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
Results 6-10 of 89
... important prudent , intelligent intelligent and independent country gentlemen were in generating economic improvement in the countryside . As a class they were least likely to be corrupted by great wealth or poverty , or by ' the ...
... important to Addison as it would be to Smith that modern ethics should pay attention to the needs of women as well as men ) . It was a world ruled by the vagaries of opinion and fashion , a world in which people looked in vain for fixed ...
... important part in securing the decencies and pleasures of ordinary life . It was a form of sociable Stoicism that ... importance of conversation as the social skill on which the exchange of sentiments and the creation of social and moral ...
... important part in launching his career . ― The groundwork for Smith's philosophical career could not have been laid down in two more different universities . In the 1720s and 30s Glasgow became one of the most sophisticated and ...
... important. By the late seventeenth century Glasgow had a merchant community of between four and five hundred, about a hundred of whom were engaged in overseas trade. This tiny group of 'sea adventurers', as Christopher Smout calls them ...
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 | |