Adam Smith Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Adam Smith was born on 5 June 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, a small Scottish port town whose rhythms of fishing, petty trade, and coastal traffic quietly schooled him in the realities behind abstract talk of "wealth". His father, also Adam Smith, was a customs official who died before his son was born; the absence left Smith raised in a close household centered on his mother, Margaret Douglas, whose long life and careful management gave him both stability and an early view of prudence under constraint.

Kirkcaldy sat in a Scotland remade by the 1707 Union, where commercial opportunity expanded even as older civic identities tightened. Smith grew up during the early Scottish Enlightenment, when ministers, professors, and lawyers argued over moral sentiment, religious moderation, improvement of agriculture, and the new science of society. A famous childhood anecdote - that he was briefly abducted by tinkers and quickly recovered - has the aura of folklore, but it captures something true about his legend: a bookish boy in a mobile, unsettled world, forming a temperament that observed rather than performed.

Education and Formative Influences

Smith entered the University of Glasgow at about fourteen, studying under Francis Hutcheson, whose moral philosophy joined sympathy to sociability and insisted that commerce need not be morally degrading. In 1740 Smith won a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read widely but later criticized the institution's torpor; the contrast sharpened his sense that ideas require living communities. Back in Scotland he delivered public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric and jurisprudence, moving among thinkers such as David Hume. That friendship - affectionate, intellectually bracing, and controversial in a religious age - helped Smith cultivate a style that sounded moderate while pressing radical questions about authority, custom, and the sources of social order.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In 1751 Smith became professor of logic at Glasgow and soon after professor of moral philosophy, teaching ethics, jurisprudence, political economy, and "police" (public policy). His first major book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), made his name across Europe, arguing that sympathy and the "impartial spectator" shape conscience and social judgment. A decisive turning point came in 1764 when he resigned to tutor Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch, traveling in France and encountering physiocrats such as Francois Quesnay and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot; the trip expanded his comparative view of taxation, agriculture, and administration. After returning to Kirkcaldy he labored for years on his synthesis, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), then served as commissioner of customs in Edinburgh from 1778 until his death on 17 July 1790, revising his work, protecting his privacy, and ordering many manuscripts destroyed.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Smith's inner life fused moral seriousness with analytical patience. He distrusted moral theater and preferred mechanisms: how ordinary motives, repeated across millions of lives, produce institutions that feel impersonal yet remain human. In Wealth of Nations he framed exchange as a social instinct - "The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals". The line is not a hymn to greed so much as a psychological claim: people seek recognition and advantage through mutual dependence, and the market is one arena where sympathy is translated into rules, prices, and expectations.

His political economy is often mistaken for a simple defense of the rich. In fact, he anatomized power, especially where property can command income without service: "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce". Here Smith's voice is morally alert, almost indignant, revealing a mind that saw exploitation not as an exception but as a temptation built into social arrangements. Yet he was no utopian. His caution about national security - "Defense is superior to opulence". - shows a realist streak: wealth is fragile, states are vulnerable, and policy must weigh liberty against survival. Stylistically he wrote as a lecturer addressing intelligent skeptics, using plain examples, careful qualifications, and quietly devastating irony, aiming to persuade without declaring himself a prophet.

Legacy and Influence

Smith died before industrial capitalism reached its nineteenth-century scale, yet his framework endured because it treated economies as moral and institutional ecosystems rather than mere heaps of money. He shaped classical political economy (Ricardo, Malthus), modern debates about free trade and regulation, and even welfare economics through his insistence on incentives, information, and unintended consequences. Beyond economics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments remains central to moral psychology and social theory, reminding readers that markets do not eliminate judgment - they reorganize it. Smith's lasting influence lies in this double vision: the dignity and danger of ordinary self-interest, and the delicate civic architecture required to turn private striving into public good.