Adam Smith may be the most famous author no one has read. Everyone has heard of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace; almost as many are familiar with his famous assertion: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Even those who are fond of quoting Smith are often ignorant of the breadth and depth of his writings. The Smith of the popular imagination is a sort of parlor libertarian, defending the butcher, the brewer, and the baker from the all-too-visible hand of the welfare state – even though it wasn’t for a century that anyone dreamed of such an institution.

Yet many of the issues Smith was debating are still going on today, particularly concerning free trade and protectionism. Unfortunately, not even economics students are generally familiar with Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” or “Theory of Moral Sentiments” or many of the other founding works of the discipline they study. They may have studied David Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage, or come across John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” in a philosophy seminar, but they are ignorant of the titanic disputes that divided the study of economics as it took shape during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Thomas Sowell is attempting to rectify that. His new book, “On Classical Economics” (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $35), is supposed to give us a glimpse of who the giants of classical economics were, what they believed, and how their voluminous arguments on topics as fundamental as the meaning of value were carried out.

“Classical” economics is, itself, a term of much argument; some see the classical period as having started in the 17th century and ended around 1830, while others date the start, and end, much later; John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, argued it ended when he published his “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” Mr. Sowell’s book makes controversial inclusions – not only obscure figures, like Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (whom he argues deserves much more prominence), but also Karl Marx, whose inclusion in the classical school is bitterly debated.

But Mr. Sowell is nothing if not iconoclastic. He is best known not as an economist but as a black conservative columnist, albeit one with a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Like most prominent black conservatives, he has been vilified for his beliefs – his first name makes him unfortunately even more apt to be called an “Uncle Tom.” Critics of Mr. Sowell’s work portray him as a traitor to the black race, or in some metaphysical sense not really black at all – even though by his own account, Mr Sowell grew up so isolated from white people that as a child he didn’t believe that yellow was a possible hair color.

It takes a heroic supply of mental courage to withstand that sort of public pressure, and a certain amount of stubborn self-assurance. Mr. Sowell’s public persona is that of the dignified professor emeritus: sure of himself and his subject, a little distant, but respected, loved, and, slightly feared by his students. That character has made him formidable as an evangelist of basic economic ideas to the masses.

Unfortunately, what is endearing in his books on society and culture is deadly in a work about classical economics. Mr. Sowell’s prose is never what you could call sparkling; he attracts his audience by the clarity of his ideas, not the lyrical language in which he couches them. When covering debates abandoned a century ago by authors long dead, it takes work to keep the subject lively, but Mr. Sowell has become even more arid than usual. The result is a history desiccated and dull, peopled by dried-out mummies in whom the reader must labor to take the faintest interest.

It is hard to know at whom the book is directed. The natural market would seem to be students, who have to wade through whatever their professor assigns them no matter how dreary the work. But it is not obvious what sort of students would benefit from it. Overview works like this one necessarily exclude as much as they include, but Mr. Sowell’s selection of subjects is too idiosyncratic, and his outlines of what he does cover too sketchy, to make this a good introductory textbook. Its potential as a secondary source for advanced students is hampered by the limited way that Mr. Sowell engages with the texts he covers; he is essentially reporting, rather than debating.

Probably, like many books, this is destined to be excerpted rather than consumed whole; his chapters on Sismondi and Marx are fresh and interesting, and many of the other chapters contain enough interesting points that some professors will choose to use them as a quick gloss to slide their students into a topic. Perhaps it will inspire some to attack the primary sources, which are often more accessible than Mr. Sowell’s overview of them. If that is the only thing the book accomplishes, it will have been a worthy project.

Ms. McArdle last wrote for these pages about illicit enterprise.