Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

Front Cover
Yale University Press, Oct 5, 2010 - Biography & Autobiography - 311 pages
This 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

Contents

List of Illustrations
1699
Acknowledgements
1703
Prologue
1707
1A Kirkcaldy Upbringing
1717
2Glasgow Glasgow University andFrancis Hutchesons Enlightenment
1737
Oxfordand David Hume
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
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2010)

Nicholas Phillipson is one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment. An Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, he has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, the Folger Library, and the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität.

Bibliographic information