Adam Smith vs Karl Marx
Smith and Marx are the two greatest theorists of capitalism in the modern philosophical tradition, with Marx the most important critic of the system Smith influentially analyzed. Marx read Smith carefully and engaged him at length in Capital and the Theories of Surplus Value.
At a glance
| Adam Smith | Karl Marx | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | 1723 – 1790 | 1818 – 1883 |
| Nationality | Scottish | German |
| Era | Modern | Modern |
| Movements | Scottish Enlightenment, Enlightenment | Marxism, Continental Philosophy |
| Profile | Adam Smith → | Karl Marx → |
Where they agree
Both held that a market economy generates enormous productive power through the division of labor, both treated the analysis of value, labor, and production as central to political economy, and both wrote against the moralistic and theological accounts of economic life that preceded them. Marx took the labor theory of value from the classical tradition Smith helped found.
Where they disagree
Smith held that competitive markets, properly constrained by sympathy and basic legal protections, produce a tendency toward general welfare — what is often summarized as the invisible hand. Marx held that capitalism is structurally exploitative: the surplus value generated by labor is appropriated by capital, and the system's own dynamics produce crises, inequality, and alienation that reform cannot resolve. Where Smith's political economy is a science of how wealth is produced under conditions of liberty, Marx's is a critique of how wealth is produced through the appropriation of others' labor.
Representative quotes
Adam Smith
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“All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Chapter IV, p. 448. -
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”
Section I, Chap. I. -
“Defence is of much more importance than opulence.”
Chapter II
Karl Marx
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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretirt; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern. -
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-ope -
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2
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