Crediting Adam Smith as the "Founding Father of Modern Economics" is unhelpful though now ubiquitous.  It started with J. B. Say and has had a long gestation period.

In the 1930s, Oscar Lange (1937-, 38; and 1945), argued that socialist planning was superior to capitalist markets because socialist planners would do better in their planned interventions than Smith’s unreliable and uncontrolled invisible hand.

Paul Samuelson, argued the now ubiquitous view, that Adam Smith’s invisible hand meant markets were superior, though he got Smith’s words wrong in popularizing the myth that the IH meant markets enabled ‘selfish’ people to act unintentionally for the public good (Economic, 1948, p 36).  This justified Smith as the ‘father of economics’ in contrast to Soviet planning.

At the UK HET annual conference this week (Balliol, Oxford) Professor Arild Saether, presented a detailed paper, “Pufendorf – Hutcheson’s and Smith’s Most Important Source?”, with clear details of Pufendorf’s (1632-1704) priority in many key economic concepts in his widely read and used books in many European languages, including English (Smith read Latin too) in European Universities, including Glasgow in Scotland.
Details link Hutcheson’s (Smith’s tutor) and Smith’s ideas to Pufendorf’s prior publications, showing that:

‘if  Adam Smith, as Jean Baptiste Say claimed, can be called the father of political economy, Samuel Pufendorf deserves to be remembered as the grandfather’. 

I believe that there is a case to be answered here, let alone whether to continue the usefulness and correctness of the popular claims about our discipline’s parentage.   We might also wish to re-look at other myths, their origins and purpose.

I am sure that Arild Saether would send his paper on request to: [log in to unmask]