Adam Smith's Early German Readers: Reception, Misreception, and Critique Fania Oz-Salzberger Professor and Director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought Faculty of Law and Center for German and European Studies, University of Haifa Contact: Professor Fania Oz-Salzberger, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel salzberg@research.haifa.ac.il To be published in the Adam Smith Review, special issue on Adam Smith’s international contexts, early 2016 Author’s bio: Fania Oz-Salzberger is Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Center for German and European Studies, University of Haifa. She is Director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought. Her books include Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth Century Germany (Oxford, 1995), Israelis in Berlin (Frankfurt, 2001) and Jews and Words (co-authored with Amos Oz, Yale, 2012). Oz-Salzberger edited the Cambridge edition of Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767/1995). She has published numerous articles on the Enlightenment, the history of political thought, and the translation and reception of political texts. Introduction Adam Smith’s earliest German reception came in several stages, which run roughly parallel to the profound historical and geopolitical changes associated with the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of Prussian supremacy. The late Enlightenment saw the early translations of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (by Christian Rautenberg, 1770) and of the Wealth of Nations (by J.F. Schiller, 1776-8). The era of Napoleonic upheaval and war dovetailed with a second and highly effective translation of the Wealth of Nations (by Christian Garve, 1794-6) and the emergence of specialist German Smithians, especially from the University of Göttingen. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms in 1