Adam Smith became a highly abstract writer who used charming prose to disarm his readers. He himself commended this tactic to his students, telling them that if they wanted to sway an unsympathetic audience, “we are not to shock them by affirming what we are satisfied is disagreeable, but are to conceal our design and beginning at a distance, bring them slowly on to the main point and having gained the more remote ones we get the nearer ones of consequence”
