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. |
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Page 1734
... city could foster virtue as well as corruption, if only citizens would pay attention to the way in which they performed the offlces of everyday life and were willing to exchange the company of cronies for the friendship of strangers who ...
... city could foster virtue as well as corruption, if only citizens would pay attention to the way in which they performed the offlces of everyday life and were willing to exchange the company of cronies for the friendship of strangers who ...
Page 1735
... 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 sentiments and the creation of social and ...
... 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 sentiments and the creation of social and ...
Page
... city that had been almost completely rebuilt in the wake of two disastrous fires in 1652 and 1677. Glasgow is indeed, a very fine City: the four principal Streets are the fairest for Breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen ...
... city that had been almost completely rebuilt in the wake of two disastrous fires in 1652 and 1677. Glasgow is indeed, a very fine City: the four principal Streets are the fairest for Breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen ...
Page
... city govemment and the management of the university from 1725 to 1761. He was to play a crucial part in laying the foundations of the academic culture that shaped Smith's education and his academic career. The city's population was ...
... city govemment and the management of the university from 1725 to 1761. He was to play a crucial part in laying the foundations of the academic culture that shaped Smith's education and his academic career. The city's population was ...
Page
... city's flagship enterprise and the source of its enormous wealth in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Before the Union the tobacco trade had been entirely illegal and possible only because the Glaswegians were skilful ...
... city's flagship enterprise and the source of its enormous wealth in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Before the Union the tobacco trade had been entirely illegal and possible only because the Glaswegians were skilful ...
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