The Life of Adam Smith - Hardcover

Ross, Ian Simpson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198288212 ISBN 13: 9780198288213

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Few would argue that Adam Smith was one of the great minds of the eighteenth century. He is perceived through his best-known book, The Wealth of Nations, as the founder of economics as a science, and his ideas about the free market and the role of the state (in relation to it) continue to influence modern economic thought. Yet Smith achieved even more as a man of letters, as a moralist, historian, and critic.
The Life of Adam Smith, the first full-scale biography of Smith in a hundred years, is a superb account of Smith's life and work, encompassing a career that spanned some of the defining moments in world history, including the American and French Revolutions. Here author Ian Simpson Ross examines Smith's family life, education, career, intellectual circle (including David Hume and Francois Quesnay), and his contemporaries (the likes of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson), bringing to life this great thinker and author. Readers will meet Smith as a student at a lively Glasgow University and at a sleepy Oxford; a freelance lecturer delivering popular classes on rhetoric; an innovative university teacher ("by far the most useful, and therefore," Smith wrote, "by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life"); then a tutor travelling abroad with a Duke; an acclaimed political economist; a policy advisor to governments during and after the American Revolution; and finally, if paradoxically in view of his strongly held tenets, a Commissioner of Customs coping with free traders in the smuggling business. But it his impact as a writer that continues to set Adam Smith apart today. The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, as the British Parliament was deep in debate about the American colonies, continues to influence modern economic theory throughout the world. Ross sheds new light on this classic work and on its meaning for today. And he also paints a vivid portrait of Smith's personal life, revealing a man of singular generosity of spirit, who believed that with wit and logic and sensitivity to our feelings, we might aspire to virtue rather than wealth, and so become members of a truly civil society.
Upon Adam Smith's death in 1790, a friend wrote of him, "Happy are those who at the close of life can reflect that they have lived to a valuable purpose by contributing, as he did, to enlighten mankind, and to spread the blessings of peace and liberty and virtue." The Life of Adam Smith illuminates the world of a man whose legacy of thought concerns and affects us all.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
Ian Simpson Ross is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day and William Dunbar and the co-editor of The Correspondence of Adam Smith, with E. C. Mossner.

Reviews

Scottish economist Adam Smith, who laid the foundation of classical economics with his model of a competitive, self-regulating market, was described by contemporaries as having a harsh voice, huge teeth and a conversational style tantamount to lecturing. Smith (1723-1790) studied at Oxford, met his idol, Voltaire, near Geneva and mingled in Paris with French Physiocrats?laissez-faire economists whose belief in absolute freedom of trade Smith rejected, according to Ross, emeritus professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Challenging Hobbes's and Rousseau's theories of intrinsic human selfishness, Smith, as professor of law and politics at Glasgow University, devised a philosophy that argued that our moral and aesthetic judgments are grounded in feelings. In London, Smith, a policy adviser, urged the British government to jettison its colonial system of restraints, and the publication of his classic Wealth of Nations in 1776 was timed, suggests Ross, to convince Parliament to support a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the rebellious American colonies. Ross's rounded intellectual biography gives us all sides of the man. Illustrated.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Adam Smith is considered the founder of economics. Though his theories were formed more than 200 years ago, they shape much of today's economic and political debate--especially current arguments regarding free trade. Within the last 100 years, the many books about Smith have been devoted to his ideas and his works rather than to the individual. Little popularly available biographical information exists. Adam Smith (1982), by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, does include several biographical chapters that provide a useful introduction to Smith's life. Now Ross, who coedited The Correspondence of Adam Smith (1987), provides a full-scale biography based largely on Smith's letters. As Ross notes, this biography satisfies natural curiosity about a writer "of such wide influence" and it helps those who would argue or oppose Smith's theories today put his ideas into historical and personal contexts. Laden--and leaden--with notes, Ross' book is not armchair reading. It is, however, an impressive scholarly achievement and belongs in any serious economics collection. David Rouse

Ross (emeritus, English, Univ. of British Columbia) has written a full-scale biography of Adam Smith (1723-90), the first in a century. He covers not only Smith's masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations, which defined the role of the free market in modern economic theory, but also his careers as a man of letters, a university professor, a government policy adviser, and a customs official. Ross discusses Smith's friendship with David Hume and other leaders of Scotland's 18th-century Enlightenment and Smith's other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, dealing with ethical and philosophical issues. However, Ross's analysis of The Wealth of Nations is not well focused; overall, his writing is dense and turgid. Recommended only for academic libraries with large collections of economic literature.
Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198288212
• ISBN 13: 9780198288213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 524