Adam Smith

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, a small port town on the Firth of Forth in Fife, Scotland, and was baptised on June 5, 1723; his exact birth date is not recorded, so the baptismal date is conventionally used ^[1]. His father, also named Adam Smith, worked as a customs official and died about two months before his son was born. The child was raised by his mother, Margaret Douglas, the daughter of a local landowner, and the bond between mother and son remained the closest attachment of his life ^[1][2].

One oft-repeated story from his childhood holds that the young Smith was briefly carried off by travelling tinkers at the age of three or four and quickly recovered by relatives. Early biographers, beginning with Dugald Stewart, passed the tale along, though its details rest on family tradition rather than documentary proof ^[2].

Smith attended the burgh school in Kirkcaldy, where he received a solid grounding in Latin, mathematics, history, and writing. In 1737, at fourteen, an age not unusual for Scottish students of the period, he entered the University of Glasgow. There he studied under Francis Hutcheson, the professor of moral philosophy whose lectures on liberty and benevolence left a lasting mark on him ^[1][3]. In 1740 he won a Snell Exhibition, a scholarship that took him to Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent six years. He found Oxford teaching neglectful compared with Glasgow, and he later criticised the complacency of endowed institutions whose teachers faced no incentive to work; much of his Oxford education came from independent reading ^[3].

Smith left Oxford in 1746 and returned to Scotland without a settled career. His opening came in 1748, when he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric, belles lettres, and later on jurisprudence, under the patronage of Lord Kames. The lectures drew paying audiences and established his reputation among the lawyers, clergy, and men of letters who made up the Scottish Enlightenment ^[2][3]. During these Edinburgh years he formed his friendship with the philosopher David Hume, roughly a decade his senior. The two remained intellectual allies and close friends until Hume's death in 1776 ^[1].

In 1751 the University of Glasgow elected Smith professor of logic, and the following year he transferred to the chair of moral philosophy, the post once held by Hutcheson. He later described his thirteen years at Glasgow as the happiest and most honourable period of his life ^[2]. His course ranged across natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and what he called police, revenue, and arms, the material that would eventually feed into his economic writing ^[3].

The first fruit of the Glasgow lectures was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759. The book argued that moral judgment grows out of sympathy, the human capacity to imagine ourselves in another person's situation, and that conscience works as an impartial spectator within the breast. It made Smith famous well beyond Scotland and went through six editions in his lifetime, the last extensively revised shortly before his death ^[1][4]. Any serious Adam Smith biography has to begin with this book, because Smith himself never abandoned its framework: the economist of 1776 was still the moral philosopher of 1759.

The success of The Theory of Moral Sentiments changed the course of Smith's life. Charles Townshend, the politician who had married the widowed mother of the young Duke of Buccleuch, offered Smith a lucrative post as the duke's travelling tutor. Smith resigned his Glasgow chair in 1764 and spent nearly three years on the Continent, mainly in Toulouse, Geneva, and Paris ^[2]. In France he met Voltaire and spent time with the physiocrats, including François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, economic thinkers who treated the wealth of a nation as a flow of production rather than a hoard of gold. Their conversation sharpened ideas Smith had been developing since his Glasgow lectures ^[3][5].

Back in Kirkcaldy from 1767, supported by a pension from Buccleuch, Smith worked for the better part of a decade on his second book. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in London on March 9, 1776 ^[1][5]. The book opens with the celebrated description of a pin factory, showing how the division of labour multiplies output: one worker draws the wire, another straightens it, another cuts it, so that ten people can make many thousands of pins a day where a lone worker might struggle to make twenty ^[5]. From this starting point Smith built a systematic account of prices, wages, profits, rent, money, and public finance.

