Adam smith biography phillipson wine

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Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Apparently Smith was much more proud of his first major work - The Theory of Moral Sentiments which explained at length his scientific analysis of how humans behave in groups - through self regulation of their passion and reason than his second major work The Wealth of Nations.

Smith used The Theory of Moral Sentiments as the bedrock on which his subsequent major works rest. The Wealth of Nations speaks to how humans bargain to meet reasonable, mutually beneficial outcomes. The author has done yeoman's work here, but the fact of the matter is that some lives are more interesting than others. Smith, despite his historical contribution, seems to fall into the latter category.

Although I must admit that I lack just too much knowledge about Adam's Smith life, and his other mayor work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I did get the impression of understanding a little bit more about Adam Smith's life and ideas. I cannot deny that this book had a lot of research, but, at times, it seems that it may had not been enough.

However, I cannot deny what was said several times during the book, Adam Smith was a very private person. The fact that he burned most of his unfinished writings just seems to confirm this fact.

Adam smith biography phillipson wine

No author is to be blamed, and their efforts should be considered. A very notorious thing that may come to the reader's mind is the following: the book may, at times, center itself too much on other people, and even places or circumstances. This is not a bad thing. This book may give you a good idea of what the world was like for Adam Smith, and those around him, during the time of his life.

After reading this book, I'll venture to say, you'll think you know Adam Smith a little bit better, and it may even surprise you. My mayor critique about this book is the, at times poor, chronology of events. While the chapters are made to fit the chronology of his life, the author will mention things that happened after the years in which the chapter is centered.

This may not disrupt you too much, but could certainly have been improved. That said, it is not a big problem. This book involved a lot of research, and, I am sure, it required a lot of work. This latter is a book I wholeheartedly recommend. Though his name looms large as the founder of modern economic theory, Adam Smith himself is in many ways a mysterious and unknowable figure.

Faced with the challenge of writing a biography of a man who left only a little correspondence and only two books, Nicholas Phillipson provides a broader portrait of Adam Smith's intellectual world. In doing so, he sites Smith firmly within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, showing how he took the explorations of his teachers and colleagues most notably his close friend David Hume and used them to produce two of the seminal books of Western thought.

By adopting this approach, Phillipson challenges the image of Smith as an absent-minded academic and turns him instead into a dynamic teacher who was in contact with many of the leading intellectual and political lights of his day. With his persuasive reinterpretation and and readable style, Phillipson has produced what is likely to be the best account of Smith's life and times for decades to come, and an essential read for anyone interested in learning about the origins and development of the ideas we still discuss today.

It is well written and obviously well researched. Though the biography itself is only pages long if you ignore the notes and sources, bibliography and index I was left with the impression that I knew everything there was to know about him. As one would expect since Adam Smith had only two books published in his lifetime the circumstances involved in having them both published and at least one revised to a fifth and final edition are dealt with to some degree.

It is my opinion that if this bio is the only one available you will not be disappointed. I cannot recommend it too highly. It is well worth spending the time to read. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist, and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important.

This book, by one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, shows the extent to which The Wealth of Nations and Smith's other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments , were part of a larger scheme to establish a grand 'Science of Man', one of the most ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was to encompass law, history and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics.

Nicholas Phillipson reconstructs Smith's intellectual ancestry and formation, of which he gives a radically new and convincing account. He shows what Smith took from, and what he gave to, the rapidly changing and subtly different intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Above all he explains how far Smith's ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume.