Adam Smith: An Enlightened LifeAdam Smith is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas - that of the 'Invisible Hand' of the market and that 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest' - have become icons of the modern world. 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 book, by one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, shows the extent to which The Wealth of Nations and Smith's other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of a larger scheme to establish a grand 'Science of Man', one of the most ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was to encompass law, history and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics. |
From inside the book
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... Presbyterian gentry of north - east Scotland . He was educated for the law at Aberdeen and Edinburgh and grew up in the turbulent world of Scottish politics between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Act of Union of 1707. It was a ...
... Presbyterian circles to which Smith belonged for being an intellectually stagnant , High Church and high Tory institution . Glasgow could offer Smith a distinctive philosophy curriculum and the teaching of two of the most charismatic ...
... Presbyterians from the west of Scotland , thus making Glasgow and its university the focal point of the new province's commercial and academic life . During the century after the Restoration of 1660 Glasgow's economy took its decisive ...
... Presbyterian pietism , the other remarkable fact of its eighteenth - century history . One contemporary put the paradox well when he wrote that in the middle of the century , ' the chief objects that occupied the minds of the citizens ...
... Presbyterians like John Clerk of Penicuick , who , recalling the radical conventicles of covenanting days , feared that this ... Presbyterian orthodoxy had always played an important direct or indirect part in shaping the history of the ...
Contents
1695 | |
1699 | |
1709 | |
1719 | |
1741 | |
Oxford and David Hume | |
Edinburghs Early Enlightenment | |
a Conjectural History | |
Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch in Europe 17646 | |
London Kirkcaldy and the Making of the Wealth of Nations 176676 | |
The Wealth of Nations and Smiths Very violent attack upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain | |
Humes Death | |
Last Years in Edinburgh 177890 | |
Epilogue | |
Notes and Sources | |
Bibliography of Works Cited | |
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow 1 17519 | |
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Civilizing Powers of Commerce | |
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow 2 175963 | |
Index | |