German social scientists in the 1800s came up with lots of bad ideas. One of them was the idea that Adam Smith’s thought is inconsistent. They believed that Smith’s two books, 1759’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and 1776’s The Wealth of Nations, are opposed to each other and called the resulting challenge of interpretation “the Adam Smith problem.”

In the April essay for Capital Matters’ Adam Smith 300 series, celebrating Smith’s 300th birthday this year, Yuval Levin has written about how some of America’s Founding Fathers interpreted Smith. Being smarter and wiser than the German social scientists in the 1800s, the Founders provided a solution to “the Adam Smith problem.” Levin writes:

These Americans seemed to understand Smith’s aims in his two books rather differently from his more modern readers. They drew on The Wealth of Nations as a description of the commercial economy and on The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a prescriptive guide to living well in modern free societies. And those impressions of Smith’s books could help us better grasp how they might fit together.

Levin covers Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, but spends the most time on Adams. Here’s some of what he has to say about Smith’s influence on our second president:

Abigail Adams warmly recommended The Theory of Moral Sentiments in a letter to her son Charles in 1786. In 1790, John Adams recommended the book to his eldest son John Quincy Adams, and was clearly engaging intensely with Smith’s ideas in his own thinking about morality and society in this period. The elder Adams was intensely concerned about the danger of oligarchy, but in terms quite different from Jefferson’s peculiar sort of gentry populism. Adams was not a materialist opponent of commercial wealth. His concern was not exactly that the wealthy would conspire to direct the power of government to their advantage. Rather, true to his puritan roots, he worried about the morally corrosive power of money and status. And on this question, perhaps to the surprise of 21st-century readers, he found a profound and brilliant guide in Adam Smith.

This is particularly evident in Adams’s Discourses on Davila, which were published as a series of essays in the early 1790s. Adams frequently quotes and paraphrases The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Discourses, referring to Smith only as “a great writer,” or “one great writer.” Adams approvingly cites Smith’s argument that the desire for status and distinction is the foremost social passion in the hearts of men, and that people pursue great wealth less to enjoy the material possessions that money can buy than to be looked upon as successful by other people. He thought that this kind of struggle for status can deform a democratic society, whether or not it actually comes to affect how formal political power is used.

Check out all of Levin’s essay, “The Adam Smith Solution,” here.