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Seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith published a book on morality, and he valued it at least as highly. He argues that our moral sense…
Seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith published a book on morality, and he valued it at least as highly. He argues that our moral sense grows from sympathy, our ability to imagine ourselves in another person's place, and from an imagined impartial spectator inside us who judges our conduct as an outsider would.
Context and significance
First published in 1759 and revised until Smith's death in 1790, the book shows that the father of modern economics was above all a moral philosopher who did not believe people act only out of self-interest. It owes much to his friend David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature it answers in places.
About the author
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, studied at Glasgow and Oxford and became professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. His Theory of Moral Sentiments made his name in 1759, and a few years later he travelled in France as tutor to a young duke, meeting Voltaire and the French economists.
Back in Scotland he spent ten years on An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), which explained the division of labour, markets and free trade and founded modern economics. He ended his life, with some irony, as a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh.