The Life of Adam Smith

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY DEC 4, 1995

Scottish economist Adam Smith, who laid the foundation of classical economics with his model of a competitive, self-regulating market, was described by contemporaries as having a harsh voice, huge teeth and a conversational style tantamount to lecturing. Smith (1723-1790) studied at Oxford, met his idol, Voltaire, near Geneva and mingled in Paris with French Physiocrats--laissez-faire economists whose belief in absolute freedom of trade Smith rejected, according to Ross, emeritus professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Challenging Hobbes's and Rousseau's theories of intrinsic human selfishness, Smith, as professor of law and politics at Glasgow University, devised a philosophy that argued that our moral and aesthetic judgments are grounded in feelings. In London, Smith, a policy adviser, urged the British government to jettison its colonial system of restraints, and the publication of his classic Wealth of Nations in 1776 was timed, suggests Ross, to convince Parliament to support a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the rebellious American colonies. Ross's rounded intellectual biography gives us all sides of the man. Illustrated.