Smith was a nuanced thinker. Many academics, most notably the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, have suggested that the figure invoked by free-market apostles is little more than caricature. Smith’s first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, opens with a clear rebuttal of self-seeking behaviour: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others … though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”