Biography of Adam Smith

"Bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest and most humiliating calamity which can befall an innocent man. The greater part of men, therefore, are sufficiently careful to avoid it. Some, indeed, do not avoid it; as some do not avoid the gallows." Adam Smith.

Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723. His father died six months prior to this date. Adam Smith senior was the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. Smith grew up in Kirkcaldy with his mother.

In 1737, Adam Smith became a student at Glasgow. He was studying moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson. Smith referred to him as "the never-to-be-forgotten." In 1740, Smith entered Balliol College, Oxford. Regarding Smith, William Robert Scott has said, 'the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework.' Smith was not happy with the money that was being spent toward an education that was not stimulating his needs at the time. He left Oxford in 1746 due to the lack of intellectual stimulation, but not before expressing his views. "Smith's hostility to Oxford's educational inefficienc

Society. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

In 1748, under the support of Lord Kames, Smith began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh. The subjects of the lectures were rhetoric, but he then took up the subject of "the progress of opulence." Then in his late twenties, he first explained the economic philosophy of "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty," which he later declared to the world in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This excerpt from one of the lectures Smith gave shows that Smith was already "developing his analysis of the institution of the division of labor (West 49)."