Yet we forget that Adam Smith set the operation of the invisible hand within a moral context
of “sympathy” toward one’s fellow man as he described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759). My reading suggests Smith uses the word “sympathy” the way
today we would use the word “empathy,” defined as “the ability to
understand and share the feelings of another.” This is not Gordon Gekko’s
invisible hand as portrayed in the 1987 film Wall Street.