Statue on the Royal Mile, commissioned by Adam Smith Institute, unveiled 2008.  But the ASI, established in 1976, is a think tank promoting neoliberalism.  Others eg Margaret Thatcher also claim Adam Smith as a father of free enterprise economics.
Gordon Brown has said that Adam Smith would be happier in the John Smith Institute rather than the Adam Smith institute.
There have been different phases to Smith’s posthumous reputation.  Early after his death, in 1790 so close to the French Revolution, his more radical ideas were downplayed.  At the same time as industrial capitalists were promoting a narrow selection of his ideas, the emergent working class movement started drawing from different sections of the Wealth of Nations.
When neoclassical economics began to emerge, these social and moral concerns were seen as “unscientific” .  They saw Smith as describing how commercial society works, rather than how it can be made to work.
Eventually Smith was resuscitated as a poster boy for free market capitalism, much as he had been after his death.  None of these attitudes recognise that the Wealth of Nations refers to Scotland’s emergence from feudalism – when Smith attacks unproductive labour, he was not referring to State employees, but highland clan retainers.  When opposing monopolies, he was not thinking of the naionalisation of industry in the 20th century, but companies which relied for their market position on royal charters.
He did not see markets as a quasi-mystical institution that should be made to penetrate every aspect of life, but a limited mechanism for liberating economic potential from feudal stagnation.
And he recognized, in his description of pin manufacture (seen on £20 notes), the massive deterioration in workers’ conditions, even as their efficiency increased (see book V).  “Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a  civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of the people”.  He was strongly in favour of increasing educational attainment.
He hoped that commercial forces could be used to hurry the deveopment of an agrarian-based capitalism, guarded by a state run by public spirited landed gentelmen.  his expectations have been disappointed.  To defend capitalism now is to attack Enlightenment values.
[Neil Davidson, Scottish Review of Books 2013]