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Samuel Fleischacker explores in this piece the central role that a norm of human equality plays in Smith’s moral theory and political economy. He argues that it is essential to virtue, for Smith, that each of us acknowledge the equal worth of all other human beings. It is pointed out that Smith found the need to justify social and economic inequalities pressing in a way that few figures before him had done, and did not think they were justified in many cases. According to the author, Smith was therefore an unusually ardent champion of the rights of the poor, and was not unreasonably taken, later, as a source for leftwing as well as rightwing models of political economy. Thus the attempt to read Smith as an unambiguous ancestor of classical rather than progressive liberalism would be a mistake: indeed progressive liberalism —Fleischacker says— may have a rather stronger claim to his heritage.