Adam Smith (1723–1790)
Perhaps the best remembered of all Glasgow’s Enlightenment figures, Adam Smith can be found on buildings and on bank notes. The Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) are his principal works. His awareness of their colossal success and reach led to his decision to destroy most of his unpublished manuscripts, in the hope that his legacy would remain untarnished.
Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Smith attended Glasgow University at fourteen years-old. Following a spell at Balliol College, Oxford, he lectured in Edinburgh after an invitation from Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782). His residence in Glasgow would prove crucial, when he moved there to take the chair in Logic in 1751. Smith was instrumental in founding the Glasgow Literary Society in 1753, a central society in tracing Glasgow’s impact on the Scottish Enlightenment. Among its members were David Hume, James Watt, and John Anderson.
His lectures in Glasgow were to form the basis for The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work which professed the qualities of sympathy, reason, and Francis Hutcheson’s “moral sense”. In many ways, The Wealth of Nations, often said to be a capitalist manifesto, can be read as a sequel to these theories; Smith fully believed in individual ambition contributing to the welfare of society in general.
Beside his legacy as an economist and philosopher, his works are often brought to the forefront of discussions of Scotland’s relationship with slavery. Smith believed that slavery was a financially unsound idea for Britain, and that it would be cheaper to pay for the services slaves were forced to perform than maintain exhaustive colonial expeditions. For all this, Smith’s Glasgow remains overshadowed by Edinburgh in the framework of the Scottish Enlightenment.