Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here : Following from this, in a particularly insightful portion of the book, Weinstein completely discredits any purely economic reading of Smith. He contends that “life is not a marketplace” for Smith. Instead, “it is often familial, pedagogical, spiritual, and natural; it is only sometimes commercial.” Competition and self-interest were means to an end, not ends in themselves. Rather, Weinstein sees the healthy notion of harmony as the most dominant ideal running through Smith’s philosophy.

Or perhaps not? Discuss. Passage 1: "The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, t...

"The beginnings of The Wealth of Nations made part of the course, but only as a fragment of the immense design of showing the origin and development of cultivation and law; or, as we may perhaps put it, not inappropriately, of saying how, from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman." -- Walter Bagehot

Well, at least if you are taking my course on The Great Transformation they are: 1) Describe the division of labor. What does Adam Smith see as its advantages? What are some possible disadvantagtes? 2) What is the idea of dialectics as developed by Hegel? How did Karl Marx apply the idea to history? How did feudalism trasition into capitalism in this view? 3) How does Max Weber characterize the spirit of capitalism? Specifically, how is it different from the traditional attitude towards economic life? How did Lutheranism and Calvinism contribute to that change?