This new edition of The Life of Adam Smith remains the only book to give a full account of Smith's life whilst also placing his work into the context of his life and times.

Smith's experience at Balliol College was disappointing, since the dons he encountered were not interested in teaching, and their easy enjoyment of sinecures as Fellows did not encourage that competition for students, and therefore revenue, prevalent among the Glasgow professors, which kept them abreast of their subjects and in touch with the advances of Enlightenment thought, especially the New Philosophy of Locke and the New Science of Newton. Smith read widely on his own, in politics and modern languages, but with (...) no one to supervise him, he seems to have overdone study and suffered a kind of nervous breakdown. He may have started reading Hume at this time, and been punished for doing so; certainly the religious orthodoxy of Balliol and the Jacobitism there, perhaps inflamed by the ’45 Rising’, must have repelled him, and he is reported to have left Oxford in 1746 ‘in disgust.’. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the ’45 Rising, the jurist and man of letters, Lord Kames, recruited Adam Smith to come to Edinburgh, Scotland's capital—notable for its superb views, historic buildings, and noisome streets— to deliver to young professionals, from 1748–51, freelance courses of lectures on rhetoric and criticism. Smith's course included a theory of communication, distinguishing between scientific discourse based on reason and the rhetorical kind meant to persuade by moving the passions. Another part of the course was devoted to (...) the origin and progress of language, an example of the philosophical or natural type of history prevalent among the Scottish literati, which Smith adopted for all his works, moral, political, and literary. (shrink)

The emotional strength of his mother, Margaret Douglas, and close kinship bonds, to some degree, compensated Adam Smith for the loss of his father. In addition, he was well prepared at the Kirkcaldy burgh school for his student years, and found his vocation as a moral philosopher, in an era marked by a strong drive for advance in agriculture and other economic sectors. Most important of all, his Presbyterian inheritance, together with training in the Latin and Greek classics, instilled in (...) him the values of self‐command of a Stoic cast, frugality, diligence in his calling, and strict justice towards others tempered with benevolence, which characterized his actions and his teaching. At the same time, he seemed to have developed an independence of mind, which led him to rebel against the strict controls of Calvinism meant to check human depravity, and to set store by human goodness, and the will to enjoy natural liberty. (shrink)

Here, we follow criticism of TMS by contemporaries, for example, Hume, who discerned that sympathy was the ‘Hinge’ of the book's system, but argued that Smith had not proved that all kinds of sympathies are necessarily agreeable, and that it was necessary to bring in a way of accounting for ‘disagreeable sympathy.’ This pushed Smith to make changes for the second edition of 1761, explaining more fully the moral psychology of sympathy and the role of imagination in the emplacement of (...) the impartial spectator. A negative view of TMS came from the Common Sense philosopher, Thomas Reid, who argued that Smith's system did not offer a standard of virtue for measuring the emotions of the moral actor or the sympathy of the spectator, and that it was reason that informed our moral judgements. This criticism of Smith impressed the patrons of the Glasgow Chair of Moral Philosophy, including Kames, and Reid was chosen as Smith's successor, when he left Glasgow in 1764 to become a travelling tutor to the third Duke of Buccleuch. (shrink)

Smith returned to Glasgow in 1751 to occupy the Chair of Logic, and within a year moved to that of moral philosophy. In his logic course, he substituted for the Aristotelian treatment his system of rhetoric and criticism, which he believed explained and illustrated best the powers of the mind. His moral philosophy course was a four‐part one, covering natural theology, presenting empirical proofs of the existence and attributes of God; Ethics, which gave rise to TMS; Justice, covering a history (...) of civil society, taking up the theme of human progress through the four socio‐economic stages of hunting and fishing, herding, farming, and commerce; and, in essence, Political Economy, the basis for WN. Two surviving sets of lectures on Jurisprudence, combining parts three and four of the moral philosophy course, are discussed to demonstrate the growing sophistication of Smith's economic analysis during his Glasgow professorship. (shrink)

Smith was devoted in his attentions to Hume as he lay dying, but, ever the man of prudence, gave his best friend some pain through unwillingness to see through the press the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. In the event, Smith was violently abused by Christians for describing Hume in a published letter as approaching as near to the idea of a ‘perfectly wise and virtuous man’ as human weakness permits. Smith would have been in further trouble if his 1778 Machiavellian (...) advice about a solution to the American problem had been published, for it advocated returning Canada to the French, and Florida to the Spaniards, to ensure that independent Americans would become allies of Britain. (shrink)

