“Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters. Thus the law which obliges the masters in several different trades to pay their workmen in money and not in goods, is quite just and equitable” (Smith 1976 [1776]), I.x.c.61, pp. 157–158).

This observation is from an obscure backwater of the Wealth of Nations. It is about companies that were archaic even in 1776: the Russian Company, the Eastland Company, the Hamburgh Company, chartered in Britain in the sixteenth century, and trading mainly in the Baltic. But the comments on regulated companies are a revealing epitome of Adam Smith’s thought. There is the artful language, and one can almost hear Smith’s ironic tone as he dictated these sentences. There is the analytic idiom, so characteristic of the Wealth of Nations, in the juxtaposition of large theories with the details of legal and economic history. There is, above all, the subject, which is also the largest object of inquiry in the Wealth of Nations, or the changing relationship between states and markets.

Selecting a single favorite quote from the work of one’s favorite thinker is quite a challenge. Although I had been immediately enthusiastic about the project when I first heard about it, I struggled with this selection task for weeks. The first reason is that there are just so many quotable passages in Adam Smith’s work that I like very much, and not always on the same grounds. Some quotes I appreciate because they drive home Smith’s broader argument, or because they are philosophically rich, such as his quite Lockean evaluation of long apprenticeships in the Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1976; WN I. x.c.12). Others have been long-time companions for me, either because they require a more meticulous analysis than one would think, for example the famous brewer or baker passage (WN I.ii.2), or because there is something paradoxical about them, such as the quote that describes “the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as our neighbour is capable of loving us” (Theory of Moral Sentiments [1756] 1976; TMS I.i.5.5). And then there are passages that are enormous fun to read because Smith gives free rein to his literary skills and irony, such as the “poor man’s son” passage in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS IV.i.8), or where he sheds his polite restraint, for example when he lashes out against Oxford (TMS V.ii.f.8) or against colluding merchants (WN I.x.c.27). The second reason why the choice wasn’t easy had to do with the underlying, perhaps unintended, incentives of the project itself. Opting for a popular quote came at the risk of more competition and fewer chances in the submission process. In the end, I nevertheless dropped all tactical considerations and went for the well-known opening words in Smith’s first opus magnum, the Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” (TMS I.i.I.1).

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

TMS I.iii.3.1

“Sympathy, however, cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish principle. When I sympathize with your sorrow or your indignation, it may be pretended, indeed, that my emotion is founded in self-love, because it arises from bringing your case home to myself, from putting myself in your situation, and thence conceiving what I should feel in the like circumstances. But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize. When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters.”

“Since such, therefore, are the advantages of water-carriage, it is natural that the first improvements of art and industry should be made where this conveniency opens the whole world for a market to the produce of every sort of labour, and that they should always be much later in extending themselves into the inland parts of the country. … All the inland parts of Africa, and all that part of Asia which lies any considerable way north of the Euxine and Caspian seas, the antient Scythia, the modern Tartary and Siberia, seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present. … There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in Europe, the Mediterranean and Euxine seas in both Europe and Asia, and the gulphs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia, to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of that great continent: and the great rivers of Africa are at too great a distance from one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation.”

WN I.iii.4–8