This is far less a view of Smith’s than of his epigones

Oligarchs like Trump, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer, and others don’t subscribe to the social and political meliorism typical of the faceless corporate CEOs of the mid-twentieth century

Even at that most elementary level, what’s being limned is a world of winners and losers

even in Glenn Beck’s lachrymose sacrilege at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington

the fatuity and hypocrisy that lurked just beneath this romance of risk

Confidence Men writ large, as a moral stench in the nostrils of society

the declension of the masculine mystique long identified with the titan of finance

Populism, progressivism, and the New Deal (not to mention socialism and the labor movement) are overdetermined phenomena originating in multiple grievances, articulating a variegated array of desires and objectives

A sacerdotal atmosphere pervades this old-line family bank, where the very notion of risk is verboten, where rumors and hot tips are considered unseemly

Militants of the moment began to demand work not as a sop to the indigent, but as a right of citizenship, as precious and inviolable as anything in the Bill of Rights.