The article summarizes the key methodological and theoretical provisions of A. Smith in the field of political economy: labor (his specialization and cooperation), needs, economic interests, utility, cost, money, capital, national reproduction, role of the state in managing the national economy, the grounds for its participation in the international division and labor cooperation, which seems to be the cognitive basis of their further, creative, productive development by modern industries nomic science - political economy, marginalist economics, the theory of the factors of production, institutionalism and neo-institutionalism.