Adam Smith | ClassicMotivation.com

Before the Work

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1723, the posthumous son of a customs official. He was a sickly child who was reportedly kidnapped by Gypsies at age four and returned by chance — his biographer John Rae dryly noted that he would have made a poor Gypsy. He enrolled at Glasgow University at fourteen, moved to Oxford on a scholarship at seventeen, and spent six miserable years there before returning to Scotland to lecture, eventually becoming Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow in 1752.

He was an unusual figure: deeply learned, socially awkward, prone to absent-mindedness of legendary proportions, and possessed of a genuine warmth and concern for his students and friends that contradicts the cold rationalist image that later economics projected onto him. His mother Margaret was his closest companion; they lived together for most of his adult life, and her death six years before his own was one of the great griefs of his life. He never married.

The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, transformed economics. But Smith himself considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, his more important work, and revised it repeatedly throughout his life. The two books together constitute his complete philosophy of human nature — the first on sympathy and moral life, the second on exchange and economic life. The tragedy of his reception is that the second was remembered and the first was largely forgotten, producing a distorted version of his philosophy that he would not have recognized.

The Philosophy

The Theory of Moral Sentiments opens with a claim that cuts directly against the later caricature of Smith: however selfish we may suppose man to be, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Sympathy — the capacity to imagine and be moved by the experience of others — is, for Smith, the foundation of all moral life and of all social life.

The impartial spectator — the imagined judge within each of us who observes our own conduct from outside and approves or disapproves according to whether a fully informed, reasonable person would approve — is his account of conscience. Not a divine command, not a social rule, but an internalized capacity for self-observation that develops through the experience of living with others who watch and judge us as we watch and judge them.

The Wealth of Nations is not a rejection of this moral philosophy but an extension of it into economic life. The famous passage about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker — that we rely not on their benevolence but on their self-interest — is often read as an argument that only self-interest matters. Smith was arguing something more precise: that in market exchanges, self-interest is a reliable motivator that does not require benevolence, because the structure of exchange aligns individual interest with social benefit. He did not argue that self-interest is sufficient for a good society — the Theory of Moral Sentiments is entirely about what else is required.