Terminally ill in 1776, Hume was relieved from anxieties over Smith's masterwork when it finally reached him on 1 April, and he gave it unstinted praise, though not without offering cogent criticism. The two‐part structure of WN is discussed in context. Books I and II are analytical and identify the principles, chiefly division of labour, which naturally lead to economic growth where the free‐market system, or something close to it, is adopted. Books III to V are historical and evaluative, focused (...) on what legislators, to whom the book is addressed, have done and should do to promote growth. This second part of WN assesses alternatives to the free‐market system, denouncing mercantilism's injudicious restraints and incentives, and Physiocracy's blindness to the benefits of industry and trade. Smith settles for some restrictions on individual economic freedom, to provide resources for society's chief needs identified as defence, justice, public works, and education, and he manifests grave concern about the mental torpor found in workers subjected to extensive division of labour. (shrink)

Smith's correspondence of this period of his life suggests that he believed that raising a revenue in a non‐discriminatory way did not gravely affect the tendency towards price equilibrium on which economic efficiency depends. There was also the necessity of providing for justice, education, and public works in Scotland. Smith was consequently willing, on the grounds of utility, to regulate and enforce the mercantile system, even though he viewed some of its features as unwise and unjust, for example, prohibiting certain (...) imports and punishing smugglers harshly. Smith's activities as an administrative judge and director of import police are assessed, and highlights of his service are described, such as his coastguard command role in gathering intelligence about the entry of John Paul Jones with units of the American navy, supported by France, into the Firth of Forth in September 1779. As well, his views of this time about the issue of free trade for Ireland are examined. (shrink)

Glasgow had a number of advantages as the place of Smith's university education beginning in 1737. Expenses were moderate and important reforms had been implemented in 1727, which put the teaching of logic and metaphysics, moral philosophy, and natural philosophy on a thoroughly modern basis. As well, regulations were made for an arts curriculum including the ancient classics, philosophy, also mathematics and Newtonian science, which provided a firm grounding in cultural and intellectual values for subsequent careers in the professions. Smith (...) noticed the natural beauty of Glasgow's setting, also the emerging industries and thronged local markets, plus the transatlantic shipping in the Clyde estuary, which gave the city a rising economy, contrasting it with Kirkcaldy's declining one. (shrink)

Returning to London in November 1766, Smith spent the next six months as an adviser to Buccleuch, and engaged in government research projects on taxation and management of the Sinking Fund intended to reduce public debt. Other assignments were inquiries into Pacific exploration and the history of Roman colonies as a guide, perhaps, to problems in North America. Buccleuch married in May 1767 and Smith spent the next seven years in Kirkcaldy, struggling with bouts of ill health and the perplexing (...) task of composing WN to his satisfaction. Correspondence of this period reveals that Smith was absorbing new information about grain prices and values of silver, with a view to improving his economic system, through refining its self‐correcting feature governed by the price mechanism, in which rents, wages, and profits are detailed as the factors of production. (shrink)

Adam Smith was baptized on 5 June 1723 in the Fife seaport of Kirkcaldy, where his father, who died on 9 January 1723, had served as Comptroller of Customs. Father Adam Smith studied the liberal arts in Aberdeen, took legal training in Edinburgh qualifying him for estate management, and became secretary to a Campbell magnate. He hesitated about taking up a Customs post in Kirkcaldy, because his income there depended on volume of trade, which was falling off. However, he handled (...) his money well, and married the daughter of a substantial Fife laird. His Will specified that his widow, Margaret Douglas, would get help in raising young Adam from guardians associated with intellectual and economic improvement in Scotland. (shrink)

Smith was not optimistic about his free‐trade policy advice being readily accepted, as prejudice and special interests stood in the way, but he must have been gratified that his views received favourable attention by some of Britain's leaders, and that translations of his great work were stirring the minds of French inquirers into political economy and supporters of the coming revolution. In Germany, the reception of his ideas was marked by translations, reviews, assimilation into university teaching, then popularizations, and afterwards (...) the fertilization of original thoughts about economics with application to the problems of the German‐speaking lands, stages that were paralleled across the globe. In 1787, Smith received the honour that gave him the greatest pleasure of his life: election as Rector of Glasgow University. (shrink)

