Customer Reviews

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-C)

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A solidly written biography of one known by most of us only as the Scottish author of an unread great book. Professor Phillipson's fine effort should lead many to go back and read "The Wealth of Nations."

Adam Smith's thoughts still have direct relevance to today's bucketful of economic problems--and resulting strident political debates--over government's proper role in terms of expenditures, debt, taxation, and business regulations.

While this book concentrates on the scholarship of Adam Smith, the author also intelligently traces the era within which Smith lived and his private life that included such striking people as David Hume, James Boswell, and Voltaire.

In this current age of instant and empty celebrities, Smith still stands, after about 250 years, as a man worth knowing.

This is a great, thoughtful & engaging biography on the elusive Scottish academic & philosopher, Adam Smith, titled "Adam Smith : An Enlightened Life" by professor Nicholas Phillipson. Adam Smith is well known for his description of the market's/capitalism's "invisible hand" that guides the economy, keeping 'everything' under control. But there is more to this elusive philosophical man than meets the eye : he was a private man, a hypochondriac who lived with his widowed mother most of his life. His popular lectures at the University of Glasgow turned Adam Smith into an 'institutional figure of note'. He wrote two great influencial books, "The Wealth Of The Nations" which took him 10 years to write on colonial America & the philosophical, "The Theory Of Moral Sentiments". By drawing from his published works & lecture notes, his thinking on social theory & ethics influenced his theory of economics & human behaviour.

Adam Smith instructed his executors to destroy all his lecture notes, but seven upublished philosophical essays & 193 letters survived to give us a glimpse of this elusive Scottish academic & philosopher, making the market's "invisible hand" come alive again, even if it's only at an intellectual level. This is a highly recommended reading on the 18th century's influential philosopher & academic that is Adam Smith.

I have read five book-length biographies of Adam Smith and concluded that the one by Ian Simpson Ross was definitive. I purchased the latest by Nicholas Phillipson because of his reputation rather than an expectation to learn much that is new. Reading it has proven that labeling a work as definitive does not mean it is the final word on the subject. Quite the contrary, Phillipson's work is aptly titled: Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, as it traces the development of Smith's thought in the milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment and British geopolitics during the second half of the eighteenth century. What was especially enjoyable was to learn more about the great debt Smith owed Hume as an intellect in shaping his works and as a friend. Phillipson expresses puzzlement about why Smith may not have held up his end of the friendship. After reading E. C. Mossner's The Life of David Hume and the Smith biographies, it seems clear Smith was too prudent to do so. If given a change, this reviewer would rather have kept the company of Hume than Smith.
Yale has done justice to this wonderful work. The production is a delight to see and to hold. It provides the best answer to e-books because we buyers will surely enjoying pulling it from our shelves, looking at the illustrations, and reading it again.

I was hoping for a general overview of the political, social, and geographic climate that Smith lived in as well as some analysis of the influences in his work. Unfortunately, this book is far too scholarly for the general reader. Unless you grew up in the British school system, you'll need to brush up on Scottish/English history and keep Wikipedia handy to have any chance of understanding what's going on.

The book assumes the reader already has a thorough understanding of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations". If you don't, you'll very quickly become lost and start skimming paragraphs or finish reading a page and not remember a single thing that was discussed.

I may return to this tome after reading TWoN and TToMS; we'll see.

Though his name looms large as the founder of modern economic theory, Adam Smith himself is in many ways a mysterious and unknowable figure. For all of his impact upon Western thought, Smith left little beyond the two books that were his great intellectual legacy. Not even the date of his birth is known with certainty, while his correspondence consists mainly of letters from friends plaintively wondering why he never wrote back. Nicholas Phillipson doesn't shirk from the challenge of writing a biography of the man from such a scarcity of information, but in filling the blanks he provides something more by giving his readers a broader portrait of Adam Smith's intellectual world, one that sites Smith firmly within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Phillipson begins by charting the formative influences that shaped Smith's intellectual development in his early years. Foremost among them was his schoolmaster in Kirkcaldy and two professors at the University of Glasgow, Robert Simson and Francis Hutcheson. Yet it was the writings of Smith's close friend David Hume which proved the most fertile inspiration for Smith's masterpieces. Phillipson shows how Smith drew upon Hume's ideas as inspiration for a comprehensive "Science of Man", which be began to articulate with his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Its publication in 1759 was greeted with acclaim, elevating Smith to the first rank of intellectual figures. A period as tutor of the young Duke of Buccleuch gave him both the opportunity to meet some of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in Europe as well as an income that freed him from his onerous academic duties. This allowed Smith upon his return to concentrate on writing his most famous book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a revolutionary text that was nonetheless intended to be only one part of his much larger project - a project that was left incomplete by the time of his death in 1790.

With his persuasive reinterpretation and readable style, Phillipson has produced what is likely to be the best study of Smith's life and times for decades to come. His account challenges the traditional image of Smith as an absent-minded academic and turns him instead into a dynamic teacher who was a part of the vibrant intellectual world of the 18th century. The book's main flaw - an absence of any real examination of Smith's personality and daily life - is understandable given the limits of his material, but it does limit his achievement by failing to give a fully rounded portrait of the philosopher as a person. Nevertheless, this book is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand Smith ideas and their development within the context of the era, ideas that still are used to inform the world in which we live today.

I thought this book would have a million reviews, but since not let me give it another fiver. I was just astonished at how Smith's grand worldview is in fact a projection of his own provincial, very historically constrained culture. The author, while emphasising this fact, is oddly (seemingly, reading between the lines)still inclined to view it as somehow objectively correct as a model of human behavior. Phillipson's mastery of the Scottish Enlightenment is absolutely complete, what a great tour. This is a must read for anyone interested in the humanities.

The owl of wisdom flies at night. After it's over, then we understand. About capitalism, that's the feeling I get from this book.

Like some other readers I'm finding this book a bit heavy going because of the subject matter. It's not a standard biography as Adam Smith deliberately left little information about himself behind and little is known directly about his life from other sources. It is about his intellectual development as far as it can be traced through the environment he grew up and worked in and the people he associated with. So it is a book about ideas rather than a person. I actually think it is very well written, just on a subject that some, including myself, will find hard to grasp. I'm going to finish this and then read his book on David Hume to compare.

Big minus is that my kindle edition has not downloaded any of the illustrations that are supposed to accompany the text. That's really annoying!

I've enjoyed many biographies on financial "giants" and this book simply didn't have the punch or interesting facts to make Adam Smith's history and experiences come to life. Not to fault the author too much, Smith simply didn't record personal events well and the amount of information about him is smaller than some other finance pioneers. I did enjoy reading about David Hume's influence on Smith and this book did motivate me to read Adam Smith's two masterpieces again. In summary, not sure I would spend my time reading this book.

Rich and plentiful research and scholarship make this book a treasure for academics. For the semi-intellectual, there is just too much of it. What I wanted was an overview of why Adam Smith is important, not a history of the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith is almost buried in all the facts at the author's fingertips. A more focused treatment would be a vast improvement for most people, but then, I don't think that was the author's goal.

Beautifully written biography of a key father of the modern world. So well done I bought and read Adam Smith's two great books as well.