By 1800, Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations had both been translated twice into the German language. Kosegarten's second 1791 translation of Theory of Moral Sentiments remained the standard version until 1926, when the first scholarly edition was published, edited by Walther Eckstein. This became in turn the standard edition, and is still in print. We might infer from the lengthy gap between 1791 and 1926 that Theory of Moral Sentiments made little impact upon German readers compared with Wealth of Nations, which appeared in some fifteen new translations and editions up to the 1930s. Certainly this view seems to have been adopted by later commentators, many of whom in writing of Smith's general influence neglect to mention Theory of Moral Sentiments at all. But as with almost all the literature on national receptions of Wealth of Nations, the histories constructed in these accounts peter out in the early decades of the nineteenth century, adhering to the broad conventionalised chronology already outlined in the General Introduction.

But without Theory of Moral Sentiments there would of course be no ‘Adam Smith Problem’, a German scholarly debate of the second half of the nineteenth century in which Theory of Moral Sentiments' ‘altruistic’ account of human motivation was contrasted with the ‘selfish’ rendering of human motivation said to underpin the Wealth of Nations. While we might today simply regard ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’ as a mistake, based on a faulty appreciation of Smith's writings, the fact that there is kein Problem is not however relevant to historical appraisal of past understandings of Adam Smith's writings. The history of ideas would be a very short one if this approach were generally adopted. German scholars might have been wrong in thinking that there was an inconsistency in Smith's account of human motivation as between the two books, but in so doing they were addressing a wider problem: the reconstruction of Smith's original project. Hitherto all discussion of Adam Smith's writings had directed attention to one or the other of the two books.