In an article in today's Financial Times, Amartya Sen - winner of the Nobel prize for economics - reminds us that Smith knew the need for virtue.

Whereas the Scottish moral philosopher of the European Enlightenment is touted as a stalwart of untrammelled self-interest, he was first and foremost a forerunner of today's moral psychologists.

His first book - a book that he revised five times in his life including expanding it after the publication of The Wealth of Nations - was his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Refreshing to see a major economist smashing the almost biblical reverence market fundamentalists place in a narrow view of Smith's examination of the motivations driving trade, by placing it into the context of Smith's examination of political economy as a whole.

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