ADAM SMITH (c.1723-1790):
Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. He
has become famous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was the son of the comptroller of the customs at
Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact date of his birth is unknown.
However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, his father
having died some six months previously.
At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university,
studying moral philosophy under "the never-to-be-forgotten" Francis
Hutcheson (as Smith called him). In 1740 he entered Balliol college,
Oxford, but as William Robert Scott has said, "the Oxford of his
time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework,"
and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748 he began
delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord
Kames. Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but
later he took up the subject of "the progress of opulence," and it
was then, in his middle or late 20s, that he first expounded the
economic philosophy of "the obvious and simple system of natural
liberty" which he was later to proclaim to the world in his Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. About 1750 he
met David Hume, who became one of the closest of his many friends.
In 1751 Smith was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow
university, transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy.
His lectures covered the field of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence
and political economy, or "police and revenue." In 1759 he published
his Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying some of his Glasgow
lectures. This work, which established Smith's reputation in his own
day, is concerned with the explanation of moral approval and
disapproval. His capacity for fluent, persuasive, if rather
rhetorical argument is much in evidence. He bases his explanation,
not as the third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, on a
special "moral sense,"nor, like Hume, to any decisive extent on
utility,but on sympathy. There has been considerable controversy as
how far there is contradiction or contrast between Smith's emphasis
in the Moral Sentiments on sympathy as a fundamental human motive,
and, on the other hand, the key role of self-interest in the The
Wealth of Nations. In the former he seems to put more emphasis on
the general harmony of human motives and activities under a
beneficent Providence, while in the latter, in spite of the general
theme of "the invisible hand" promoting the harmony of interests,
Smith finds many more occasions for pointing out cases of conflict
and of the narrow selfishness of human motives.
Smith now began to give more attention to jurisprudence and
political economy in his lecture and less to his theories of morals.
An impression can be obtained as to the development of his ideas on
political economy from the notes of his lectures taken down by a
