Adam Smith 1723 – 1790

Adam Smith was an 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher and political economist, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the founder of modern economics. His 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments developed an account of morality grounded in sympathy and the impartial spectator. The 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations argued that the productive division of labour and competitive markets, mediated by the metaphorical invisible hand, generate the wealth of nations more reliably than mercantilist regulation. He held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and was a friend of David Hume. His political economy shaped the development of modern liberal political thought and continues to be central to debates over markets, regulation, and inequality.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was the founding figure of modern political economy and one of the central philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Born in Kirkcaldy, educated at Glasgow under Francis Hutcheson and at Oxford, he became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow in 1752 — succeeding his teacher Hutcheson — and was a close lifelong friend of David Hume.

Smith's two great works form a single moral and economic philosophical system. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) develops a sentimentalist moral philosophy grounded in sympathy: moral judgment proceeds through the imaginative projection of oneself into the situation of others, and the impartial spectator within each agent regulates conduct through internalized moral feedback. The Wealth of Nations (1776) extends the same broadly empiricist framework to the analysis of commercial society, with the division of labor, the operation of markets, and the production of wealth analyzed in detail. The relationship between the two works — sometimes called Das Adam Smith Problem — has been the subject of sustained scholarship.

Smith served as commissioner of customs in his last years and lived quietly in Edinburgh. His political economy, often misread as the philosophical defense of unfettered markets, is in fact an extended argument for commercial society constrained by sympathy, justice, and the institutional arrangements that prevent the rich from exploiting the poor. He has been the most consequential single figure in the history of economic thought.