Adam Smith

Adam Smith was born in 1723 in the small town of Kirkcaldy, near Edin?burgh. His father, also Adam Smith (1679-1723), who died shortly before he was born, was a distinguished judge advocate for Scotland and later comp?troller of customs at Kirkcaldy, who had married into a well-to-do local landowning family. Young Smith was therefore raised by his mother. The town of Kirkcaldy was militantly Presbyterian, and in the Burgh School in the town he met many young Scottish Presbyterians, one of whom, John Drysdale, was to become twice moderator of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Smith, indeed, came from a customs official family. In addition to his father, his cousin Hercules Scott Smith, served as collector of customs at Kirkcaldy, and his guardian, again named Adam Smith, was to become cus?toms collector at Kirkcaldy as well as inspector of customs for the Scottish outports. Finally, still another cousin named Adam Smith later served as customs collector at Alloa.

Although the exact date of Smith's birth is unknown, his baptism was recorded on 16 June 1723 at Kirkcaldy.Though few events in Smith's early childhood are known, Scottish journalist and biographer of Smith John Rae recorded that Smith was abducted by gypsies at the age of four and eventually released when others went to rescue him. Smith was particularly close to his mother, who likely encouraged him to pursue his scholarly ambitions. He attended the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy - characterised by Rae as "one of the best secondary schools of Scotland at that period" - from 1729 to 1737.There he studied Latin, mathematics, history, and writing.

1.2 Formal education

From 1737 to 1740, Adam Smith studied at Glasgow College, where he fell under the spell of Francis Hutcheson, and imbibed the excitement of the ideas of classical liberalism, natural law and political economy. In 1740, Smith earned an MA with great distinction at the University of Glasgow. His mother had baptized Adam in the Episcopalian faith, and she was eager for her son to become an Episcopalian minister. Smith was sent to Balliol Col?lege, Oxford, on a scholarship designed to nurture future Episcopalian cler?ics, but he was unhappy at the wretched instruction in the Oxford of his day, and returned after six years, at the age of 23, without having taken holy orders. Despite his baptism and his mother's pressure, Smith remained an ardent Presbyterian, and returning to Edinburgh in 1746, he remained unem?ployed for two years.

Smith considered the teaching at Glasgow to be far superior to that at Oxford, and found his experience at the latter to be intellectually stifling. In Book V, Chapter II of The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: "In the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." Smith is also reported to have complained to friends that Oxford officials once detected him reading a copy of David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, and they subsequently confiscated his book and punished him severely for reading it.[7][11][12] According to William Robert Scott, "The Oxford of [Smith's] time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework."Nevertheless, Smith took the opportunity while at Oxford to teach himself several subjects by reading many books from the shelves of the large Oxford library.When Smith was not studying on his own, his time at Oxford was not a happy one, according to his letters.Near the end of his time at Oxford, Smith began suffering from shaking fits, probably the symptoms of a nervous breakdown.He left Oxford University in 1746, before his scholarship ended.

In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith comments on the low quality of instruction and the meager intellectual activity at English universities, when compared to their Scottish counterparts. He attributes this both to the rich endowments of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which made the income of professors independent of their ability to attract students, and to the fact that distinguished men of letters could make an even more comfortable living as ministers of the Church of England. Smith had originally intended to study theology and enter the clergy, but his subsequent learning, especially from the skeptical writings of David Hume, persuaded him to take a different route.

1.3 Teaching and early writings

Smith began delivering public lectures in 1748 at Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames. His lecture , economics, and religion indicate that they shared a closer intellectual alliance and friendship than with the others who were to play important roles during the emergence of what has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

In 1751, Smith earned a professorship at Glasgow University teaching logic courses. When the Chair of Moral Philosophy died the next year, Smith took over the position.Smith would continue academic work for the next thirteen years, which Smith characterized as "by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period [of his life]".His lectures covered the fields of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, political economy, and "police and revenue".

He published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures. This work was concerned with how human communication depends on sympathy between agent and spectator, or the individual and other members of society. His analysis of language evolution was somewhat superficial, as shown only fourteen years later by a more rigorous examination of primitive language evolution by Lord Monboddo in his Of the Origin and Progress of Language. Smith showed strong capacity for fluent and persuasive--if rather rhetorical--argument. He bases his explanation not on a special "moral sense", as the third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, nor on utility as Hume did, but on sympathy. Smith's popularity greatly increased due to the The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and as a result, many wealthy students left their schools in other countries to enroll at Glasgow to learn under Smith.

After the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith began to give more attention to jurisprudence and economics in his lectures and less to his theories of morals. The development of his ideas on political economy can be observed from the lecture notes taken down by a student in 1763, and from what William Robert Scott described as an early version of part of The Wealth of Nations.For example, Smith lectured that labor--rather than the nation's quantity of gold or silver--is the cause of increase in national wealth.