What has been called modernity and capitalism created a form of social reproduction differentiated from the previous stages of existence of homo sapiens. Both processes converged into what someone called an expanding wealth consciousness. Not only the ties of sociality were disrupted, but the entire scope of expectations -political, economic, cultural among others. But the perception of science, scientific thought and its discourse were also transformed. Capitalism, one of the key pieces of these changes, created a discourse, or rather, the elites built a discourse capable of explaining, but at the same time promoting the new social relations, which although they were already outlined, would have to be defined as broadly and in detail as possible.

Among the elites, some individuals, who can be considered men of their time, achieve a better penetration into the mechanisms that allow a more complete, although perhaps never all-encompassing, understanding of their functioning in a more integral way. No doubt Adam Smith belongs to this privileged group, who described in economic terms that reality later called the Industrial Revolution. Smith's theoretical effort laid the foundations of what is now known as economic science, but not in general, but of capitalism in the context of modernity. Adam Smith manages to decipher such an Industrial Revolution in his discourse, and shows in a forceful way the benefits, and only tangentially and not entirely obviously, the future difficulties.

This issue of www.olafinanciera.unam.mx pays tribute to Adam Smith where it problematizes and updates his already complex and diverse thought, which goes from Theory of Moral Sentiments to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The objective outlined here is to expand and disseminate his thought, but also to demystify the image that both neoclassical thought and so-called neoliberalism have made, or rather, have distorted and deformed to the point of complete disfigurement. In this perspective, academics from different geographical and thematic points undertake this task of current reflection of a classic, in this case of economics as political economy.

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