The Life of Adam Smith
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Adam Smith (1723-1790) is perceived, through his best-known book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science. His thought has shaped modern ideas about the market economy and the role of the state in relation to it. Yet Smith needs to be recognized as more than this, as a man of letters, moralist, historian, and critic, as well as an economist, if we are to get full value for his ideas and perspectives in
contemporary applications.
Ian Simpson Ross is the biographer of Lord Kames, Smith's patron, and of the Scottish poet William Dunbar, and has edited, with E C Mossner, Smith's correspondence for the Glasgow edition of his works. In this, the first full-scale biography of Adam Smith for a hundred years, Ross brings his subject in to historical light as a thinker and author by examining his family circumstance, education, career, and social and intellectual circle, including David Hume and Francois Quesnay, revealed
through his correspondence, archival documents, the reports of contemporaries, and the record of his publications.
Readers will meet Smith as a student at a lively Glasgow and sleepy Oxford; freelance lecturer in rhetoric; innovative university teacher; tutor travelling abroad with a Duke; acclaimed political economist; policy advisor to governments during and after the American crisis; and finally, if paradoxically in view of his tenets, a Commissioner of Customs coping with the free traders in the smuggling business.
This is the life of a Scottish moral philosopher whose legacy of thought concerns and affects us all. Its lively and informed account will appeal to those interested in the social and intellectual milieu of the eighteenth century, and in scottish history. Economists and philosophers will find much to read about the history of their disciplines, supported by full documentation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
