Adam Smith
1 book in the library
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and economist, born in Kirkcaldy, Fife. He studied at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1752 became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), explained moral judgement through sympathy and the imagined view of an impartial spectator. In the 1760s he travelled in France as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, meeting the economists of the physiocrat school, and then spent years in Kirkcaldy writing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. A close friend of David Hume, he was appointed a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh, where he died in 1790. His work laid the foundations of modern economics.
