Reading Adam Smith in the light of the classics

Adam Smith, it has been frequently observed, won great renown in the fairly new field of political economy; and this was enough to overshadow for more than a century the fame of his moral treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1976a, TMS), although it had been a success. Even the emergence of the ‘Adam Smith Problem’, which drew scholarly attention to TMS, had the purpose of examining how it was possible for the author of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976b, WN) to have written so different a book.