was a popular professor who took his educational role very seriously. Many of the personal reminiscences that his contemporaries have about him suggest that he approached the stereotype of the absent-minded professor: talking to himself, wandering out of doors in his nightgown, accidentally trying to make tea from rolled-up pieces of bread. While these images are endearing, they sit in more than a little tension with the reality of Smith as a gifted and professional teacher and a skilled university administrator whose roles included complicated tasks involving the finances of the University and the development of the library. In addition to his university duties, Smith was able to publish his first great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759.
As his reputation grew, Smith was able to attract students from as far afield as Russia, Geneva, and the American colonies. Among those who attended Smith’s classes were the future biographer James Boswell (1740–95) and the gifted legal scholar John Millar (1735–1801), who would himself become a Glasgow Professor and later educate Smith’s heir David Douglas (1769–1819). Smith’s reputation attracted the attention of the politician and future Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (1725–67). Townshend was the stepfather to the young Henry Scott, the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1746–1812), one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland. Townshend persuaded Smith to resign his position at Glasgow after 13 years and become a travelling tutor to the young Duke. Though initially reluctant to leave his professorship at Glasgow, Smith was persuaded by the fact that the position would not only allow him to travel to the Continent, but would also come with a lifetime pension that would allow him to devote himself to study and writing.
Smith spent the years 1764–6 chiefly in France, basing himself in Toulouse and then Paris. He met many of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, the so-called ‘philosophes’. Among these were Voltaire (1694–1778), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81), François Quesnay (1694–1774), and several of the French economic thinkers known as the Physiocrats. Smith’s time in France was cut short by the tragic death of the Duke’s younger brother, and he returned to London with his pupil. Smith remained in London in 1766 and 1767 and used the time to produce a revised third edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He would remain close to Buccleuch throughout his life and acted as an adviser on the Duke’s financial matters and on his improvements to his vast estates.
Returning to Scotland in 1768, Smith retired to Kirkcaldy and began work on what was to become his most famous book, the Wealth of Nations. His friend Hume complained of his infrequent visits to Edinburgh during this period, but Smith assured him that he was making progress with his studies away from the distractions of the city. Smith travelled to London in 1773 and remained there until 1776, when the Wealth of Nations was published to great acclaim, and was soon followed by a second edition in 1778 and a third, significantly revised edition in 1784. The London of the 1770s was dominated by the dispute with the American colonies, and this context surely shaped Smith’s thinking on international trade (as we will see below). But 1776 also brought a personal blow with the death of Hume. Smith penned a memorial to his friend that was published along with Hume’s own autobiographical essay. He was later to observe that this memorial caused more personal attacks on him than the far more, as he saw it, controversial economic arguments of the Wealth of Nations. There is a certain irony in this as Smith had informed Hume that he was uncomfortable in acting as his literary executor as it would involve publishing the highly controversial, and now classic, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). The Dialogues is a sustained attack on many of the most popular philosophical arguments for belief in God, and Smith clearly feared this would attract the ire of the religious. In the end, Hume’s essay was published, but to little abuse, while Smith’s memorial produced sustained criticism.
In 1778, Smith’s influential political contacts secured him a position as one of Commissioners of Customs for Scotland and he moved his mother and cousin, Janet Douglas, to Edinburgh and his new residence at Panmure House in the Canongate. By all accounts, Smith was as assiduous in his customs office duties as he had been in his professorial duties. One anecdote from the time tells how he read the list of smuggled goods, realized that he owned many of them himself, and promptly burned these to avoid any accusation of impropriety. He soon became a well-known figure walking up the High Street of Edinburgh from his home to the Customs House opposite St Giles’ Cathedral. One of the very few images we have of Smith is a sketch by the artist John Kay (1742–1826) of him walking up the street holding a posy of flowers to his nose to block out the stench of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Smith also became an integral part of the Edinburgh social scene and was a leading light in the Oyster Club, a group that met for intellectual debate in a tavern in the Grassmarket. In addition, he hosted Sunday evening dinners for close friends and visitors to the city.
Smith was troubled by poor health in his later years and shaken by the death of his mother in 1784 and by that of his cousin and housekeeper Janet Douglas in 1788. He had never married, and we have almost no evidence of him having any kind of romantic engagement. So his household was gradually reduced to a few loyal servants and the son of his cousin, the young David Douglas, whose education Smith was directing and who would become his heir.
Smith’s late career as a civil servant was complemented by his growing reputation as a policy adviser to government. The success of the Wealth of Nations meant that his ideas were taken seriously at the highest levels. His opinion was sought on the American crisis, on free trade with Ireland, and on the changes to banking regulations. During a trip to London in 1787, many of the leading figures of the government, including the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), attended a dinner in his honour where Smith’s influence on economic policy and free trade was acknowledged. Also in 1787, Smith was elected Rector of Glasgow University. He was particularly delighted by the honour as it reflected the good opinion in which the students at his old university held him. He travelled to Glasgow with his friend the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97) for the installation ceremony and gave a talk on the Imitative Arts which he intimated elsewhere was part of an unfinished new book.
By 1790, ill health had set in while Smith was working to produce a final revised edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Although he managed this task, he did not manage to complete unfinished books on jurisprudence and on the arts and asked his executors, the scientist Joseph Black (1728–99) and the geologist James Hutton (1726–97), to help him destroy his papers. On his death, the bulk of Smith’s estate passed to David Douglas, later Lord Reston, an influential judge. Smith left small bequests to his friends and gave significant amounts to charitable causes. All of the evidence we have of his character is that he was a modest and unassuming man who was a loyal friend. Beyond that he seems to have been a very private man who sought to avoid public controversy. Indeed, the care with which he revised his two great books suggests that he wanted them, rather than any details of his personal life, to stand as his reputation to posterity.2
The Scottish Enlightenment
While the details of Smith’s life give us some insight into the connection between his biography and the content of his ideas, we are limited in what we can build upon this as he was a poor correspondent and ultimately a very private man. We actually gain considerably more insight by examining the intellectual climate in which he lived, the so-called ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.3
The Scottish Enlightenment was an outpouring of intellectual achievement that occurred during the middle years of the eighteenth century (roughly 1740–90). It forms a subset of the wider phenomenon of the European Enlightenment. The ‘Century of Light’ or ‘Age of Reason’ was a time when many of the features of the modern world came into focus. Ideas of science, academic freedom, progress, and civil liberty became increasingly popular amongst a newly emerging class of public intellectuals. The idea that the darkness of superstition was being replaced by science and reason as part of a movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals, ‘daring to know’, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would later describe it, and refusing to accept truths set down by authority, has become central to understanding the intellectual
