Intellectual infl uences on Adam Smith’s thinking

Abstract

Adam Smith was one of the most stellar figures of that astonishing period of intellectual ferment known as the Scottish Enlightenment. He was also the creator of modern Western Economics. In the words of Donald Winch, probably the foremost Adam Smith scholar of our time, Smith’s second book, The Wealth of Nations, was «the fountainhead of classical political economy». Although Smith did have significant predecessors, he well deserves his reputation as the father of modern economics. No doubt someone else, in time, would have arrived at his insights if he had not come along. But he did, and his contribution was enormous. Nearly two hundred fifty years later, the consequences are still with us. They remain of firstmagnitude importance. What spurred Smith’s thinking? Where did his crucial insights come from? The historian Edmund Morgan (Morgan, 2013) observed that it is impossible to know why people acted as they did; it is even harder to know why they thought as they did. Even so, the object of this paper is to speculate about the key intellectual influences guiding Smith’s thinking. Section I begins by clarifying the central content of Smith’s foundational contribution to economics. Section II enumerates four key influences on Smith’s thinking, some familiar but others less so. Section III briefly returns to the question of why all this is so important today, commenting on the lasting legacy of Smith’s thinking for the discipline of economics.