The few facts of his life

On July 17, 1790, at the age of 67, full of honours and recognition, Smith died; he was buried in the churchyard at Canongate with a simple monument stating that Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was buried there. Beyond the few facts of his life, which can be embroidered only in detail, exasperatingly little is known about the man. Smith never married, and almost nothing is known of his personal side. Moreover, it was the custom of his time to destroy rather than to preserve the private files if illustrious men, with the unhappy result that much of Smith's unfinished work, as well as his personal papers, was destroyed (some as late as 1942). Only one portrait of Smith survives, a profile medallion by Tassie; it gives a glimpse of the older man with his somewhat heavy-lidded eyes, aquiline nose, and a hint of protrusive lower lip. "I am a beau in nothing but my books, "Smith once told a friend to whom he was showing his library of some 3,000 volumes. From various accounts, he was also a man of many peculiarities, which

The Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of the philosophical theme begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The ultimate problem to which Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions and the "impartial spectator' - explicated in Moral Sentiments in terms of the single individual - works its effects in the larger arena of history itself, both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the immediate characteristics of the stage of history

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In 1759 Smith Published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory lays the psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built. In it Smith described the principles of "human nature ", which, together with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well as social behaviour, could be deduced. One question in particular interested Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This was a problem that had 
attracted Smith's teacher Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question was the source of the ability to form moral judgements, including judgements on one's own behaviour, in the face of the seemingly overriding passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith's answer, at considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an "inner man" who plays the role of the "impartial

3 Lessons Adam Smith Teaches Us

For all the attention Adam Smith receives as the father of modern economics, most of his lasting influences are best classified as moral and social – maybe even anthropological. Smith was a Scottish professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and most of his economic insights were byproducts of this pursuit. Smith championed self-interest as enlightening and beneficial, and he viewed political or business power with contempt.

Economic growth

Smith’s explanation of economic growth , although not neatly assembled in one part of The Wealth of Nations, is quite clear. The score of it lies in his emphasis on the division of labour (itself an outgrowth of the “natural” propensity to trade) as the source of society’s capacity to increase its productivity.
The Wealth of Nations opens with a famous passage describing a pin factory in which 10 persons, by specialising in various tasks, turn out 48,000 pins a day, compared with the few, perhaps only 1 , that each could have produced alone. But this all-important division of labour does not take place unaided.

Society and “the invisible hand”

The theory of historical evolution, although it is perhaps the binding conception of The Wealth of Nations, is subordinated within the work itself to a detailed description of how the “invisible hand” actually operates within the commercial, or final, stage of society. This becomes the focus of Books I and II. In which Smith undertakes to elucidate two questions. The first is how a system of perfect liberty, operating under the drives and constraints of human nature and intelligently designed institutions , will give rise to an orderly society.
The question, which had already been considerably elucidated by earlier writers, required both an explanation of the

The Wealth of Nations

Despite its renown as the first great work in political economy. The Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of the philosophical theme begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The ultimate problem to which Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions and the “impartial spectator’ - explicated in Moral Sentiments in terms of the single individual - works its effects in the larger arena of history itself, both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the immediate characteristics of the stage of history typical of Smith’s own day.

The answer to this problem enters in Book 5, in which Smith outlines he four main stages of organization through which