Adam Smith

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Adam Smith Article

What is Adam Smith best known for?

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Adam Smith is known primarily for a single work—An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the first comprehensive system of political economy—which included Smith’s description of a system of market-determined wages and free rather than government-constrained enterprise, his system of “perfect liberty”—later know as laissez-faire capitalism.