Book description
Adam Smith 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 icons
of the modern world. 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, by
one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, 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. Nicholas Phillipson
reconstructs Smith?s intellectual ancestry and formation, of which he
gives a radically new and convincing account. He shows what Smith took
from, and what he gave to, the rapidly changing and subtly different
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. This superb
biography is now the one book which anyone interested in the founder of
economics must read. Nicholas Phillipson is Honorary Research Fellow
in History at Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1965. He has held
visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, Tulsa, the Folger Library,
Washington DC and the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat, Munich. He is
co-director of a three-year Leverhulme-funded project on the Science of
Man in Scotland. He was an associate editor of the New Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, a founder editor of the journal
Modern Intellectual History
, published by the Cambridge University Press, and is a past president
of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society.
