The Scottish Enlightenment

Making Adam Smith

The ideas that influenced Adam Smith

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The Scottish Enlightenment was overwhelmingly sane, a world of decency and common sense.

Adam Smith would be horrified and angry to hear his name invoked by the greedy and selfish. He was not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, because it did not exist in his lifetime. He would have considered Social Darwinists, and Ayn Rand in particular, barbaric.


Hopefully the historians can rescue Smith from the ignominy of the market fundamentalists and economists.

The many apparently 'informed' commentators who hold forth on Smith's supposed free market doctrine can do so only by choosing to ignore the chapters in Wealth Of Nations which call for government subsidies, defence against monopoly, and taxes...

The same said commentators also studiously fail to read Theory Of Moral Sentiments...which is meant to be read in conjunction with WoN.

Along with Nietzsche, Smith maybe one of the most misunderstood, and quoted out of context philosopher of the modern age.


The great man would have been have great as Jesus if he walked 15 miles to Dunfermline wrapped only in his thoughts and his dressing gown. The Forth Bridge wasn't built then!

Eusebius Pamphili

"Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, “turned the tables” on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that society enslaved man to vanity and ambition. Smith argued, instead, that society taught man to be good."

~Both opinions are opposite sides of the same coin motivated by the same urges. At the heart of it we all want to be liked. We want to be loved, respected and admired. These drive us to seek power fame and money. How many people who want to run a fortune 500 want to do so for the responsibility it brings? No human is born wanting to fire people with children. Why would any person want to be the president when it ultimately means you cannot please everyone and you are doomed to fail more than you succeed?

The urge to fit in drives many in our age to get a tattoo. When asked why they got the tattoo they'll promptly tell you, "to be an individual or to show how they don't care what others think of them", when nothing can be further from the truth. The urge to fit in has driven many a youth to rebel and drop out from society. The motivation for such rebellion being the American aspiration of individualism as is embodied in the bad boy archetype. What’s ironic is that the only reason we’re driven toward individualism is because of a collective hubris telling us to do so.

On the other side of the coin lies the desire to earn admiration and accomplishment through the standards set forth by society. We all long to be told by parents, teachers, mentors and friends how great we are. At conflict are the conscious and subconscious within us.



For all the advocacy of free trade, Adam Smith "spent the last years of his life as a commissioner of customs, administering 800 acts of parliament" which restricted imports?

Whatever the free trade theory, mercantilist practice determines that to export is more blessed than to import, and trading partners beware.
A clear case of do as I say, rather than do as I do.


...And, more useless facts: he only used the term 'invisible hand' 3 times - only once referring to it when discussing economics, and once describing astronomy. He could barely speak French, and never once used the term Laissez-Faire.

Smith also lived in Kirkcaldy - c.15 miles from the Dunfermline.


'The great man once walked 15 miles to Dunfermline wrapped only in his thoughts and his dressing gown, according to an early biographer' Quite.



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