It’s a truism that each of us is more complex than anyone else believes. Our friends and family members think they know us, but their deep knowledge is still limited across time, place and context. And many in the public eye are transformed, especially after death, into a caricature — a simplified, 2D, metaphorical cutout figure lacking the rich history and inconsistencies of the typical human. This year, 2023, is the tricentennial birth anniversary of an 18th-century economic influencer, Adam Smith, a complex thinker who has been simplified and caricatured by centuries of economists. It’s likely you’ll be hearing his name a lot this year, so who was he and why give him attention? Revealing the complexity of Smith’s thinking should inspire reflection upon common understandings about ourselves, as well as reveal some of America’s continuing challenges.

If you took a college-level economics course, then you were exposed to the ideas and words of this 18th-century Scot born in 1723. But even if you’ve never stepped inside a college classroom, you’ve still been impacted by this founder of modern economics. Smith is most famously known for the phrase “invisible hand,” a phrase found in his 1776 masterwork “The Wealth of Nations” (WN).

According to Smith, a wave of the metaphorical “invisible hand” commands an outcome unintended by economic actors. In commercial markets unintended collective benefit is generated by individual actions taken solely in self-interest. For example, both myself and the grocer benefit from grocery store transactions even though my purchases and their sales are motivated by self-interest rather than collective benefit. The invisible hand represents the magic of markets: an economic institution that benefits the collective even though dominated by self-interest. Combining Smithian self-interest with his distrust of government regulation yields the patron saint of free-marketeers.

However, Smith was a celebrated thinker long before publishing “WN.” In 1759 he published his first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (TMS), his attempt to explain how morality works. Upon publication some German-speaking economists perceived an inconsistency between the two books. The perception spawned a long conflict called “Das Adam Smith Problem,” a problem eventually solved but still relevant today.

The problem was that while “WN” is all about how well economies work when benevolence is not a motivation, Smith’s focus in “TMS” is about how “sympathetic” and benevolent humans are, that we do and should make decisions motivated by consideration of others. Some explained the motivation inconsistency by suggesting Smith changed his mind about benevolence while writing “WN.” Others figured he was just confused.

Another explanation, and solution to the problem, is that Smith knew what he was talking about, but political agendas and changes in word usage across the centuries obscured the proper understanding of Smithian “sympathy.”

In contemporary usage “sympathy” names a capacity to share the feelings of another. For Smith, sympathy is the lifelong socialization process, the unavoidable and mostly unconscious process by which humans perceive how others think and act and then internalize and model how to be human themselves. Smith understood that Homo sapiens is fundamentally a social animal, that we learn how to be human by monitoring others, especially those with whom we have an emotional attachment. For Smith, the self equals the “I with you in mind.” In a sense, I never act; rather, we always act.

Of relevance to we Americans today is the expansiveness of that “we.” Is your personal “we” self-contained to a small set of identities and loyalties? Are you distrustful of or hostile toward those outside your in-groups? Is political and cultural polarization and fragmentation America’s destiny? Or, might we figure out how to honor and respect the stories and aspirations of 330 million Americans? Smith’s two books tell us that the “I with you in mind” can be self-seeking and benevolent. We’ve mastered the self-seeking. Considering this century’s serious domestic and global challenges, how might benevolence yield a broader we?

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