Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel.

It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself.

From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us.

For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time.
The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth.

On the one hand he is the founder of the classic political economy.