Adam Smith

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, in the County of Fife, Scotland. His father served as comptroller of customs at Kirkcaldy and other clerical positions. Adam was born a few month after the death of his father.  He entered the University of Glasgow in 1737, studying moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson and mathematics under Robert Simpson, a celebrated mathematician. In 1740 he went on to study at Oxford on a scholarship. Being unhappy with the education at Oxford, and having some health problems, he left in 1746, and continued his education on his own in Scotland. [1] According to his biographer: "The lectures of the profound and eloquent Dr. Hutcheson... of which he always spoke in terms of the warmest admiration, had, it may be reasonably presumed, a considerable effect in directing his talents to their proper objects."[2]

Publications

After delivering some public lectures on rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, he obtained a professorship teaching logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751, and in 1752 he began teaching moral philosophy there, an assignment he held for thirteen years.[3] In 1759, he published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which quickly established he reputation as a scholar. In 1763, he received an invitation to accompany the young Duke of Buccleuch as a tutor. During these travels, Smith met Voltaire, Turgot, D'Alembert and Quesnay, the leader of the French Physiocratic school of economics.[4]

From 1766 to 1776, along with some tutoring in Scotland, Smith concentrated on writing his famous Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In 1778 he was appointed Commissioner of Customs in Scotland, causing him to settle in Edinburgh, where he resided until his death in 1790.[5]

Friendships

In 1750, Smith met David Hume, and they began a lifelong close friendship. Through Hume, Smith became a member of a circle of intellectual friends in Edinburgh. He often commuted to this city to participate in their gatherings while he still resided in Glasgow, and more conveniently after he moved to Edinburgh. Some of these meetings were as part of organized cultural societies, and some were just private among the closest friends in the circle.[6] Although not very proficient in conversation, Smith was still very valued:

He did not fall in easily with the common dialogue of conversation and... he was somewhat apt to convey his own ideas in the form of a lecture. When he did so, however, it never proceeded from a wish to engross the discourse, or to gratify his vanity. His own inclination disposed him so strongly to enjoy in silence the gaiety of those around him, that his friends were often led to concert little schemes, in order to engage him in the discussions most likely to interest him.[7]

The serenity and gaiety he enjoyed, under the pressure of his growing infirmities, and the warm interest he felt to the last, in every thing connected with the welfare of his friends, will be long remembered by a small circle, with whom, as long as his strength permitted, he regularly spent and evening in the week; and to whom the recollection of his worth still forms a pleasing, though melancholy bond of union.[8]

[1] Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith (Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Company, 1811), 3-10.

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Ibid., 11.

[4] Ibid., 62-70.

[5] Ibid., 104-108.

[6] Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr Carlyle, Second edition (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860), 275.

[7] Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, 114.

[8] Ibid., 112-113.