Adam Smith’s pioneering book on economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776), is around 950 pages long. Modern readers find it almost impenetrable: its language is flowery, its terminology is outmoded, it wanders into digressions, including one which is seventy pages in length, and its numerous eighteenth-century examples often puzzle rather than enlighten us today.

In this book, Madsen Pirie suggests that there is a "micropolitics" just as there is a microeconomics. Whereas microeconomics considers the behaviour of individuals and groups in economic markets, micropolitics looks at it in political markets.