76 Facts About Adam Smith

Adam Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by fellow Scot John Snell.

Adam Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow, teaching moral philosophy and during this time, wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Adam Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were often satirised by writers such as Horace Walpole.

Adam Smith's father, Adam Smith, was a Scottish Writer to the Signet, advocate and prosecutor and served as comptroller of the customs in Kirkcaldy.

Adam Smith's mother was born Margaret Douglas, daughter of the landed Robert Douglas of Strathendry, in Fife; she married Adam Smith's father in 1720.

Two months before Adam Smith was born, his father died, leaving his mother a widow.

Adam Smith was close to his mother, who probably encouraged him to pursue his scholarly ambitions.

Adam Smith entered the University of Glasgow at age 14 and studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson.

Adam Smith considered the teaching at Glasgow to be far superior to that at Oxford, which he found intellectually stifling.

Adam Smith left Oxford University in 1746, before his scholarship ended.

Adam Smith's lectures endeavoured not merely to teach philosophy, but to make his students embody that philosophy in their lives, appropriately acquiring the epithet, the preacher of philosophy.

Adam Smith began delivering public lectures in 1748 at the University of Edinburgh, sponsored by the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames.

In 1750, Adam Smith met the philosopher David Hume, who was his senior by more than a decade.

In 1751, Adam Smith earned a professorship at Glasgow University teaching logic courses, and in 1752, he was elected a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, having been introduced to the society by Lord Kames.

Adam Smith worked as an academic for the next 13 years, which he characterised as "by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honorable period [of his life]".

Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures.

Adam Smith defined "mutual sympathy" as the basis of moral sentiments.

Adam Smith based 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 mutual sympathy, a term best captured in modern parlance by the 20th-century concept of empathy, the capacity to recognise feelings that are being experienced by another being.

For example, Adam Smith lectured that the cause of increase in national wealth is labour, rather than the nation's quantity of gold or silver, which is the basis for mercantilism, the economic theory that dominated Western European economic policies at the time.

Adam Smith resigned from his professorship in 1764 to take the tutoring position.

Adam Smith subsequently attempted to return the fees he had collected from his students because he had resigned partway through the term, but his students refused.

Adam Smith first travelled as a tutor to Toulouse, France, where he stayed for a year and a half.

Adam Smith discovered the Physiocracy school founded by Francois Quesnay and discussed with their intellectuals.

Adam Smith returned home that year to Kirkcaldy, and he devoted much of the next decade to writing his magnum opus.

Adam Smith secured the patronage of David Hume and Thomas Reid in the young man's education.

In 1778, Adam Smith was appointed to a post as commissioner of customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Panmure House in Edinburgh's Canongate.

On his deathbed, Adam Smith expressed disappointment that he had not achieved more.

Adam Smith left behind many notes and some unpublished material, but gave instructions to destroy anything that was not fit for publication.

Adam Smith mentioned an early unpublished History of Astronomy as probably suitable, and it duly appeared in 1795, along with other material such as Essays on Philosophical Subjects.

Adam Smith's library went by his will to David Douglas, Lord Reston, who lived with Adam Smith.

Adam Smith never married, and seems to have maintained a close relationship with his mother, with whom he lived after his return from France and who died six years before him.

Adam Smith was described by several of his contemporaries and biographers as comically absent-minded, with peculiar habits of speech and gait, and a smile of "inexpressible benignity".

Adam Smith was known to talk to himself, a habit that began during his childhood when he would smile in rapt conversation with invisible companions.

Adam Smith had occasional spells of imaginary illness, and he is reported to have had books and papers placed in tall stacks in his study.

Adam Smith is said to have put bread and butter into a teapot, drunk the concoction, and declared it to be the worst cup of tea he ever had.

Adam Smith has been alternatively described as someone who "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment" and one whose "countenance was manly and agreeable".

The best-known portraits of Adam Smith are the profile by James Tassie and two etchings by John Kay.

Adam Smith's father had shown a strong interest in Christianity and belonged to the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland.

Anglo-American economist Ronald Coase has challenged the view that Adam Smith was a deist, based on the fact that Adam Smith's writings never explicitly invoke God as an explanation of the harmonies of the natural or the human worlds.

