Gavin has a very subtle reading of TMS passage. (I like it especially because it fits with my reading of the 'deception of nature' passage in my contribution to New Voices on Adam Smith (Montes & Schliesser, eds, Routledge: 2006)

But two further observations: first, about the poor man's son it is said, "whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition"--it's not the poor man's son that is angry (he's ambitious), but heaven. This is not merely Smithian irony, but also encourages a social justice reading  (cf the moral luck involved of growing up in a "Cottage" or a "palace" with "equipage" etc) of the whole passsage about the "secret motives of the most serious important pursuits of both private and public life." (TMS IV.i.7, 181) Very inegalitarian social institutions can corrupt the souls of the poor (who are enchanted with the wrong things and strive after objects that cannot provide true happiness).

Second,  in TMS the invisible hand is, through the gratification of the 'vain and insatiable desires' by the rich, said 'to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life' (TMS IV.i.10). In Smith, the necessaries of life are contrasted with
the conveniences of life, which is what the rich are said to aim at. Now often people see in this passage Smith's commitment to benign stoic providentialism. But regardless of what else Smith is saying, he is making a fairly weak claim here; the invisible hand is equalizing only to some degree the bare necessities of life. Moreover, the claim is even weaker than first impressions suggest. For, we are also told something about how he interprets the quantity of the 'necessaries of life' here. For Smith qualifies the distribution of the necessaries of life with the claim: 'which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants'. This is a counterfactual. The question is what hypothetical time (and, thus, population size) does Smith have in mind when he discusses equal portions of the earth: at creation, the establishment of property relations, the present, or, say, any given time? Regardless how one answers this
 question, by Smith's own lights simply 'dividing the earth- he does not even say the fruits of the earth - in the absence of exchange relations, the division of labour, or derived property rights, is going to Hobbesian state of nature or conditions of starvation, the invisible hand is advancing the interest of society when the rich select the nlost agreeable parts. In miserable times, such as feudalism or aristocracy, and the
context suggests this is what Smith has in mind (note the references to the 'proud and unfeeling landlord', who 'views his extensive fields', seems to live in a 'palace', and employs 'thousands') even the poor get more than they would otherwise have. (Of course, the political claim is important in the context of Hume's and Smith's attack on feudalism and their interpretation
of how feudalism was undone by the feudal lords' insatiable interest in luxury goods.) But if the baseline is a society with advanced division of labour, then the claim that Smith makes on behalf of the invisible hand as presented in TMS, however interpreted, is quite implausible.~~So, even if Smith is presupposing providentialism here, he is making an extraordinary weak claim: even during the worst political times, the consumption of the rich will help the poor do better than in a Hobbesian
state of nature. This suggests a b lse nse in which history offers a valuable baseline. (See Eric Schliesser 2006 "Articulating Practices as Reasons," ASR (2) p. 84.)

Eric Schliesser