Nicholas Phillipson

Though his name looms large as the founder of modern economic theory, Adam Smith himself is in many ways a mysterious and unknowable figure. Faced with the challenge of writing a biography of a man who left only a little correspondence and only two books, Nicholas Phillipson provides a broader portrait of Adam Smith's intellectual world. In doing so, he sites Smith firmly within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, showing how he took the explorations of his teachers and colleagues (most notably his close friend David Hume) and used them to produce two of the seminal books of Western thought. By adopting this approach, Phillipson challenges the image of Smith as an absent-minded academic and turns him instead into a dynamic teacher who was in contact with many of the leading intellectual and political lights of his day. With his persuasive reinterpretation and and readable style, Phillipson has produced what is likely to be the best account of Smith's life and times for decades to come, and an essential read for anyone interested in learning about the origins and development of the ideas we still discuss today.… (meer)

This book sorely tested my knowledge of Scottish history. Phillipson assumes his reader’s familiarity with the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Glorious Revolution and the 1707 Act of Union in such a generous way, that one feels complimented. He speaks to one as an equal.

But soon you have to set the book aside and catch up on some serious background study.

When Adam Smith wrote that the end of government “is to secure wealth and to defend the rich from the poor”, he was not making a disapproving statement. It was a commentary on the society he was living in. Adam Smith is recruited today as the patron of all manner of right wing causes, by people who highlight words that he wrote but have no knowledge of the context within which he wrote them. Smith was not an early participative democrat, and perhaps he would associate eagerly with the present promoters of free trade, free markets, lower taxes and less government interference. But the period in which he wrote was so different from our own that it is not possible to use his words as an early authority for such views. This happens, however, because Smith was writing for modern times when trade, monopoly, colonisation and taxation were gaining their modern meanings. (This is not the case with the Greek and Roman authors who were the foundation of Smith’s own education and also of his own teaching.) Smith walks through this book much more as a philosopher than as the founder of economics. He himself rated his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” as superior to the more well-known “Wealth of Nations”.
Smith burned all his private papers just before he died in 1790 so the modern prying biographer is at a disadvantage. But Phillipson convincingly puts Smith in his historical context. It lays out his intellectual antecendents (in Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Hume) and describes the way he was bought out of his professorship in Glasgow by a wealthy family who wanted a tutor to accompany their noble 19 year old son on a two year tour of Europe. Many parties and engagements, but also a lot of Greek and Latin. After Smith published the Wealth of Nations, the same family arranged for a well-paid job for Smith on the Customs Board. This was, however, also a lot of work and Smith was prevented from completing his planned philosophical writings before he died at the age of 67.

As an alleged intellectual fore bearer of the tea party movement, one is surprised to discover that Smith was no covenanter but privately an infidel, eager to keep well away from matters of religion. There is a doubly telling story on page 246 on what a dying David Hume imagined saying to Charon to delay his journey over the Styx – and how Smith altered his report of this to lessen controversy.

As a customs official, Adam Smith “was enraged by parliament’s willingness to encourage the importation of [cheap] foreign linen yard regardless of its consequences for domestic producers and the wages of the poor.” (p.264) South Africa’s tyre and textile manufacturers and unions may be overlooking a patron saint.… (meer)

A nice account of Smith's career and the economic environment of his times. However, I find the book rather superficial in its description of the intellectual ideas Smith dealt with. For example, much is made in the book of Smith's arguments with the French physiocrats regarding the primacy of land as the ultimate source of value in the economy. Phillipson does not explain the critical issues in this debate. (The critical issue is with regard to the generation of land rents as surplus value, much as Karl Marx thought of labour creating surplus value when combined with capital.) Instead of explaining the ideas that engaged Adam Smith, the author often quotes at some length various commentators who were Smith's contemporaries. But this was at times insufficient for me to really understand the points of contention.… (meer)