ABSTRACT
Cooperation, as Adam Smith saw it in his Wealth of Nations, is a system of reciprocal dependence between people, rationalized by the division of labour and, all, completely independent from what Michael Tomasello called shared intentionality. Isolation, egoism, cooperation without solidarity, strategies used for gaining advantages from the egoism and the interests of others, utilitarian rationality: these are the characteristics which emerge from the image of Adam Smith’s economic man. According to Karl Marx, Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s reasoning constitutes a form of anticipation: they project into the past the image of a ‘primitive economic man’, who has all the characteristics of the modern middle-class individual. The historical scheme proposed by Marx in opposition to Adam Smith’s shows the same antagonism that, at a later time, will inform Ferdinand Tonnies’s concepts of community and society. Marxist theory assumes that a social class can perceive, choose, and act upon its own group interests.
