Nations” had the biggest impact?I knew that this had mechanical importance in terms of the understanding of economics. I didn’t understand the moral underpinnings of it, nor did I understand the core simplicity of the way he managed to boil economics down to self-interest, division of labor, freedom of trade. I mean I knew that those were the fundamental principles of the book but I had no idea that the book was so carefully focused on those three things. And because those three things seems to modern ears to be self-evident, I had to get my head around how unself-evident these things were to 18th century thinkers. People were just beginning to understand. Although I did not read anything in Smith that shocked me, I didn’t understand how new this thinking was and how focused this thinking was.
