Introduction

2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, reason enough to dedicate a special conference to this pioneering thinker—in our case the 37th Heilbronn Symposium entitled “300 Years of Adam Smith: Reception and Influence in Germany.” Even though the primary mission of the Heilbronn conferences—to unlock a body of literature tied to the German language and thus hardly accessible to the international community of scholars—seems to contradict direct engagement with an English-speaking economist, the great significance of Smith’s work on the development of economic theory in the German-speaking world clearly justifies a focus on this topic. Reaching beyond current research, various questions are examined in these pages in a new light, and, above all, relationships are addressed that have not yet been explored in this way. Moreover, when discussing the influence of Smith’s economic theory in Northern and Eastern European countries, the German-speaking world is sometimes directly crossed.