In his opening address at the inaugural MPS Conference, the Swiss economist and diplomat William Rappard depicted his colleagues as the inheritors of both Adam Smith's economic science and his liberal politics. What Smith did not realise, this well-travelled diplomat argued, was that the 'economic man' underpinning his science was 'like Smith himself, a Scotchman who preferred to work and to save rather than idly to enjoy idleness'. Rappard contrasted this 'Scotch brand of homo economicus', for whom work was a virtue and saving a characteristic trait, with the Algerian Arabs he had witnessed in Algiers five years earlier, shunning work and enjoying themselves by sitting idly on the pavements. Had Smith been 'reared among the sun-baked race of Arabs who prefer leisure to work' and equality to liberty, he speculated, 'would his semi-tropical economic man not have led him quite consistently to preach a very different doctrine?' Smith's liberal economics, Rappard believed, could only thrive in conditions inhabited by a very distinctive subject.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 86