ADAM SMITH (1723-90)

Smith was born to a Lowland Scots family of modest circumstances and reared by a mother who was widowed a few months before his birth. He early distinguished himself as a student and, at the age of fourteen, entered the University of Glasgow.

In 1740 Smith was elected to the Snell Exhibition, a scholarship awarded to promising Scotsmen for continued study at Balliol College, Oxford. He was to spend the next six years of his life there. Despite the duration of his stay he found the Oxford academic atmosphere far from congenial. He was not a popular figure and did not get on well with fellow students or with his teachers. He found space in The Wealth of Nations to record his judgement on the latter: 'In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.3 This state of affairs, in his view, was but a manifestation of a general economic principle: that when financial rewards were divorced from criteria of performance, neglect of duties was likely to result.4

Smith had originally been sent to Oxford with the expectation that he would enter holy orders. His sceptical turn of mind and sympathy for the works of David Hume (an attachment that strained his relationship with the Balliol tutors) ruled out this career. Upon his return to Scotland in 1746 he sought a teaching position - a search fulfilled five years later when his old university, Glasgow, called him to fill the chair of Logic.

The major fruit of this period in his life was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759. This work, which has little distinction as a contribution to philosophy, was a preliminary attempt on Smith's part to formulate the character of a 'natural order' of society. Human conduct was analysed in terms of three pairs of motives: self-love and sympathy; the desire to be free and a sense of propriety; the habit of labour and the propensity to exchange. In Smith's view these natural sentiments acted as checks and balances on one another and supported a social order of natural harmonies in which each man, when left to pursue his own interests, unconsciously promoted the common good. Other themes, later to be worked out more fully in The Wealth of Nations, emerged in his Glasgow lectures. Already he was arguing that 'the division of labour is the great cause of the increase of public opulence, which is always proportioned to the industry of the people, and not to the quantity of gold and silver, as is foolishly imagined.'5

In 1762 Smith resigned his professorship to accept a position as tutor to the son of the Duke of Buccleuch. Quite apart from its financial attractions this appointment brought opportunities for continental travel and made few demands on his energies. He wrote from France to his friend, David Hume, On 5 July 1764 : 'I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time. You may believe I have very little to do.'6

The incubation period of The Wealth of Nations was extended. Writing from Edinburgh in 1772, Hume, who had been led to believe that the work was near completion in 1769, upbraided Smith:

I should agree to your Reasoning if I could trust your Resolution. Come hither for some weeks about Christmas; dissipate yourself a little; return to Kirkaldy; finish your work before autumn; go to London, print it, return and settle in this town, which suits your studious independent turn even better than London. Execute this plan faithfully, and I forgive you....7

Ultimately, The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776.

Smith spent the last thirteen years of his life as His Majesty's Commissioner of Customs for Scotland. He is reported to have discharged his administrative duties competently. It is one of those ironies of the times that a man who had devoted a substantial part of his intellectual activity to producing arguments favouring the promotion of free trade and the minimization of governmental interference in economic affairs should have ended his days as the beneficiary of such patronage.

2.