Throughout I have emphasized Smith's focus on social order, and his desire to harmonize tensions between self and others. I ultimately argued that Smith's reconciliation of this tension through the apparatus of moral psychology yielded an acute localism that is bound to strike twenty-first-century interpreters reflecting on global interconnectedness as an insightful and finely textured theory of social coordination, but also an unsatisfying theory of, even an obstacle to, society in broader spaces.

In this chapter I shall extend my argument in two related ways. First, I will economize the tension Smith described throughout the Moral Sentiments between self and society, describing it here as a tension between economy and ethics. Clearly, this is an old subject. The tension between Adam Smith's ethical and economic thought first became a “problem” for European scholarship in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and turned on the extent that Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) arose conceptually from the ethical framework developed in the Moral Sentiments? (1759).