Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, on 5 June 1723, the posthumous son of a customs comptroller. His famous absentmindedness declared itself early: at three years old he was briefly kidnapped by passing tinkers and had to be retrieved. He entered Glasgow College in 1737 at age fourteen, studying under the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who taught him that the purpose of ethics is to describe the principles of human conduct. In 1740 he won a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent six unhappy years largely self-educating from the Bodleian — the Oxford dons, he later wrote in The Wealth of Nations, had given up all pretence of teaching. He returned to Scotland in 1746, began lecturing in Edinburgh, and in 1751 was appointed Professor of Logic at Glasgow, shifting to the Chair of Moral Philosophy the following year. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), described how human beings form moral judgements through sympathy — the imaginative act of placing oneself in another's situation. It went through six editions in his lifetime and made him famous across Europe; Voltaire called it a work that surpassed everything produced in any language. On the strength of it, the Duke of Buccleuch hired him in 1764 as tutor to his stepson, taking him to France and Geneva for two and a half years. In Toulouse, bored, Smith began what became The Wealth of Nations. In Paris he met Turgot, Quesnay, and the Physiocrats, who reinforced his conviction that economic life had natural laws as discoverable as Newton's laws of motion. Back in Kirkcaldy from 1766, living with his mother in his childhood home, he worked on the book for a decade. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared on 9 March 1776 — eighteen days before the shot at Lexington, five months before the Declaration of Independence. Its argument was layered: the division of labour multiplies productivity; the price mechanism, working like an 'invisible hand,' allocates resources more efficiently than any government planner can; mercantilism's export surpluses and trade restrictions impoverish nations rather than enriching them; and wages, rent, and profit are the natural constituents of price. The invisible hand metaphor appears only once in the book, almost in passing, but it became the shorthand for an entire worldview. Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs for Scotland in 1778, a post he took seriously — destroying thousands of contraband goods, including, by one account, a shipment of smuggled French lace that he had himself ordered. He spent his last decade in Edinburgh, presiding over a circle that included Joseph Black and James Hutton. He died on 17 July 1790, having instructed that most of his manuscripts be burned. He was sixty-seven. The surviving library of 3,000 books and the two completed texts were enough to reshape economics, political philosophy, and the theory of history for two centuries.
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Scottish Economist · Moral Philosopher · Father of Modern Economics · Author of The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
1,723 CE – 1,790 CE
The Kirkcaldy professor who invented the vocabulary of modern economics — the invisible hand, division of labour, free markets — in a single 900-page book published the year America declared independence.
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