Smith, Adam

Scottish economist. Until comparatively recently, Adam Smith was known only as the author of a single book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), published in the same year as the American Revolution. This book is said to have established economics as an autonomous subject and, at the same time, to have launched the doctrine of free enterprise upon an unsuspecting world. It is true that he also published another major treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a work about those standards of ethical conduct that hold society together, but this was a book that economists generally left unread. However, the recent publication of his many essays on philosophical and literary subjects suggests that he may have been working towards a complete system of social science, which he never lived to complete.

Smith took a deeply cynical view of the behaviour of businessmen and legislators, and reserved for government the provision of those social services which could not or would not be provided by private action. Yet it was as an exponent of free trade, free enterprise, the free movement of people and goods – in short, laissez-faire and the untrammelled operation of the market – that he made his mark on the history of economics and on the dominant intellectual outlook of the western world.