Adam Smith(1723–1790)

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy on the north shore of the Firth of Forth in the spring of 1723, the posthumous son of Adam Smith senior, a Writer to the Signet who had served as comptroller of customs at Kirkcaldy and died six months before his only child was born. His mother Margaret Douglas raised him at her family's house at Strathenry. At the age of four, by the family story, he was briefly carried off by a passing party of tinkers from his uncle's garden at Strathenry and was recovered later that day; the writer he became kept the story dryly to himself but the early biographers made much of it. He was schooled at the burgh school of Kirkcaldy from six to fourteen, an institution unusually strong for its size in mathematics and Latin, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1737 at fourteen, where he sat under the moral philosophy lectures of Francis Hutcheson, the man whose course of thought he was to extend and rewrite for the next forty years.

He went south on a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford in 1740, was unimpressed by what he found, and read his way through the Balliol library mostly unsupervised for six years; the famous remark on the indolence of Oxford professors in Book V of The Wealth of Nations is the residue of that experience. He returned to Kirkcaldy in 1746, and from 1748 gave public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric and belles lettres at the invitation of Lord Kames and the Edinburgh literati. The lectures made his name in Edinburgh and Glasgow simultaneously. He was elected to the chair of logic at the University of Glasgow in January 1751 and translated to the chair of moral philosophy fifteen months later, the post he held for thirteen years and which he later called by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period of his life.

In 1759 Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book that argued ethics from the position of the impartial spectator within each of us, the imagined judge whose approbation we seek and by whose disapproval we are corrected. The book was Smith's account of what makes a society of largely self-interested individuals coherent and habitable rather than rapacious, and it shaped Kant's later analysis of the moral law as Smith shaped his economics. It ran through six editions in his lifetime, the last of them, in 1790, substantially revised in the months before his death. The Theory and The Wealth of Nations are two halves of one project, and the assumption that Smith was a one-book theorist of unregulated markets does justice to neither.

In 1764 he resigned the Glasgow chair to take a tutorship with the young Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, on a Continental tour. The tour lasted two and a half years and put Smith in personal conversation with Voltaire at Geneva, with Turgot, Quesnay and the physiocrats in Paris, and with Diderot and d'Alembert. The annuity that the Duke settled on him on their return gave him the income to spend the next decade at Kirkcaldy writing what he called his book on commerce. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in two quarto volumes in London on 9 March 1776, four months before the American Declaration. The book founded the modern discipline of political economy in the same way Newton's Principia had founded modern physics: by laying the framework of analysis on which everything subsequent in the field has had to position itself.

In 1778 he was appointed a Commissioner of Customs for Scotland, a sinecure post on the strength of his reputation and his connection to the new Prime Minister Lord North, which carried with it a house at Panmure House in the Canongate of Edinburgh and a salary that doubled his income. He held the post and the house for the rest of his life. He worked at the Customs Board in the mornings, walked in the New Town gardens in the afternoons, and held a Sunday supper at Panmure House through the 1780s at which the Edinburgh literati including David Hume, Joseph Black, James Hutton and Adam Ferguson had a permanent place at the table. He died at Panmure House on 17 July 1790, leaving instructions that the great majority of his unpublished manuscripts were to be burned, which his executors Black and Hutton did. He is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard. The Smith name today carries his weight as the founding figure of political economy, but the man himself thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments his deeper book.