ABSTRACT
Adam Smith is a universal genius and as such his legacy belongs to the whole world. Unfortunately, the diverse national traditions of commentary of his work have to a large extent remained opaque to one another. The dominance of the English-speaking world in the Smith scholarship is a fait accompli for reasons easy to understand. However, as is well known, it was German philosophy that raised the issue of the compatibility between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations under the name ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’. As for French social thought, it has always been very active in the discussion of Smith, but, especially as regards its more recent manifestations, it seems that very little of it has transpired in the English-speaking world if one is to judge from the almost complete lack of references made to it in the specialized literature.1
