Adam Smith

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Adam Smith : biography

N.S.]]) January 5 [[Old Style – 17 July 1790

James Boswell who was a student of Smith’s at Glasgow University, and later knew him at the Literary Club, says that Smith thought that speaking about his ideas in conversation might reduce the sale of his books, and so his conversation was unimpressive. According to Boswell, he once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that ‘he made it a rule when in company never to talk of what he understood’.Boswell’s Life of Johnson, year 1780, footnote"

Smith, who is reported to have been an odd-looking fellow, has been described as someone who "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment". Smith is said to have acknowledged his looks at one point, saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books." Smith rarely sat for portraits, so almost all depictions of him created during his lifetime were drawn from memory. The best-known portraits of Smith are the profile by James Tassie and two etchings by John Kay. The line engravings produced for the covers of 19th century reprints of The Wealth of Nations were based largely on Tassie’s medallion.

Religious views

There has been considerable scholarly debate about the nature of Smith’s religious views. Smith’s father had shown a strong interest in Christianity and belonged to the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland. The fact that Adam Smith received the Snell Exhibition suggests that he may have gone to Oxford with the intention of pursuing a career in the Church of England.

Anglo-American economist Ronald Coase has challenged the view that Smith was a deist, based on the fact that Smith’s writings never explicitly invoke God as an explanation of the harmonies of the natural or the human worlds. According to Coase, though Smith does sometimes refer to the "Great Architect of the Universe", later scholars such as Jacob Viner have "very much exaggerated the extent to which Adam Smith was committed to a belief in a personal God", a belief for which Coase finds little evidence in passages such as the one in the Wealth of Nations in which Smith writes that the curiosity of mankind about the "great phenomena of nature", such as "the generation, the life, growth and dissolution of plants and animals", has led men to "enquire into their causes", and that "superstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity, by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods. Philosophy afterwards endeavoured to account for them, from more familiar causes, or from such as mankind were better acquainted with than the agency of the gods".

Smith was also a close friend and later the executor of David Hume, who was commonly characterized in his own time as an atheist. The publication in 1777 of Smith’s letter to William Strahan, in which he described Hume’s courage in the face of death in spite his irreligiosity, attracted considerable controversy.

Footnotes

Published works

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In 1759, Smith published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He continued making extensive revisions to the book, up until his death. Although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith’s most influential work, it is believed that Smith himself considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be a superior work.

In the work, Smith critically examines the moral thinking of his time, and suggests that conscience arises from social relationships. His goal in writing the work was to explain the source of mankind’s ability to form moral judgements, in spite of man’s natural inclinations towards self-interest. Smith proposes a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior.

Scholars have traditionally perceived a conflict between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations; the former emphasizes sympathy for others, while the latter focuses on the role of self-interest. In recent years, however, some scholarsWight, Jonathan B. Saving Adam Smith. Upper Saddle River: Prentic-Hall, Inc., 2002.Robbins, Lionel. A History of Economic Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.Brue, Stanley L., and Randy R. Grant. The Evolution of Economic Thought. Mason: Thomson Higher Education, 2007. of Smith’s work have argued that no contradiction exists.There is at least one clear contradiction between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations: The gluttony of the landlords is in the former an "invisible hand" which helps the poor to partake in the landlord’s wealth. In "The Wealth of Nations" it is seen as the consumption of unproductive labour, limiting the growth of wealth. They claim that in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith develops a theory of psychology in which individuals seek the approval of the "impartial spectator" as a result of a natural desire to have outside observers sympathize with them. Rather than viewing The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments as presenting incompatible views of human nature, some Smith scholars regard the works as emphasizing different aspects of human nature that vary depending on the situation.