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With the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations approaching next year, the world is gearing up to honour Adam Smith. But which Smith should be recognised? The hard-nosed “founding father” of modern economics, or the philosopher who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments? Scholars have wrestled with this question, a riddle known as “Das Adam Smith Problem,” for centuries, because it concerns not just dualities within Smith’s thought, but also our own uneasy relationship with morality and markets. The “problem” was first formulated in late-19th-century Germany, where economists of the historical school, including Wilhelm Hasbach and August
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