Introduction Capitalism is not a system that emerged suddenly. Its practical roots lie in the long-distance trade, colonialism, financial innovations, and agricultural transformations that developed in Europe from the 16th century onwards. However, these practices lacked a systematic thought system to legitimize themselves until the 18th century. It is at this point that Adam Smith comes onto the historical stage. He is the thinker who transformed the scattered capitalist practices into a coherent philosophical, moral, and economic doctrine, which he called the "system of natural liberty." Smith not only explained the laws of operation of capitalism but also provided it with a moral legitimacy, becoming one of the founding ideologues of the modern world. This narrative will examine his great synthesis and how this synthesis evolved into a global system layer by layer. 1. Period: The Prehistory of Capitalism and Smith's Arrival in the World (16th Century - 1740s) This period is a long historical phase in which capitalism gradually emerged from the womb of feudalism as a mode of production, but its name had not yet been given and it had not yet gained intellectual legitimacy. To understand Adam Smith's world of thought, it is essential to grasp this "prehistory." 1.1. The Dissolution of Feudalism and the Birth of Commercial Capitalism: Feudal Europe was a land-based, hierarchical, and stagnant society. This order began to unravel from the 14th century onwards due to a series of factors. The Black Death led to a labor shortage, increasing the bargaining power of peasants and shaking the traditional power of lords. The Geographic Discoveries provided Europe with a tremendous influx of precious metals ("Price Revolution") and exploded transatlantic trade, enriching a new merchant class. The Mercantilism that emerged during this process was the first ideological and practical form of capitalism. Mercantilism believed that the wealth of a nation was measured by the amount of precious metals (gold and silver) it possessed. To achieve this goal, the state had to tightly control the economy: implementing protective tariffs that promoted exports and restricted imports, establishing monopolistic trading companies that tied colonies solely to the motherland, increasing the population, and keeping wages low. Although the mercantilist system played a key role in the strengthening of nation-states, it suffocated the economy with a network of guilds, monopolies, and privileges. 1.2. Agricultural Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation: In England, particularly from the 16th century onwards, the "enclosure" movement played a vital role in the birth of capitalism. Common lands were fenced off and turned into private property by large landowners who wanted to raise sheep for the wool trade. This process uprooted the rural population from their lands and transformed them into a "free" working class with no option but to sell their labor power to survive. This violent process, which Marx would later call "primitive accumulation," created the two fundamental classes of the capitalist mode of production: the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, who had to sell their labor power to survive. 1.3. The Birth of a Thinker in the Heart of the Scottish Enlightenment: Here is Adam Smith, born at this historical crossroads in 1723, in the small port town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland. The world he was born into still harbored feudal remnants on one side, while on the other, cities like Glasgow were integrated into the Atlantic economy through the trade of tobacco and sugar, hosting a dynamic commercial capitalism. Scotland was experiencing the advantages of being politically connected to England through the 1707 Act of Union, gaining free access to the English colonial empire. Glasgow was the center of this new commercial wealth. While studying at the University of Glasgow, Smith was deeply influenced by the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, one of the founding figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson's idea of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" and his belief in an innate "moral sense" in human nature would become one of the cornerstones of Smith's thought. Although Smith later went to Oxford, the scholastic and conservative education there disappointed him; he owed his true intellectual awakening to the vibrant philosophical environment of Glasgow and the skeptical philosophy of David Hume. 2nd Period: Smith as a Moral Philosopher: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1751-1764) This period encompasses the years Smith spent as a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. These years represent a highly significant phase of intellectual maturation, during which he laid the deep philosophical foundations for the political economy he would later write. Reading Smith solely as an economist misses his project entirely; above all, he was a moral philosopher trying to understand human nature. 2.1. The Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow and the Holistic System: In 1751, Smith returned to Glasgow as a professor, first taking the chair of Logic and then that of Moral Philosophy. His Moral Philosophy lectures consisted of four main sections that went beyond the standard curriculum of the time, encompassing a much broader analysis of human society: Natural Theology, Morality (Ethics), Law, and finally Political Economy, which also included "The Revenues and Armed Forces of the State." This structure shows the big picture in Smith's mind: Economy, morality, law, and politics are inseparable parts of an integrated system. His understanding of capitalism has been embedded within this holistic framework from the very beginning. 2.2. