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 1723
... first Wednesday of July to encourage the local linen trade.9 In 1733, it was producing 177,740 yards of stamped linen per year for England and the home market, by 1743 production had nearly doubled, and by the time of Smith's death in ...
... first Wednesday of July to encourage the local linen trade.9 In 1733, it was producing 177,740 yards of stamped linen per year for England and the home market, by 1743 production had nearly doubled, and by the time of Smith's death in ...
Page 1727
... first comes to life biographically with a curiously suggestive contemporary story that he was snatched by a tinker woman and rescued by his uncle, if true it must surely have helped to lay the foundations of the extraordinarily close ...
... first comes to life biographically with a curiously suggestive contemporary story that he was snatched by a tinker woman and rescued by his uncle, if true it must surely have helped to lay the foundations of the extraordinarily close ...
Page 1728
... first year of Glasgow University's curriculum, which was largely devoted to remedial classical education. His copies of two of the history textbooks Miller used have survived. The first, Trogus' De Historiis Philippicis, was a well ...
... first year of Glasgow University's curriculum, which was largely devoted to remedial classical education. His copies of two of the history textbooks Miller used have survived. The first, Trogus' De Historiis Philippicis, was a well ...
Page 1733
... first view of the mightiest city in the kingdom, a city which dazzled by virtue of its wealth, power and glamour. His essays allowed his readers to glimpse life as it was lived in the city and to share vicariously in the ethical hopes ...
... first view of the mightiest city in the kingdom, a city which dazzled by virtue of its wealth, power and glamour. His essays allowed his readers to glimpse life as it was lived in the city and to share vicariously in the ethical hopes ...
Page 1735
... first glimpse of the modern commercial city as a complex pluralistic entity, which had the power to improve as well as to corrupt human nature. They showed the importance of conversation as the social skill on which the exchange of ...
... first glimpse of the modern commercial city as a complex pluralistic entity, which had the power to improve as well as to corrupt human nature. They showed the importance of conversation as the social skill on which the exchange of ...
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