He chided the mercantilists that their very cupidity, by imposing a heavy duty on certain goods, called into being a smuggling of the goods which ruined their business.

However, he was constantly inveighing against the farmers, the workers, the manufacturers, and the banks, complaining that they did not understand their own particular interests. From then on, the inevitable benefits of self interest become a doctrine to which rising manufacturers and owners of newly enclosed land constantly appealed.

What Smith did was to give it a reasoned economic exposition which made it acceptable and, so to speak, respectable. When Smith wrote, this view was already familiar to eighteenth century thinkers. The view that personal self-interest is the best regulator of public affairs had been put forward before: it is expressed in Bernard de Mandeville’s, Private Vices, Public Benefits. The result is his famous “invisible hand” theory in which the individual, intending only his own gain, is led “to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” the well-being of society. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith combined the two doctrines: God’s providential benevolence and man’s earthly self-interest. His teacher, Hutchenson, indeed, had taught that the only virtue was benevolence but Smith, while agreeing that this was the major virtue and the one which aimed “at the greatest possible good,” felt strongly that the system of benevolent ethics was too simple and left no room for the “inferior virtues.” Therefore he devoted himself to a more naturalistic theory of morals, in which man’s nature was accepted as it was. One difficulty in following Adam Smith’s account of self interest is that he had discussed the matter thoroughly in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he assumed that the reader of the Wealth of Nations would not think that he, Smith, considered self-interest the only or even the main motive, or virtue, of humanity.

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