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): "Sympathy" and Social Order: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, is the work that brought Smith his greatest fame during his lifetime and placed him among the leading philosophers of Europe. This book is a profound moral inquiry into the individualistic and self-interested human model of modern capitalist society. Smith's fundamental question is: "How can a being with selfish tendencies, namely humans, make moral judgments and establish a society without being torn apart by conflicts of interest?" It is a direct response to Hobbes' idea that man is a wolf to man and Mandeville's formula of "private vices, public benefits." The answer lies in the famous concept of sympathy. For Smith, sympathy is not merely a feeling of pity or compassion. It is the capacity of a person to put themselves in another's place through imagination, to share and understand their feelings. This is the cement of society. Impartial Spectator (Tarafsız Seyirci): This sympathy mechanism creates an internal court that allows a person to morally judge their own actions. When performing an action, we create an imaginary, knowledgeable, and impartial spectator in our minds, and we view our own actions through the eyes of this spectator. If this spectator approves of our action, our conscience is at ease; if not, we feel guilt and shame. Society serves as a mirror in which we can look at ourselves. Self-love (Kendini Sevme) vs. Selfishness (Bencillik): Smith defines the desire of a person to improve their own situation and to look after their own interests (self-love) as a natural, necessary, and even virtuous impulse. This is distinctly separated from selfishness (selfishness), which considers one's own interests at the expense of harming others. A person who knows that others also have the same need for sympathy and approval stays within the limits that the "impartial spectator" would approve of while looking after their own interests, and does not commit injustice or unfairness. This is precisely the moral foundation of the capitalist market actor: an individual who looks after their own interests in the market is not an immoral being; rather, they are a moral agent seeking social approval and judging their actions in an internal court. This book reminds us that the "economic man" (homo economicus) that we will encounter later in The Wealth of Nations is actually just a model, while the real human being is a much more complex, social, and moral entity. When reading Smith in The Wealth of Nations , remembering this foundation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments protects us from the error of reducing him to a shallow laissez-faire advocate. 3. Period: The Wealth of Nations and the Birth of Systematic Capitalist Theory (1764-1776) This period is the most productive age in which Smith became acquainted with the intellectual centers of Europe and wrote his life's masterpiece, thus composing the founding text of modern economic science and capitalist ideology. 3.1. Grand Tour and the Physiocrats' Idea of "Natural Order": In 1764, he left Glasgow to serve as a private tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch and embarked on a two-year tour of Europe. This tour became an intellectual turning point for him. During his time in Toulouse and Geneva, a bored Smith began to write the first drafts of The Wealth of Nations . Most importantly, during their stay in Paris (1765-1766), he met François Quesnay, the leader of the Physiocrats, the most advanced school of economic thought of the time. The Physiocrats represented the first systematic rebellion against Mercantilism. For them, the source of wealth was not the accumulation of precious metals, but agricultural production based on the productive power of nature. Their most important idea was that the economy, like nature, was a self-regulating system that operated according to divine and immutable "natural laws." The state's intervention in the economy only served to disrupt this natural order. The famous slogan "Laissez-faire, laissez-passer" (Let them do as they will, let them pass) belonged to them. Smith directly inherited this understanding of "system" and the emphasis on free trade from the Physiocrats, but he vehemently opposed the idea that the only source of wealth was land. According to him, the true source of wealth was all productive human labor encompassing agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. 3.2. Retreat in Kirkcaldy and the Writing of The Wealth of Nations : Returning to England in 1766, Smith withdrew to his hometown of Kirkcaldy and began writing his masterpiece in almost complete seclusion at his mother's house for the next six years. This was a superhuman intellectual effort; his health deteriorated, his eyes ached, and he often had to dictate what he wrote to a student. The result was a monumental work published on March 9, 1776: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, briefly The Wealth of Nations . This book was a comprehensive manifesto of the emerging capitalist society, a manual of operation, and a philosophical defense. Smith's genius was in bringing together the scattered observations and ideas into a coherent and systematic whole for the first time. 3.3. The Wealth of Nations 's Architecture: Fundamental Concepts and Arguments: The book is based on a series of interconnected revolutionary arguments: Division of Labor and the Explosion of Productive Forces: The book opens with the famous example of a needle factory in its very first sentence. Smith explains that a worker alone might not be able to produce even one needle a day, but in a small workshop where the work is divided into ten different specialized stages, ten workers can produce forty-eight thousand needles a day. The division of labor leads to a tremendous increase in the productivity of labor. There are three main reasons for this increase: the incredible improvement in the skill of each worker in their narrow area of expertise, the complete elimination of the time normally lost when switching from one type of work to another, and finally, the focus of the worker's attention on a single simple task triggering the invention of machines that facilitate and speed