Unlike his friend Hume or his precursors Locke and Mandeville, Adam Smith seems never explicitly to have posed the question of what the self is, or in what it consists. All the same, Smith deserves a signal place in the history of modern self-reflection. He provided a theory of how selves are formed that went significantly beyond his predecessors, and his account resonates with a series of contemporaneous developments and situations through which we can begin to see the linkages between the history of thinking about the self and some evolving experiences of early modern and modern people.

It was in moral philosophy especially that questions about selfhood became a capital concern for Smith. They were pivotal there because in his view no quality was more central to ethical theory and practice than “self-command.” As he put it at one point, “Self-command is not only a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre” (VI, iii, 11; 241). One writer has noted that in Smith's catalogue self-command replaced two virtues of great moment in the ancient register, namely fortitude and temperance; it is not too much to say that self-command was the nucleus for his whole moral theory. Virtuous behavior was grounded in the individual's capacity to govern him or herself. This meant that moral philosophy ceased to be a discourse on the nature of virtue or goodness, becoming instead an inquiry into how people achieve the capacity for self-management.