Adam Smith and the Economic Man

We are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the sea, all that countermarching of tribes and races that confounds old history with its dust and rumor, sprang from nothing more abstruse than the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural instinct for cheap rations. To anyone thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and pitiful explanation.--Robert Louis Stevenson, Will o' the Mill.