The great eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith (1723-90) is celebrated as the founder of modern economics.
An Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, he has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, the Folger Library, and the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universit t..
About the Author: Nicholas Phillipson is one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Above all he explains how far Smith\'s ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume.
Nick Phillipson reconstructs Smith\'s intellectual ancestry and shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, in the rapidly changing intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment.
This biography shows the extent to which Smith\'s great works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of one of the most ambitious projects of the Euruopean Enlightenment, a grand "Science of Man" that would encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on Smith\'s death in 1790.
Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important.
The great eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith (1723-90) is celebrated as the founder of modern economics