The strong Scottish Enlightenment interest in science created a market in Edinburgh for information about this subject, and Smith responded by providing a course that included the history of astronomy. A key part was a theory of theorizing or system building, with a system identified as an ‘imaginary machine’ invented to provide a coherent pattern of cause and effect in phenomena. His major works presented systems on this model in ethics and economics. WN's free‐enterprise system was foreshadowed in a third (...) course given at Edinburgh on jurisprudence, in which Smith traced the development of law, and argued that humanity could evolve from barbarism to opulence, through enjoying peace, moderate taxes, also minimal justice, and reliance on the natural course of things. (shrink)

Smith expressed regret in 1780 that his Custom‐house duties held up ‘Several Works’ he had projected. One of these was on the subject of the ‘Imitative Arts,’ presumably his mimetic aesthetic philosophy. This was very likely connected with the two ‘Great Works’ he had ‘on the anvil’ on 1785. He described the first one as a ‘sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry, and Eloquence.’ The second he described as a ‘sort of theory (...) and History of Law and Government,’ which presumably would have included the ‘system of jurisprudence’, Smith promised his readers at the conclusion of TMS in 1759. He reported in 1785 that the materials collected were in tolerably good order, but he doubted whether the onset of old age would allow him to finish either work. Parts of the first project were published after his death in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, the only book of his that was not a commercial success. His major efforts of the end of his life went into further editions of TMS and WN, which he had in hand by 1783, in part responding to his critics. (shrink)

Smith understood that as a professor he was required to publish his work and help administer his University. While his reputation for absent‐mindedness grew, his Glasgow colleagues benefited from his sound practical bent and entrusted him with a wide range of university management issues. As for publishing, he began by contributing to the two numbers of the first Edinburgh Review: commenting on Johnson's Dictionary in 1755; and in 1756, on d’Alembert's Encyclopédie, also on Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, whose argument about (...) self‐love as an economic driving force he took up in TMS and WN. Following the publication of TMS in 1759, Smith concentrated more on political economy, also began work on the long process of the composition of WN, adding to his system lessons learned from a banking crisis in Scotland as his professorship came to an end in 1764. (shrink)

Smith moved from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh late in 1778, after his appointment as a Commissioner for managing His Majesty's Customs in Scotland. We may think it a paradox that this prominent advocate of free trade should end up enforcing the mercantile system, but there was a family tradition of Customs service, and while WN does attack restraints on some branches of trade and encouragement for others, especially in the form of monopolies, Smith was not an across the board economic libertarian. (...) He urged that there were reasons of state, as well as economic considerations, for implementing an efficient collection of moderate duties on imports and exports. In Edinburgh, Smith regularly entertained the intelligentsia and their visitors at a Friday Club and Sunday suppers. (shrink)

Smith wrote that his thirteen years as a Glasgow professor formed the most useful, and, therefore, the happiest and most honourable period of his life. His students joked about his absent‐mindedness and loved him for his benevolence and learning and also for the care he took over the delivery of his lectures. In due course, they disseminated Smith's ideas. Some were sons of local merchants, from whose fathers Smith learned about Glasgow's growing wealth from trading and manufacturing activities, then reflected (...) on related moral and economic problems and offered solutions. Others were from foreign countries: e.g. S.E. Desnitsky and I.A. Tret’yakov, sent abroad by Catherine the Great to complete their education, who then assisted her reform programme in Russia, by passing on Smith's liberal economic policy advice, at least eight years before it was published in WN. (shrink)

From 1773 until 1776, Smith remained in London ‐adding finishing touches to WN, whose publication was timed to seize Parliament's attention, and influence Members to support a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the American colonies. North America offered a major point of application for free‐market theory, and if Smith could win supporters, there was some hope of ending the cycle of violence induced by efforts to preserve the old colonial system involving economic restraints and prohibitions. Smith advocated the creation (...) of an Atlantic union, which would accommodate economic dynamism, develop new political institutions, and allow a place for the revolutionary spirit to be exercised. He foresaw that the pace of American economic growth would inevitably guarantee that leadership would pass from Britain to the former colonies. On an entirely different front at this period, Smith, in commenting on a proposal for reform in university medical education, revealed the strength of his endorsement of competition and detestation of monopolies of any kind. (shrink)

Smith's last illness is described, along with his final order to have his unfinished manuscripts burned shortly before he died on 17 July 1790. His character is summed up as two‐sided: benevolent yet prudent, also firm and decisive, from one point of view; but from another darker one, that of a melancholy or, at times, volatile personality, subject to psychosomatic illness arising from his intense concentration on chains of abstract ideas. Nevertheless, he remained a tireless inquirer into human nature, particularly (...) its emotional range, and into its expressive forms and institutions. His free‐market system showed, he believed, how people in a relatively early phase of commerce and manufacturing might prosper within a framework of justice and equality before the law. He thought that self‐interest was centrally involved in economic transactions, but also held that the happiness of others is necessary to us, and he devoted his last years to moral philosophy, believing that he might help us aspire for virtue rather than wealth, and so become members of a truly civil society. (shrink)

