The man is a moral philosopher who spent a career arguing markets need law, empathy, and restraint. The mascot is a ghost invoked to argue they don’t.
Adam Smith (1723-1790) was first a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, not an economist by the discipline’s later definition; that field didn’t yet exist as a separate specialism. His first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argued that moral judgment is built from sympathy and disciplined by an internalised “impartial spectator,” an account of ethics he never retracted or contradicted in his later writing. Seventeen years afterward, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) laid out his economic thought: division of labour, competitive markets, and a sustained argument against monopolies and mercantilist state protection, including a pointed attack on chartered monopolies like the East India Company.
The version of Smith cited in most modern policy debates is largely a 20th-century construction. Mid-century Chicago School economists distilled a “Chicago Smith” out of the original corpus to lend historical weight to deregulatory, laissez-faire policy, foregrounding the handful of self-interest passages while leaving behind the surrounding argument about law, competition policy, and moral restraint that Smith treated as preconditions, not obstacles, to markets working well. Reading both books together resolves what historians call “the Adam Smith Problem”: the moral philosopher and the economist are the same person making one continuous argument, not two positions in tension.
Source: Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Liu, G. M., “Rethinking the ‘Chicago Smith’ Problem: Adam Smith and the Chicago School, 1929-1980,” Modern Intellectual History (2019). Sen, Amartya, “Adam Smith and the Contemporary World,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 3(1), 2010.