Absent-minded he may have been, but naïve he wasn't, let alone a cynic. Smith did not tolerate immoral behaviour. It would never have occurred to him that selfishness and greed might be viewed as being just normal - and even less that they might be morally laudable, let alone negligible. This differentiates him from Thomas Hobbes, in whose view man is a wolf to other men, and also from Bernard Mandeville, well-known for his poem "The Fable of the Bees", in which he - half satirically, half seriously - claims that private vices result in public benefits. Smith strongly objected to this view. The proof of this attitude is his first widely recognised book, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, published on April 26, 1759-250 years ago.

In this work, which was based on his Glasgow lectures, Smith dedicates about 400 pages to nothing but questions of morality. He asks how it is that people recognise, through their interaction, what is virtuous. The Theory is a book on social self-organisation, clad in an analysis of moral psychology. It is all about how the moral basis for society evolves and what keeps it alive. It deals with sympathy, benevolence, conscience and self-control. The monograph was an immediate success.

Nevertheless, the Theory of Moral Sentiments is by no means a necessary moralistic counterweight to the allegedly morality-free Wealth of Nations. Both books stem from and unfold the same coherent logical system, though the Theory is wider in scope and more fundamental to Smith's overall approach. The myth about the contrariness of the two books, the "Adam Smith problem", is entirely unwarranted. The term was coined by members of the so-called Historical School, a specific German branch of economics from the 19th century with a strong empirical orientation but a serious weakness in abstract theory. In its uninformed view, Smith had simply changed his mind over the years. It is true that almost two decades elapsed between the first publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations. But Adam Smith never left it at the first editions of his works. Both books underwent numerous rewrites and additions until the end of Smith's life. He worked on them continuously and in parallel but never fundamentally changed his mind. His approach and the logical system that he built always stayed the same.