Adam Smith

Adam Smith is celebrated all over the world as the author of "The Wealth of Nations" and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas - that of the 'Invisible Hand' of the market and that 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest' - have become icons of the modern world. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist, and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This book, by one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, shows the extent to which "The Wealth of Nations" and Smith's other great work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", were part of a larger scheme to establish a grand 'Science of Man', one of the most ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was to encompass law, history and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics. Nicholas Phillipson reconstructs Smith's intellectual ancestry and formation, of which he gives a radically new and convincing account. He shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, the rapidly changing and subtly different intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith's ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume. This superb biography is now the one book which anyone interested in the founder of economics must read.

ISBN 0713993960   Pages 368 ISBN13 9780713993967 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 663 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Allen Lane   Height (mm) 240 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 162 Publication date 05 Aug 2010   Spine width (mm) 34 DEWEY 330.153092   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		List of Illustrations
		Acknowledgements
		Maps
		Prologue		1
1		A Kirkcaldy Upbringing		9
2		Glasgow, Glasgow University and Francis Hutcheson's Enlightenment		24
3		Private Study 1740-46: Oxford and David Hume		56
4		Edinburgh's Early Enlightenment		72
5		Smith's Edinburgh Lectures: a Conjectural History		89
6		Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, 1. 1751-9		120
7		The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Civilizing Powers of Commerce		138
8		Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, 2. 1759-63		159
9		Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch in Europe 1764-6		180
10		London, Kirkcaldy and the Making of the Wealth of Nations 1766-76		200
11		The Wealth of Nations and Smith's 'Very violent attack... upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain'		214
12		Hume's Death		239
13		Last Years in Edinburgh 1778-90		255
		Epilogue		279
		Notes and Sources		285
		Bibliography of Works Cited		313
		Index		323

 Be the first to write a customer review