Resumo de Adam Smith''s Wealth Of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays

Adam Smith was a Scottish
moral
philosopher and a pioneering political
economist. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known
as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known
primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts
to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in
Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism.
Smith''s work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics
and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade,
capitalism,
and libertarianism.
Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of
England £20 note.Smith was a son of
the controller of the customs at Kirkcaldy,
Fife, Scotland.
The exact date of Smith''s birth is unknown, but he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on
June 5,
1723, his father having
died some six months previously. At around the age of 4, he was kidnapped by a
band of Gypsies,
but he was quickly rescued by his uncle and returned to his mother.. Here Smith
developed his strong passion for liberty, reason, and free speech. In 1740 he was awarded the Snell Exhibition and entered Balliol College, Oxford, but as William
Robert Scott has said, "the Oxford of his time gave little if any help
towards what was to be his lifework," and he left the university in 1746.
In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith comments
on the low quality of instruction and the meagre intellectual activity at
English universities when compared to their Scottish counterparts. He
attributed this both to the rich endowments of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which made the income of
professors independent of their ability to attract students, and to the fact
that distinguished men of letters could make an even more comfortable living as
ministers of the Church of England.In 1748 Smith began delivering
public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames.
Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres,
but later he took up the subject of "the progress of opulence," and
it was then, in his middle or late 20s, that he first expounded the economic
philosophy of "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty"
which he was later to proclaim to the world in his Wealth of Nations. In about 1750 he
met the philosopher David Hume, who was his senior by over a
decade. The alignments of opinion that can be found within the details of their
respective writings covering history, politics, philosophy, economics, and
religion indicate that they both shared a closer intellectual alliance and
friendship than with the others who were to play important roles during the emergence of what has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment he frequented The Poker
Club of Edinburgh.In 1751 Smith was appointed chair of logic at the University of
Glasgow, transferring in 1752 to the Chair of Moral Philosophy,
once occupied by his famous teacher, Francis Hutcheson.His lectures covered the
fields of ethics,
rhetoric,
jurisprudence,
political economy,and "police and
revenue". In 1759 he published his The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
embodying some of his Glasgow lectures.This work, which established Smith''s
reputation in his day, was concerned with how human communication depends on
sympathy between agent and spectator (that is, the individual and other members
of society). His analysis of language evolution was somewhat superficial, as
shown only 14 years later by a more rigorous examination of primitive language
evolution by Lord Monboddo in his Of the Origin and
Progress of Language. Smith''s capacity for fluent, persuasive, if rather
rhetorical argument, is much in evidence. He bases his explanation not, as the
third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, on a special "moral
sense"; nor, as Hume did, on uti;
but on sympathy.Smith now began to give more attention to jurisprudence and
economics in his lecture and less to his theories of morals. An impression can
be obtained as to the development of his ideas on political economy from the
notes of his lectures taken down by a student in about 1763 which were later
edited by Edwin Cannan,
and from what Scott, its discoverer and publisher,describes as "An Early
Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations", which he dates about 1763.Cannan''s
work appeared as Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. A fuller
version was published as Lectures on Jurisprudence in the Glasgow
Edition of 1976.In 1762 the academic senate of the
University of Glasgow conferred on Smith
the title of Doctor of laws (LL.D.). At the end of 1763, he
obtained a lucrative offer from Charles
Townshend (who had been introduced to Smith by David Hume),
to tutor his stepson, the young Duke of Buccleuch. Smith
subsequently resigned from his professorship and from 1764-66 traveled with his
pupil, mostly in France,
where he came to know intellectual leaders such as Turgot, Jean D''Alembert, André
Morellet, Helvétius and, in particular,Francois
Quesnay, the head of the Physiocratic
school whose work he respected greatly. On returning home to
Kirkcaldy Smith was elected fellow of the Royal Society
of London
and he devoted much of the next ten years to his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, which appeared
in 1776. The book was very well-received and made its author famous.In 1778 Smith was appointed to a post as commissioner of
customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Edinburgh.In 1783 he
became one of the founding members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and from 1787
to 1789 he occupied the honorary position of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow.He
died in Edinburgh on July 17, 1790, after a painful illness and was buried in
the Canongate Kirkyard.

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