Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life.
| Author | Stafford, James |
Nicholas Phillipson
ALLEN LANE, 2010
The life of Adam Smith offers little material for the Antonia Fraser school of historical biography. Indeed, it might well be viewed as being resistant to biography of any sort, although that hasn't prevented historians other than Nicholas Phillipson attempting the task. Smith's original biographer, the Edinburgh moralist Dugald Stewart, is quoted in the prologue to his book, observing that Smith 'seems to have wished that no materials should remain for his biographers, but what were furnished by the lasting monuments of his genius, and the exemplary worth of his private life' (p. 3). His subject's careful control over his own life and legacy, Stewart relates, was exercised most strikingly in his repeated injunctions to successive executors to destroy unfinished manuscripts. Ever since, biographers have been forced to focus on what Smith would have wanted them to focus on: his surviving, perfected writings, and the world in which he lived.
Phillipson's concise, sophisticated and readable book is an indispensable guide to both. It is an attempt to introduce the reader to Smith's world, as if through Smith's eyes. Consequently, there is as much information about Smith's intellectual contexts - the writings of Hutcheson, Hume, and Rousseau, or the social structures of eighteenth-century Kirkcaldy and Glasgow - as there is about his own life and works. We learn about his conversion to Hume's sceptical epistemology and passion-driven moral psychology during his time as a Snell scholar at Oxford in the 1740s, his response to Rousseau's assault on the emergent values of commercial civilization, and his lifelong experience of the 'improving' political culture of Scotland's landed and merchant elites. Phillipson takes pleasure in recounting amusing incidences of his subject's famed absent-mindedness - during the gestation of The Wealth of the Nations, Smith reportedly walked the fifteen miles from Kirkcaldy to Dunfermline 'wrapped in thought and clad in a dressing gown' (p. 202). But he is also at pains to stress that his subject was a man of the world. Smith was a capable university administrator, an assiduous customs official, an intimate of a number of powerful aristocratic families, and an occasional adviser and correspondent to some of the leading politicians of his age. He does not, on Phillipson's account, emerge as the priggish, isolated genius of lore.
The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral...
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