Adam Smith
Smith, Adam - 1723–90, Scottish economist, educated at Glasgow and Oxford. He became professor of moral philosophy at the Univ. of Glasgow in 1752, and while teaching there wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which gave him the beginnings of an international reputation. He traveled on the Continent from 1764 to 1766 as tutor to the duke of Buccleuch and while in France met some of Read More...
Smith, Adam - 1723–90, Scottish economist, educated at Glasgow and Oxford. He became professor of moral philosophy at the Univ. of Glasgow in 1752, and while teaching there wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which gave him the beginnings of an international reputation. He traveled on the Continent from 1764 to 1766 as tutor to the duke of Buccleuch and while in France met some of the physiocrats and began to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, finally published in 1776. In that work, Smith postulated the theory of the division of labor and emphasized that value arises from the labor expended in the process of production. He was led by the rationalist current of the century, as well as by the more direct influence of Hume and others, to believe that in a laissez-faire economy the impulse of self-interest would bring about the public welfare; at the same time he was capable of appreciating that private groups such as manufacturers might at times oppose the public interest. Smith was opposed to monopolies and the concepts of mercantilism in general but admitted restrictions to free trade, such as the Navigation Acts, as sometimes necessary national economic weapons in the existing state of the world. He also accepted government intervention in the economy that reduced poverty and government regulation in support of workers. Smith wrote before the Industrial Revolution was fully developed, and some of his theories were voided by its development, but as an analyst of institutions and an influence on later economists he has never been surpassed. His pragmatism, as well as the leaven of ethical content and social insight in his thought, differentiates him from the rigidity of David Ricardo and the school of early 19th-century utilitarianism. In 1778, Smith was appointed commissioner of customs for Scotland. His Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) appeared posthumously. See biographies by J. Rae (1895, repr. 1965) and I. S. Ross (1995); studies by E. Ginzberg (1934, repr. 1964), T. D. Campbell (1971), S. Hollander (1973), and E. Rothschild (2001). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
Adam Smith
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An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith, C J. Bullock. 590 pgs.
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Few would argue that Adam Smith was one of the great minds of the eighteenth century. He is perceived through his best-known book, The Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science, and his ideas about the free market and the role of the state (in relation to it) continue to influence modern economic thought. Yet Smith achieved even more as a man of letters, as a moralist, historian, and critic. The Life of Adam Smith, the first full-scale biography of Smith in a hundred years, is a superb account of Smith's life and work, encompassing a career that spanned some of the defining moments in world history, including the American and French Revolutions. Here author Ian Simpson Ross examines Smith's family life, education, career, intellectual circle (including David Hume and Francois Quesnay), and his contemporaries (the likes of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson), bringing to life this great thinker and author. Readers will meet Smith as a student at a lively Glasgow University and at a sleepy Oxford; a freelance lecturer delivering popular classes on rhetoric; an innovative university teacher ("by far the most useful, and therefore," Smith wrote, "by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life"); then a tutor travelling abroad with a Duke; an acclaimed political economist; a policy advisor to governments during and after the American Revolution; and finally, if paradoxically in view of his strongly held tenets, a Commissioner of Customs coping with free traders in the smuggling business. But it his impact as a writer that continues to set Adam Smith apart today. The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, as the British Parliament was deep in debate about the American colonies, continues to influence modern economic theory throughout the world. Ross sheds new light on this classic work and on its meaning for today. And he also paints a vivid portrait of Smith's personal life, revealing a man of singular generosity of spirit, who believed that with wit and logic and sensitivity to our feelings, we might aspire to virtue rather than wealth, and so become members of a truly civil society. Upon Adam Smith's death in 1790, a friend wrote of him, "Happy are those who at the close of life can reflect that they have lived to a valuable purpose by contributing, as he did, to enlighten mankind, and to spread the blessings of peace and liberty and virtue." The Life of Adam Smith illuminates the world of a man whose legacy of thought concerns and affects us all.
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Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations
by Athol Fitzgibbons. 216 pgs.
This book examines the influence that Adam Smith's philosophy had on his economics, drawing on the neglected parts of Smith's writings to show that the political and economic theories built logically on his morals. It analyses the significance of his stoic beliefs, his notions of art and music, astronomy, philosophy and war, and shows that Smith's invisible hand was part of a `system' that was meant to replace medieval Christianity with an ethic of virtue in this world rather than the next. Smith was motivated primarily by a political ideal, a moral version of liberalism. He rejected the political philosophy of the Greeks and Christians as authoritarian and unworldly, but contrary to what many economists believe, he also rejected the amoral liberalism that was being advocated by his countryman and friend David Hume. Far from being myopic about self-love, Smith arrived at his theories of free trade, economic growth, and alienation via his reinterpretation of Stoic virtue. Athol Fitzgibbons' account is clearly written, and its innovations reveal the hitherto hidden unity in Smith's overarching system of morals, politics and economics.
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