“Adam Smith, it was true, treated material wealth as a separate field of study; to have done so with a great sense of realism made him the founder of a new science, economics. For all that, wealth was to him merely an aspect of the life of the community, to the purposes of which it remained subordinate; it was an appurtenance of the nations struggling for survival in history and could not be dissociated from them. […] There is no intimation in his work that the economic interests of the capitalists laid down the law to society; no intimation that they were the secular spokesmen of the divine providence which governed the economic world as a separate entity. The economic sphere, with him, is not yet subject to laws of its own that provide us with a standard of good and evil.”

–Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation”

In other words, Smith did not see economics and markets as something separate from human affairs and human purposes; unlike modern economists he did not equate economic “law” with natural laws and likely would’ve thought it absurd to hold a demand curve equivalent with the law of gravity.

One must understand, then, that the supposed commensurate status of economic precepts and suppositions with naturally-occurring laws is an ideology, and an effective one at that.