The Worldly Philosophers

Adam Smith was born in 1723 in a small town in Scotland. A brilliant student, he studied at Oxford. After completing his studies, he worked at the University of Glasgow, where he was beloved by his students but disliked by his peers for his levity, enthusiasm, and eccentricity.

In 1759, Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work that made him one of England’s preeminent philosophers. Hired to tutor the stepson of a wealthy noble, he traveled across Europe while researching political economy. In Paris, he befriended French economist Francois Quesnay, who argued that a nation’s wealth came from production, not from gold and silver. Quesnay saw production as centered around the agricultural worker, who merely worked with nature; thus, Smith came to believe that labor, not natural resources, was the true source of national wealth.

In 1766, Smith returned to Scotland, where he continued to write while befriending prominent thinkers like Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, bringing Smith new renown, and he lived out the rest of his life in peace and quiet, as a bachelor in Edinburgh.

Smith’s true contribution was his focus on the whole of economic society and the way he “illuminated the entire landscape” of the new market system (31).