Philosophy › Reason, experience & Enlightenment › Adam Smith, moral philosopher and economist
The Wealth of Nations
1776· Book or text· Politics, society & justice
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Smith's 1776 book arguing that a nation's wealth is its people's productive work, multiplied by specialization and trade, not its stock of gold.
See it on the Philosophy map →The idea
The idea: wealth grows when work is divided up and traded freely. Smith's pin factory: ten workers, each doing a few steps, made about 48,000 pins a day; alone, each might not make twenty. We get dinner not from 'the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,' but from 'their regard to their own interest.' He attacked mercantilism, hoarding gold through tariffs and monopolies. Government still had jobs: defense, courts, roads, schooling. Main objection: it underrates monopoly, booms and busts, and inequality.
Why it matters
It became the founding text of economics, shaped free-trade policy in Britain and beyond, and supplied the theory that Marx's Das Kapital set out to critique.
Think of it like
Like specialized building trades: a crew of framers, electricians and plumbers finishes a building far faster than ten handymen each doing everything.
Where it comes from
Published in London on 9 March 1776; Smith revised it through five editions to 1789. The famous 'invisible hand' appears only once in its roughly 1,000 pages.
Still debated
Whether Smith held a true labor theory of value, and how much he took from French economists like Quesnay and Turgot, is still argued.
Connections (2)
▸Adam Smith, moral philosopher and economist wrote The Wealth of NationsWell documented
The connection
Smith built the book from his Glasgow lectures on law and government, then began writing in Toulouse in 1764, 'to pass away the time' while tutoring a young duke; in France he met the economists Quesnay and Turgot. He worked on it for twelve years before publishing.
When and how
France, 1764–66; Kirkcaldy, Scotland, 1767–73; London, 1773–76. Published 9 March 1776 by Strahan and Cadell.
How we know
His July 1764 letter to Hume from Toulouse; an early draft on the division of labor from about 1763; and students' notes of his Glasgow lectures, which already include the pin factory.
Debates and open questions
How much he borrowed from the Physiocrats and Richard Cantillon, and how the book's stress on self-interest fits his earlier ethics of sympathy.
▸The Wealth of Nations was critiqued in Das KapitalWell documented
The connection
Marx accepted Smith's and Ricardo's view that labor creates value, then asked where profit comes from if workers are paid the value of their work. His answer, surplus value, turned classical economics against capitalism. Das Kapital's subtitle, 'A Critique of Political Economy,' names Smith's tradition as its target.
When and how
Marx studied Smith from 1844 in Paris, then for years in the British Museum Reading Room in London before Volume 1 appeared in 1867.
How we know
Capital cites Smith dozens of times, and Marx's manuscript Theories of Surplus Value (1862–63) devotes a long chapter to him.
Debates and open questions
Whether Smith held a labor theory of value in Marx's sense; many economists read Smith's version as a measure of value, not its source.