Adam Smith (1723-1790)

Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher who founded classical economics. He was a proponent of the idea that individual economic activity was part of a predictable, law-based system of value and trade governed by an “invisible hand.” In a nutshell, Smith's economics predict that people invariably benefit from being in competition with one another, and claims that if things get "out of hand" (if inequality becomes too intense), the "invisible hand" will cause wealth to be redistributed within society.

Social science theory is indebted to classical economics because the idea that human behaviour is predictable and that people are governed by forces beyond their control (i.e.: the "invisible hand") comes with an implicit hypothesis that there is a difference between what people do and what people say or think they do. This became a very important premise for anthropological methodology, especially ethnography.