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An Enlightened Life
Yale University Press
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
368 pages
ISBN: 0300169272
EAN: 9780300169270
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Adam Smith (1723–90) is celebrated all over the world as the
author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern
economics. A few of his ideas--that of the “invisible hand”
of the market and that “It is not from the benevolence of
the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” have
become iconic. 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. This book shows the extent to which The
Wealth of Nations and Smith’s other great work, The Theory
of Moral Sentiments, were part of a larger scheme to
establish a grand “Science of Man,” one of the most
ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was
to encompass law, history, and aesthetics as well as
economics and ethics, and which was only half complete on
Smith’s death in 1790.
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. 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.
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