A view has emerged which sees Adam Smith’s main contribution to economics in terms of his equilibrium theory. This paper argues that equilibrium economics was neither Smith’s main contribution nor his chief concern. It is true that Smith made a few observations which may be construed as equilibrium economics in some loose sense. For example, his observation that the market price of a commodity ...

It is now easy to see, in the light of Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were parts of a grand system. Nonetheless, TMS and WTVare not tightly linked. This paper pursues the following strategy: knowing that Smith wrote both works, one can go back to TMS, investigate Smith's handling of the virtues, and see how that work implici...