Among Adam Smith achievements, the most consequential was his sustained attack on the mercantile system, the web of tariffs, monopolies, and colonial restrictions by which European states tried to engineer trade surpluses. Smith argued that a nation's real wealth lies in the annual produce of its land and labour, not in bullion, and that individuals seeking their own gain are often led, as if by an invisible hand, to promote outcomes they never intended, including the public benefit ^[5][6]. The phrase appears only once in The Wealth of Nations, yet it became shorthand for the coordinating power of markets. Smith was no doctrinaire opponent of government: he assigned the state the duties of defence, justice, and public works such as roads and education, and he warned bluntly that merchants of the same trade seldom meet without the conversation turning toward some scheme against the public ^[5][6]. The book sold out its first edition within months and influenced policy debates in Britain almost immediately, including discussions of trade with Ireland and the American colonies ^[3].

Smith never married, and no serious romantic attachment is documented. He shared his household for most of his adult life with his mother, who lived until 1784, and with his cousin Janet Douglas, who kept house for him ^[2]. Contemporaries found him warm in conversation but famously absent-minded. Stories circulated of Smith walking miles in his dressing gown while lost in thought and of him talking to himself in the street; he once described himself as a beau in nothing but his books ^[2][3].

His library was indeed his pride, some three thousand volumes at his death, ranging across philosophy, science, literature, and law ^[2]. He was clubbable despite his reserve, a member of the Select Society and the Poker Club in Edinburgh, and, from 1775, of Samuel Johnson's Literary Club in London, though he and Johnson never warmed to each other ^[3].

Among the well-attested Adam Smith facts is his deep loyalty to David Hume. When Hume died in 1776, Smith published a public letter praising his friend as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as human frailty allows. The tribute to a notorious religious sceptic provoked more angry correspondence, Smith remarked, than his attack on the whole commercial system of Great Britain ^[1][3].

In 1778 Smith was appointed a commissioner of customs for Scotland, a well-paid post that brought a certain irony: the great critic of trade restrictions now spent his days enforcing them. He took the work seriously, moved to Panmure House in Edinburgh's Canongate, and lived there with his mother and cousin ^[2][3]. The salary, added to his Buccleuch pension, made him comfortable, and he gave away much of his income in private charity that came to light only after his death ^[2].

Smith continued to revise his two books. The third edition of The Wealth of Nations in 1784 added substantial new material, and in 1790 he completed a heavily reworked sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, adding a new part on the character of virtue and a warning about the corruption of moral sentiments by the disposition to admire the rich and powerful ^[4]. He had long planned further volumes on jurisprudence and on the arts and sciences, but they were never finished. Shortly before his death he had his friends Joseph Black and James Hutton burn sixteen volumes of manuscripts, preserving only a few essays published posthumously in 1795 ^[1][2].

His health declined through 1787 and after, even as honours arrived: the University of Glasgow elected him rector in 1787. Adam Smith died at Panmure House on July 17, 1790, and was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh, where his grave remains a place of visit for economists and tourists alike ^[1][3].

Few books have had the afterlife of The Wealth of Nations. Within a generation it had become the founding text of classical political economy, shaping David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill, and it was cited in parliamentary debate by William Pitt the Younger, who acknowledged Smith's authority on questions of commerce ^[3][6]. The book's arguments for free trade informed the nineteenth-century repeal of the Corn Laws and continue to appear in modern disputes over tariffs and globalisation ^[6].

Smith's reputation has been contested as much as celebrated. Twentieth-century free-market economists, notably at the University of Chicago, claimed him as an ancestor, while other scholars, pointing to The Theory of Moral Sentiments and his suspicion of merchant lobbying, have insisted that the real Smith was a subtler and more sceptical figure than the laissez-faire icon ^[4][6]. The scholarly Glasgow Edition of his complete works and correspondence, published between 1976 and 1983, put study of the whole Smith on a firm footing ^[4].

His presence endures in public life as well as in seminar rooms. From 2007 to 2020 his portrait appeared on the Bank of England twenty pound note, the first Scot so honoured, accompanied by an image of pin manufacturing and the division of labour ^[7]. Statues stand on Edinburgh's Royal Mile and in his native Kirkcaldy, Panmure House has been restored by Heriot-Watt University as a centre for economic debate, and research institutes on several continents carry his name. For a quiet, absent-minded professor who published only two books, it is a remarkably large shadow ^[3][7].