While other economists had looked at smaller and more specific topics associated with the then-new market system, Smith focused on how the economy affected society as a whole, and he worked to explain the entirety of the market system. His ideas created a sense of order, design, and purpose that contrasted with the chaos, cruelty, and brutality of the late 18th century. Smith outlined the basic laws of the free market and showed how these laws could result in the slow but sure progress of society, even as individuals pursued their own self-interest.

Smith was both the first great economist and the first worldly philosopher, remembered to this day as the man who showed the whole western world how the market could keep society together and enable it to thrive. He looked at the seeming economic chaos of his time, when the market system was replacing the tradition and command systems, and saw an understandable order built on the laws of capitalism. At the same time, as someone who hailed from the preindustrial period, he failed to predict the coming of several innovations, such as the factory system, which would disrupt the organization of the market system as he described it.