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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... city could foster virtue as well as corruption , if only citizens would pay attention to the way in which they performed the offices of everyday life and were willing to exchange the company of cronies for the friendship of strangers ...
... 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 ...
... city government 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'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 manufactures . Between the 1660s and 1740s families like the Bogles began sugar refining , soap manufacturing ... city . It is striking , for example , that between 1740 and 1790 nearly every Provost of Glasgow was a tobacco lord ...
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 | |