A Deeply Human VisionA Deeply Human Vision

Though he embraced specialization and the empirical method, Adam Smith's thinking is not reductive.

At their best, economists are the guardians of tough truths about reality that many people, especially legislators, don’t want to hear. There is no shortage of individuals who do not like to be reminded of the need to make trade-offs, or to pay attention to the unintended and often negative side effects of well-intended choices.

Perhaps this helps explain why, ever since its publication in 1776, there have always been plenty of critics eager to denounce The Wealth of Nations and dismiss the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, as an arch-legitimator of greed and materialism. Nineteenth-century German purveyors of what was called “Das Adam Smith Problem,” such as Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, and Richard Zeyss, claimed that something happened to Smith between the publication of his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and The Wealth of Nations’ appearance seventeen years later. The first book showed a keen awareness of humans’ capacity to enter other people’s moral universes and appreciate the deeper motivations for human choice and action. But at some point, the argument went, Smith must have converted to a thoroughly materialist conception of human nature.

Today, few scholars accept this interpretation. That said, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations plainly are different books in terms of their respective topics. The first text is an exploration of moral psychology and its significance for the eternal philosophical question of how people become happy. The second book is an attempt to explain the nature of that sphere of life which we call “the economy,” as well as how what Smith described as the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” allows humans to escape poverty and the oppressive economic structures associated with the mercantile system that dominated the eighteenth-century European world.

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