THE BIOGRAPHY OF ADAM SMITH

James Buchan

The life of the philosopher Adam Smith offers small incident to the biographer. Smith passed much of his life in masculine institutions, such as Glasgow and Oxford Universities and the Scottish Customs Board. He came to London first in his late thirties, traveled abroad just once, to France and Geneva, and did not marry. His chief attachment was to his mother, whose death at a great age prostrated him. Yet this existence, which Smith once called "extremely uniform," has come to fascinate our age. A trickle of biographical studies began to flow at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the past fifty years has become a river.

Smith stands at the point where history changes direction. During his lifetime, between 1723 and 1790, the failed kingdom of drink, the Bible, and the dagger that was old Scotland became a pioneer of the new sciences. God was dismissed from the lecture hall and the drawing room. The old medieval departments of learning disintegrated. Psychology became a study not of the soul but of the passions. Political economy was separated out of moral philosophy and began its progress to respectability and then hegemony. Smith was at the heart of those changes.

Because Smith did his thinking before the French Revolution of 1789 and the division of the political house into left and right, he appeals to both sides: on the left, to Tom Paine, Karl Marx, and Mary Wollstonecraft, on the right to Margaret Thatcher and every business club from Boston to Shanghai. The left Smithians like their hero's devotion to the laboring poor and his contempt for colonialism, the right Smithians his scorn of big government. In the course of the twentieth century, as new biographical materials turned up in the attics of Scottish country houses, each side looked for ammunition to launch at their political rivals.

From this battle, the economists held themselves aloof. Because, in the words of J. S. Mill, modern political economy concerns itself not with the whole of human nature but "only such phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth," Smith's adventures and exploits were to most economists as uninteresting as the events of any other single life. Even J. M. Keynes, who had a taste for biography, showed little curiosity about Smith's life and times. The revolution in Smith's biography since the publication of his lectures on jurisprudence in 1896 has proceeded without troubling the great mass of economists.

Above all, Smith's life is intertwined with modern biography itself, as inaugurated by James Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1791). Boswell had been Smith's pupil at Glasgow University and was entranced one day by a remark of Smith's in lecture that, in the life of a great man, even the smallest detail is of interest. Yet efforts by some authors (including this one) to Boswellize Smith have, for dearth of evidence, been unsuccessful.

These are the facts of Smith's life. Adam Smith was born in the early summer of 1723 in Kirkcaldy, a small port across the estuary or firth of the River Forth from Edinburgh, the ancient capital of Scotland. He was the son of Adam Smith, a commissioner of customs (who had died), and of Margaret Douglas. He was baptized on June 5, 1723. His birth date places him at the heart of a circle of Scotsmen known (since the early twentieth century) as the Scottish Enlightenment. A protégé of the philosophers Henry Home (b. 1696) and David Hume (1711), he was friend and colleague to the literary critic Hugh Blair (1718), the historian William Robertson (1721), the social philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723), and the natural scientists James Hutton (1726) and Joseph Black (1728).

Smith never knew his father, who had practiced as an attorney, supported the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707, and was appointed comptroller of customs at Kirkcaldy in 1714. The family thus belonged to the "Whig" interest, supporters of the Protestant faith, a constitutional or limited monarchy under the House of Hanover, and political Union with England and Wales. During Smith's lifetime, the Whigs triumphed over their principal rivals, the "Jacobites," adherents of the Roman Catholic House of Stuart and old notions of absolute or divine-right monarchy. Much of Scotland fell to a Jacobite insurrection in 1745 before the rebellion was broken up the following year.

From the age of seven, Adam attended the two-room Burgh School in the town (which survives as Kirkcaldy High School) and passed, in 1737, to the University of Glasgow as a stage on the way to Oxford. He was fourteen years old, an age then thought more than ripe for university. At that time, the merchants of Glasgow were beginning to prosper from trade with the British colonies across the Atlantic, including the tobacco states of Virginia and Maryland. At the college, Smith was exposed to...