SOURCE: "The Economics and Sociology of Labor," in Adam Smith and Modern Sociology: A Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences, The University of Chicago Press, 1907, pp. 79–154.

In the following excerpt, Small comments on the extent to which extra-economic factors such as sociology and psychology enter into Smith's analysis in The Wealth of Nations, and also compares Smith's economic theories with those of Karl Marx.

… [The Wealth of Nations] was primarily a technological inquiry, with the ways and means of producing national wealth as its objective; it assumed that this interest had a value of its own; at the same time it assumed that this interest in production is tributary to the interest in consumption; it assumes, further, that the wealth interest in general is but a single factor in the total scheme of human and divine purposes, and that, whatever the technique of satisfying the wealth...