Tweet [1]
… is from page 130 of the 2014 Sixth Edition of (my mentor) Robert Ekelund’s and Robert Hébert’s remarkable history-of-economic-thought textbook, A History of Economic Theory & Method [2]:
The idea of a self-regulating economy operating within a market system was a new one in the mid-eighteenth century. Anticipations of the idea crept into early Continental economic literature before then, but clearly Adam Smith gave the idea its most timely and forceful expression. The perception of a natural social order, existing in the absence of any form of central planning, was one of the most liberating ideas ever to emerge in the history of economic thought.