Adam Smith
June 16, 1723 — July 17, 1790 — Scotland
Adam Smith was the Scottish philosopher and economist who founded the modern discipline of economics. His An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is one of the most influential books ever written — arguing that markets guided by self-interest and competition, rather than by state control, generate national prosperity more effectively than any alternative. Two and a half centuries later, his core insights remain the starting point for virtually all economic thought.
From Kirkcaldy to Glasgow and the Scottish Enlightenment
Adam Smith was born, baptized, and apparently given his birth date on June 16, 1723 in Kirkcaldy, in Fife, Scotland (his exact birthdate is uncertain within a narrow range). His father, a lawyer and comptroller of customs, died before he was born. He attended the University of Glasgow at fourteen — not unusual in the eighteenth century — where he studied under Francis Hutcheson, one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, who shaped his moral philosophy. He then went to Oxford on a scholarship, spending six unremarkable years there largely reading on his own. He returned to Edinburgh and delivered successful public lectures on rhetoric, then returned to Glasgow as a professor, eventually becoming professor of moral philosophy. Glasgow in the 1750s and 1760s was a center of Enlightenment thought; Smith's friends and interlocutors included David Hume, James Watt, and later Voltaire and Turgot during a trip to France.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations
Smith's first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argued that human morality is grounded in sympathy — our ability to imagine ourselves in another's position — and is constructed through social interaction rather than divine command. It established him as a major European philosopher. But his enduring fame rests on The Wealth of Nations (1776). Written during a decade-long retreat to Kirkcaldy, the book demolished mercantilist assumptions (that national wealth depended on hoarding gold and restricting trade), argued that the division of labor dramatically increases productivity, and described how decentralized price signals in markets coordinate economic activity more effectively than central planning. His image of the "invisible hand" — markets organizing themselves through individual self-interest — became one of the most invoked and debated metaphors in intellectual history. The book appeared the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, another text about the limits of external control.
Did You Know?
Smith was famously absentminded. Stories about him include: falling into a tanning pit while deep in conversation; talking to himself in the street; once apparently waking up during a church service to find himself having involuntarily delivered a sermon — his own reasoning process having carried him to the pulpit. He was also unusually secretive about his work, and instructed his executors to burn most of his unpublished manuscripts on his death, which they duly did.
Legacy
Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs for Scotland in 1778 — an ironic position for the man who had argued against trade restrictions — and he held it until his death. He was a founding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a close friend of David Hume, at whose deathbed he attended. He died on July 17, 1790 in Edinburgh, having reportedly lamented that he had "done so little." His legacy is contested: free-market economists treat him as a founding saint; critics note that he was also highly critical of business combinations, monopolies, and the political influence of merchants. Reading him carefully reveals a nuanced thinker whose ideas were more complex than any ideological appropriation of them suggests.