Life
Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland (baptized 5 June), into a moderately well off family, though his father died five months before Smith was born. From the age of 14 he attended the University of Glasgow, and then from 1740, by way of a scholarship, Balliol College, Oxford, for six years.
There Smith studied philosophy and European literature. He was later strongly critical of the quality of education at Oxford. Following some years freelance lecturing in Edinburgh, primarily on rhetoric and “belles-lettres” (essentially, literary criticism), but also the history of philosophy and jurisprudence, in 1751 Smith was appointed Professor of Logic at Glasgow. He shifted to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow the following year. In 1764, aged 40, he resigned his professorship to take up the position of travelling tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch. As a consequence, as well as gaining a life pension of £300 per annum, Smith then spent nearly three years in France. There, partly via the assistance of David Hume, he met a wide range of intellectuals, including Franςois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (in Geneva) and, importantly for Smith’s economic thought, Franςois Quesnay and many of the physiocratic school, as well as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.After returning from France in late 1766, Smith exploited the financial independence provided by his pension to spend six years in Kirkcaldy, drafting and redrafting WN. Skinner (1987: 359) notes that the strain of this intellectual work is revealed in Smith’s correspondence (Mossner and Ross 1977; hereafter Corr). The last three years prior to its publication were spent in London, partly to facilitate completion of empirical aspects of the book. During this period, in May 1767, he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society, though not admitted until May 1773 (Ross 1995: 225).
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published on 9 March 1776, the same year as the death of his closest intellectual friend, David Hume, and the year of the American Declaration of Independence. The latter political conflict figures a little in the book. In 1778, Smith also wrote a memorandum on the Anglo-American conflict for Alexander Wedderburn, British Prime Minister Lord North’s Solicitor-General (Corr: 377-85). The nation which was subsequently to emerge from that declaration would appear to many to become the clearest embodiment of Smith’s political and economic principles.In February 1778 Smith was appointed a Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh, a post he held until 1790, adding a salary of £600 per annum to his private pension of £300 per annum. The apparent irony of the political economist who railed against European policies of trade restriction entering into the governance of part of that system has been noticed by many commentators, though a clearer understanding of Smith’s policy views much diminishes the paradox (see the section on “Policy” below). He also in these latter years provided advice to British policy-makers on removal of restrictions on Anglo-Irish trade and on the consequences of the loss of the North American colonies. In the last decade of his life he undertook as well significant revisions of WN, and even more so of his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1759 [1976]; hereafter TMS). Smith died from a chronic bowel obstruction, in Edinburgh on 17 July 1790. According to one account, his last words to his friends were: “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place” (Ross 1995: 406).
In seeking to sum up the man, Winch (2004: 25-6) notes the elusiveness of his character, partly due to the slight extant correspondence and an absence of autobiographical reflections. This confirms a somewhat reclusive personality though he was not an unsociable man. There are also many anecdotes concerning Smith which indicate a measure of absent-mindedness. There is evidence for a high sense of personal probity as well. He never married. (Further to Smith’s biography, see Winch 2004, Ross 1995 and Skinner 1987 upon which the account in this section is based.)
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