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
Page 1731
... passions and victims of circumstances over which they had no control — a situation with which many schoolboys could easily sympathize. He had taught generations of schoolboys to think of liberty as a matter of leaming the arts of self ...
... passions and victims of circumstances over which they had no control — a situation with which many schoolboys could easily sympathize. He had taught generations of schoolboys to think of liberty as a matter of leaming the arts of self ...
Page
... passions and affections, and one that would yield up a very different understanding of the functions and duties of government to Pufendorf s. Here his starting point was the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury's idiosyncratic and influential ...
... passions and affections, and one that would yield up a very different understanding of the functions and duties of government to Pufendorf s. Here his starting point was the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury's idiosyncratic and influential ...
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... passions was far from being conclusive. It was a weakness that had recently been demonstrated with devastating clarity by Bernard Mandeville, the author of The Fable of the Bees, first published in 1711 and reissued in 1723 in the ...
... passions was far from being conclusive. It was a weakness that had recently been demonstrated with devastating clarity by Bernard Mandeville, the author of The Fable of the Bees, first published in 1711 and reissued in 1723 in the ...
Page
... passions, benevolent and selfish alike, had a single purpose: to serve and gratify our pride and what he later called 'self-liking', and it was pride and its companion, shame, that explained the ultimate paradox of human nature — that ...
... passions, benevolent and selfish alike, had a single purpose: to serve and gratify our pride and what he later called 'self-liking', and it was pride and its companion, shame, that explained the ultimate paradox of human nature — that ...
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... monarchs. It was a project that led him to think carefully about the relationship between the selfish and benevolent passions and about the civilizing process. It also, happily, provided him with an opportunity to rebut.
... monarchs. It was a project that led him to think carefully about the relationship between the selfish and benevolent passions and about the civilizing process. It also, happily, provided him with an opportunity to rebut.
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