Das Adam Smith Problem

Das Adam Smith Problem names the apparent contradiction between Adam Smith's two major works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which grounds human sociality in sympathetic, sentimental attachment to others, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which grounds economic behavior in individual self-interest. In the secondary literature this tension has been debated as a biographical and philosophical puzzle — did Smith change his mind, or are the two works genuinely incompatible? Within the argument of McGowan's capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, however, the problem is reframed: the "invisible hand" — Smith's famous figure for the spontaneous coordination of self-interested economic agents toward social welfare — functions as the theoretical operator that dissolves the contradiction. It acts, in McGowan's reading, as a secularized, capitalist substitute for God: an absent, non-existent Other whose very absence is what coordinates subjects' desires and produces a coherent social whole.

This reframing positions Das Adam Smith Problem not as an internal inconsistency in intellectual history but as a symptom of the deeper ideological problem that capitalism poses to its subjects. Capitalism confronts the individual with an unbearable Kantian freedom — the freedom of pure self-determination with no transcendent guarantor — and the invisible hand resolves this by installing an absent Other that retroactively makes self-interested desire look like it serves a higher order. The sympathy/self-interest tension is thus resolved not by choosing one side but by positing an organizing agency that neither subject knows but that both obey. The "problem" is, in this sense, ideology's own solution to its constitutive antagonism.

In capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, Das Adam Smith Problem serves as an entry point into McGowan's central argument about capitalist ideology. It is not treated as an academic curiosity but as the surface manifestation of ideology's deeper structure. The concept is intimately bound to the cross-referenced concept of the Invisible Hand, which McGowan reads through the lens of the big Other: an absent, non-existent locus that nonetheless functions as the coordinator of subjects' desires — structurally parallel to what Lacanian theory calls the symbolic Other. This connects directly to Ideology, as theorized in the cross-references: the invisible hand performs the ideological operation of papering over the constitutive antagonism (sympathy vs. self-interest) by promising that no real loss is entailed — that selfishness and community cohere naturally. This is precisely what McGowan, following Žižek, identifies as ideology's promise-structure: loss is never absolute, it is always made profitable.

The concept also touches Desire and Alienation: subjects under capitalism are constitutively alienated from any organic social bond, and Das Adam Smith Problem indexes this alienation at the level of theory — the moral and economic registers of human life appear irreconcilable precisely because capitalist subjectivity is split. The invisible hand, posited as absent Other, parallels Das Ding in its structural function: it is an excluded, unreachable organizing center around which social desire orbits without ever grasping it. Identification and Jouissance are also implicated, since the invisible hand allows subjects to identify their private enjoyment (self-interest, jouissance) with a universal social good — a classically ideological suture. Particularism enters insofar as the tension between particular self-interest and universal moral sympathy is precisely what Das Adam Smith Problem names, and what the invisible-hand ideology resolves by making the particular appear to generate the universal spontaneously.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.142)

Das Adam Smith Problem comes about because Smith's two books appear almost completely at odds with each other. Th e fi rst argues for the existence of human morality on the basis of a sentimental attachment to others, while the second contends that self-interest drives the human being.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it names the two poles — "sentimental attachment to others" and "self-interest" — whose contradiction maps directly onto the Lacanian antagonism between the social bond (the symbolic, the Other) and jouissance (the subject's private enjoyment), making Das Adam Smith Problem a displaced theoretical registration of the irreducible tension between desire and the Other that capitalism's ideology must manage and conceal.