Dugald Stewart, the successor of Adam Fergusons's chair in moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and an admirer of Adam Smith, was ready to admit that Smith's views especially on the freedom of trade and enterprise coincided remarkably with the French économistes (in which he most presumably included both Mirabeau and the Physiocratic school). However, at the same time he strongly pointed out that Smith was much less dogmatic in his views. Above all Smith differed very much with the Physiocrats regarding method. He admitted the importance of general principles, Stewart argued, but believed very little in their accuracy or practical application: ‘… in what manner the execution of the theory should be conducted in particular instances, is a question of a very different nature, and to which the answer must vary, in different countries, according to the different circumstances of the case’.

However in what should turn out to become the standard ‘great tradition’, or canon, of doctrinal history of economics this hesitance on behalf of someone who was very well placed to identify Smith's general views and methodological mores was very soon forgotten. Hence at least from the middle of the nineteenth century Smith was not only depicted as a doctrinaire free trader, a believer in general principles and – on this occasion the most important – someone who had been deeply influenced by the Physiocratic school, directly or indirectly through Turgot. Certainly the differences between Smith and the Physiocrats concerning agriculture or industry as a source of economic growth was noted. However, Smith's insistence upon a free trade (for example in corn), and the existence of sterile classes in society (servants, priests, etc.), has often been regarded as a consequence of the influence which Francois Quesnay and others bestowed upon Smith when he in the 1760s visited Paris. Ronald Meek and other scholars have also—most accurately so—drawn attention to the similarities between Turgot and the Scottish enlightenment concerning the so-called ‘four stages theory’ of economic and social development.

However, when such similarities are used in order to construct a historical sequence of doctrinal development emphasizing how the ‘old’ mercantile system was systematically criticised first by the Physiocrats and then by Adam Smith leading on to Ricardo and Classical political economy to – eventually – becoming part of the modern ‘neoclassical synthesis’, this is by large a false invention of tradition.