The capstone of Smith's years as a professor was the publication of TMS as a direct challenge to the egoistic theories of Hobbes and Mandeville, and Rousseau. In defining what virtue is and why we ought to act virtuously, Smith offers a sophisticated extension of the arguments of his teacher Hutcheson and a good friend, Hume, to the effect that our moral judgements are based on our sentiments, principally those of justice, benevolence, prudence, and propriety. The chief component of the (...) system is the role of sympathy in human transactions, through which we naturally judge the motives and conduct of others, and then ourselves. Another main component in the system is the impartial spectator, a higher self as it were, identified as the source of our normative judgements. A further important part of the book is rejection of utility as an explanation of the origin of moral rules, but acceptance of it embodied in contemplative utilitarianism, which reveals that the selfish rich, gratifying their desires, are led by an invisible hand to divide with the poor the necessaries of life, almost in the measure that equal distribution would have ensured. (shrink)

Smith's university studies at Glasgow are described: in Greek, introducing him to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus; Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, including Locke's empiricism; and Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics, which had seminal lessons for him in methodology. Above all, the inspiration of the teaching of Francis Hutcheson is assessed, who seized Smith's imagination with his teaching of ethics and economics as part of his jurisprudence course. Hutcheson's development of moral sense and benevolence theory is highlighted, as providing a kind of (...) moral Newtonianism, offering answers in ‘new light’ or liberal theology to the ‘old light’ Calvinist stress on human depravity, and in moral philosophy to the egoistic theory of Hobbes and Mandeville. Clearly, Smith received great intellectual stimulation at Glasgow, and his ability was recognized with the award of a scholarship to Oxford in 1740. (shrink)

In the face of declining strength in the 1780s and grief over the death of his nearest relatives, his mother and his cousin Janet Douglas, Smith strove to leave behind him the works he had already published in the ‘best and most perfect state.’ It fell out that he completed the additions that went into the standard third edition of WN in a time of political distress. These included the rise and fall of Shelburne as the Prime Minister whose drive (...) to make peace with the Americans was based in part on Smith's free trade teaching; the subsequent collapse of the Fox–North coalition over efforts to reform the East India Company, which is severely criticized in the third edition of WN; and the onset of the administration of Pitt the Younger, who heeded WN's policy advice with regard to smuggling and trade with France. Smith also intensified his fight against the absurdity of the government's mercantile system of encouragements and prohibitions, which thwarted competition in the market place and favoured clamorous producers over consumers. (shrink)

From April to July, 1787 Smith was in London receiving medical attention and conferring with the government about fiscal and commercial reforms that allowed Britain to recover from the strains of the American war. On his return to Edinburgh in somewhat restored health, he set about preparing a greatly expanded sixth edition of TMS. This developed further the concept of the impartial spectator, and included an entirely new part VI, focused on moral theory applicable to such crucial issues as new‐modelling (...) a political constitution, highly relevant in view of the revolutions in America and France. He also added a chapter arguing that while our disposition to admire the rich and powerful is necessary to maintain the ‘order of society,’ it is the most universal cause of the ‘corruption of our moral sentiments.’ His Stoic outlook thus affords him a standpoint for criticism of the mechanisms of the acquisitive society analysed in WN, but at the same time, he suggests that the contemporary literature of sensibility dealing with love and friendship does more for us than the arguments for ‘stoical apathy.’. (shrink)

Smith's two‐year tour abroad with young Buccleuch was modest rather than ‘grand,’ but allowed him to investigate a range of regional economies and two unfamiliar political systems: France's autocracy and republican oligarchy in Switzerland. France's taxation problems in the aftermath of war were of particular interest to him, a topic found in WN. Most of his time was spent in Toulouse, when Voltaire was leading a successful fight for a posthumous retrial there of Jean Calas, a victim of religious bigotry (...) and miscarriage of justice. Smith later visited Voltaire, who was his intellectual hero, at his home, Ferney, near Geneva. When in Paris, Smith was introduced to leading philosophes, who were impressed by TMS, also to Turgot and Quesnay, whose Physiocratic views on circular flow in the economy persuaded him to make adjustments in his system. (shrink)