Brendan Long argues that Adam Smith was a theist, whereas according to professor Gavin Kennedy, Adam Smith was "in some sense" a Christian.

Adam Smith was a close friend of David Hume, who, despite debate about his religious views in modern scholarship, was commonly characterised in his own time as an atheist.

In 1759, Adam Smith published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, sold by co-publishers Andrew Millar of London and Alexander Kincaid of Edinburgh.

Adam Smith continued making extensive revisions to the book until his death.

Adam Smith proposes a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others and seeing the judgments they form of both others and oneself makes people aware of themselves and how others perceive their behaviour.

In recent years some scholars of Adam Smith's work have argued that no contradiction exists.

Adam Smith elaborated on the virtue of prudence, which for him meant the relations between people in the private sphere of the economy.

Adam Smith warned that a business-dominated political system would allow a conspiracy of businesses and industry against consumers, with the former scheming to influence politics and legislation.

Adam Smith's argument predicted Britain's evolution as the workshop of the world, underselling and outproducing all its competitors.

Shortly before his death, Adam Smith had nearly all his manuscripts destroyed.

Adam Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were often satirised by Tory writers in the moralising tradition of Hogarth and Swift, as a discussion at the University of Winchester suggests.

Adam Smith never moved above the heads of even the dullest readers.

Adam Smith led them on gently, encouraging them by trivialities and homely observations, making them feel comfortable all along.

Classical economists presented competing theories to those of Adam Smith, termed the "labour theory of value".

Adam Smith explained the relationship between growth of private property and civil government:.

Adam Smith is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it.

Adam Smith challenged ideas that colonies were key to British prosperity and power.

Adam Smith rejected that other cultures, such as China and India, were culturally and developmentally inferior to Europe.

Adam Smith proposed that colonies be given independence or that full political rights be extended to colonial subjects.

Adam Smith resided at Panmure House from 1778 to 1790.

Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan argues that, while Smith did not coin the term laissez-faire, "it was left to Adam Smith to identify the more-general set of principles that brought conceptual clarity to the seeming chaos of market transactions".

Herbert Stein wrote that the people who "wear an Adam Smith necktie" do it to "make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government", and that this misrepresents Smith's ideas.

Adam Smith viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism.

Similarly, Vivienne Brown stated in The Economic Journal that in the 20th-century United States, Reaganomics supporters, The Wall Street Journal, and other similar sources have spread among the general public a partial and misleading vision of Adam Smith, portraying him as an "extreme dogmatic defender of laissez-faire capitalism and supply-side economics".

Some commentators have argued that Adam Smith's works show support for a progressive, not flat, income tax and that he specifically named taxes that he thought should be required by the state, among them luxury-goods taxes and tax on rent.

Yet Adam Smith argued for the "impossibility of taxing the people, in proportion to their economic revenue, by any capitation".

Adam Smith argued that taxes should principally go toward protecting "justice" and "certain publick institutions" that were necessary for the benefit of all of society, but that could not be provided by private enterprise.

Additionally, Adam Smith outlined the proper expenses of the government in The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch.

Adam Smith encouraged invention and new ideas through his patent enforcement and support of infant industry monopolies.

Adam Smith supported partial public subsidies for elementary education, and he believed that competition among religious institutions would provide general benefit to the society.

Economist Daniel Klein believes using the term "free-market economics" or "free-market economist" to identify the ideas of Adam Smith is too general and slightly misleading.

Ricardo pointed out that Adam Smith was in support of helping infant industries.

Adam Smith believed that the government should subsidise newly formed industry, but he did fear that when the infant industry grew into adulthood, it would be unwilling to surrender the government help.

Adam Smith supported tariffs on imported goods to counteract an internal tax on the same good.

Adam Smith fell to pressure in supporting some tariffs in support for national defence.

Some have claimed, Emma Rothschild among them, that Adam Smith would have supported a minimum wage, although no direct textual evidence supports the claim.

However, Adam Smith noted, to the contrary, the existence of an imbalanced, inequality of bargaining power:.