Adam Smith and the Myth of the Founder

Every year around the anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations (1776), economists and commentators repeat a familiar story: Adam Smith—the Scottish moral philosopher—is celebrated as the father, or even the inventor, of economics. In this telling, Smith stands at the beginning of a scientific tradition, single-handedly discovering the principles of the market economy and the virtues of free trade.

But this story is less history than myth.

As Murray Rothbard observed in his monumental history of economic thought, the idea that Smith created economics reflects a deeply misleading way of understanding intellectual history. The “Great Man” narrative has long dominated textbook accounts of economic thought. In reality, economics did not begin with Smith, and many of the most important insights associated with him were already well understood long before The Wealth of Nations appeared.

Indeed, by the mid-18th century, economic analysis had already reached remarkable sophistication.

Long before Smith put pen to paper, thinkers across Europe had been grappling with the nature of markets, prices, money, and trade. The late Spanish scholastics of the 16th century had developed sophisticated theories of subjective value and market price formation. They argued that the “just price” was simply the price emerging from voluntary exchange in the marketplace: not some arbitrary moral standard imposed from above.

Later economists on the Continent, especially in France and Italy, continued developing this line of analysis. By the 18th century, figures such as Richard Cantillon and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot had already produced works that modern economists would immediately recognize as rigorous economic theory.

Cantillon in particular presented a remarkably advanced analysis of entrepreneurship, price formation, and the flow of money through an economy.

In other words, by the time Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the core insights of market economics had already been developed by generations of thinkers.

Smith’s reputation as the founder of economics becomes even more questionable when one examines the direction he actually took the discipline.

As Rothbard points out, Smith did not advance the already-developing tradition of subjective value and entrepreneurial market analysis. Instead, he redirected economic theory onto a different—and ultimately less fruitful—path.

Rather than emphasizing the dynamic processes of markets and entrepreneurship, Smith focused on labor as the determinant of value and placed heavy emphasis on long-run “natural price” equilibria. In doing so, he downplayed the role of subjective valuation and real market exchange.

This shift proved unfortunately influential. David Ricardo later systematized Smith’s labor-centered framework, and the resulting Ricardian system dominated economic theory for much of the 19th century.

From Rothbard’s perspective, this represented not progress but regression. Economics moved away from the realistic analysis of individual action and market processes that earlier thinkers had begun developing. Only later, with the Austrian economists such as Carl Menger, would economics return to a theory grounded in subjective value and human choice.

Smith’s reputation as the original apostle of laissez-faire also deserves closer scrutiny.

It is certainly true that The Wealth of Nations contains powerful arguments against mercantilism and government restrictions on trade. But Smith’s advocacy of free markets was far from absolute. Throughout the book, he introduced numerous qualifications and exceptions, supporting various government interventions in areas such as banking regulation, public works, and education.

In fact, many earlier economists were even more consistently laissez-faire than Smith. French thinkers such as Turgot and the physiocrats articulated remarkably pure defenses of economic liberty well before Smith’s work appeared.

The result is that Smith’s reputation as the founder of free-market economics rests largely on historical simplification.

If Smith neither invented economics nor articulated the most radical defense of free markets, why has his reputation remained so dominant?

Part of the answer lies in intellectual fashion. The English thinkers of the classical school that followed Smith, especially Ricardo, treated him as the originator of their own framework. Later historians of thought often repeated this narrative, constructing a tidy progression in which economics begins with Smith and develops steadily from there. But history rarely unfolds so neatly.

Ideas emerge gradually, through debate, refinement, and sometimes regression. As Rothbard emphasized, intellectual history often moves in zigzags rather than a straight line of continuous progress.

Seen in this light, Adam Smith was not the beginning of economics but a participant in an already-vibrant conversation about markets and society.

None of this is meant to diminish Smith’s importance. The Wealth of Nations remains one of the most influential works in the history of social thought. Smith helped popularize economic reasoning and played a major role in shaping public understanding of markets.

But recognizing Smith’s contributions should not require repeating the myth that he created economics from nothing—and it certainly shouldn’t require lionizing a thinker whose ideas regarding prices and actual free trade were far from sound.