Adam Smith: An Enlightened LifeThis fascinating intellectual biography of Adam Smith dramatically rewrites the economist’s life and offers new insight into his iconic concepts The great eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith (1723–90) is celebrated as the founder of modern economics. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This biography shows the extent to which Smith's great works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of one of the most ambitious projects of the Euruopean Enlightenment, a grand “Science of Man" that would encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on Smith’s death in 1790.Nick Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s intellectual ancestry and shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith’s ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume. |
From inside the book
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Page 1714
... articles, and that they can be read as the work of a formidably ambitious young thinker, ready to take on the leading moral philosophers of Scotland and France, prepared to offer a friendly though radical critique of.
... articles, and that they can be read as the work of a formidably ambitious young thinker, ready to take on the leading moral philosophers of Scotland and France, prepared to offer a friendly though radical critique of.
Page 1715
Nicholas T. Phillipson. France, prepared to offer a friendly though radical critique of the philosophy teaching of Scotland's two leading universities and confident enough to be able to see himself as the heir of Grotius, Hobbes and ...
Nicholas T. Phillipson. France, prepared to offer a friendly though radical critique of the philosophy teaching of Scotland's two leading universities and confident enough to be able to see himself as the heir of Grotius, Hobbes and ...
Page 1720
... France and the Baltic. By 1644 it was a burgh with a population of around 4,500, a fleet of around 100 ships, a complex guild system and a town council. The old church of St Bryce, which Fleming rightly described as 'a large unshapely ...
... France and the Baltic. By 1644 it was a burgh with a population of around 4,500, a fleet of around 100 ships, a complex guild system and a town council. The old church of St Bryce, which Fleming rightly described as 'a large unshapely ...
Page
... France, luxury goods and foodstuffs with Holland, and timber with Norway. Pedlars from the west of the country hawked linens and yam down the west coast of England and even to London. In 1656 it was even reported that one merchant had ...
... France, luxury goods and foodstuffs with Holland, and timber with Norway. Pedlars from the west of the country hawked linens and yam down the west coast of England and even to London. In 1656 it was even reported that one merchant had ...
Page
... France in the previous century. Later in life he remembered teaching himself French, presumably by using the same method David Miller had used to teach him Latin and Greek in Kirkcaldy, by translating from French into English and back ...
... France in the previous century. Later in life he remembered teaching himself French, presumably by using the same method David Miller had used to teach him Latin and Greek in Kirkcaldy, by translating from French into English and back ...
Contents
1699 | |
1703 | |
1707 | |
1717 | |
1737 | |
4Edinburghs Early Enlightenment | |
a Conjectural History | |
9Smith and the Duke of Buccleuchin Europe 17646 | |
10London Kirkcaldy and the Making of theWealth of Nations 176676 | |
11The Wealth of Nations andSmiths Very violent attack upon the whole commercialsystem of Great Britain | |
12Humes Death | |
13Last Years in Edinburgh 177890 | |
Epilogue | |
Notes and Sources | |
Bibliography of Works Cited | |
6Professor of Moral Philosophyat Glasgow 1 17519 | |
7The Theory of Moral Sentimentsand the Civilizing Powersof Commerce | |
8Professor of Moral Philosophyat Glasgow 2 175963 | |
Index | |
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Common terms and phrases
Adam Smith agriculture Boswell Bridgeman Art Library Buccleuch Cambridge career century citizens city’s commerce contemporary Corr culture curriculum David Hume depended develop discussion division of labour Dugald Stewart Duke économistes Edinburgh edition Epictetus Essays ethical finance find first France Francis Hutcheson friends Glasgow govemment Henry Home human nature Hume’s Humean impartial spectator important improvement influence intellectual interest James Boswell jurisprudence justice Kirkcaldy language leamed lectures on rhetoric letter liberty literary live London Lord Mandeville manufactures merchants modem Montesquieu moral philosophy Moral Sentiments ofthe Oswald Oxford passions political economy Presbyterian principles Professor progress of opulence published Pufendorf Quesnay Quesnay’s reflect Ross Rousseau Scotland Scots Scottish Enlightenment sense significant sociability society teaching Theory of Moral thinking thought Tobacco Lords town Townshend trade understanding Union virtue Wealth of Nations William writing