… is from page 211 of David Schmidtz’s superb essay “Adam Smith on Freedom,” which is chapter 13 in Ryan Patrick Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (2016) (footnote omitted; original emphasis; the quotation used by Schmidtz is to page 19 of Ryan Hanley’s 2009 book, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue):
Commercial societies [in Smith’s view, as explained by Hanley] “promote not only universal opulence but also a universal freedom of which the weak are the principal beneficiaries.”
The crucial bottom line is that when people achieve freedom in commercial society, such freedom will involve depending on many, yet being at the mercy of none.
