Much of the ambiguity regarding the first principles of economic science can be traced to the fact that Smith, along with Rousseau, was putting forward a complex response to what Hume called “the selfish hypothesis”: the idea (associated with Mandeville and the Epicurean/Augustinian tradition) that self-interest was a general explanatory principle for human behavior. Smith's response was a refutation of Mandeville that integrated many aspects of Mandeville's doctrine. As a consequence, assessing the exact place of the “selfish hypothesis” in Smith's doctrine has long been a matter of controversy. A crucial historical moment in that respect was the Adam Smith problem: the polemic that occurred from the 1870s to the 1890s regarding the role of the self-interest principle in Smith's doctrine. One could think of the Adam Smith problem as the moment when the relationship between economic science and the “selfish hypothesis” presented itself as an exegetical problem: is it legitimate to read Smith as the first proponent of the idea that self-interest is the first principle of economics?

The Adam Smith problem has many similarities with the Homeric problem, a controversy that was started by the publication of F.A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795. By pointing to narrative and stylistic inconsistencies in The Iliad and The Odyssey, Wolf had questioned the existence of a single author called Homer, and hypothesized that “Homer's” works had been written by many different authors. The Homeric problem was thus a clash between a “one Homer theory” and a “many Homers theory.”