Топик по английскому языку "Adam Smith - Адам Смит"

Топик Adam Smith - Адам Смит


Early Life Unfortunately, much is known about Smith's thought than about his life. Though the exact date of his birth is unknown, he was baptized on June 5,1723, in Kikcaldy, a small (population 1,500) but thriving fishing village near Edinburgh, the son by second marriage of Adam Smith, comptroller of customs at Kikcaldy, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of a substantial landowner. Of Smith's childhood nothing is known other than that he received his elementary schooling in Kirkcaldy and that at the age of four years he was said to have been carried off by gypsies. Pursuits was mounted, and young Adam was abandoned by his captors. "He would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy" , commented his principal biographer. 

At the age of 14, in 1737, Smith entered the university of Glasgow, already remarkable as a center of what was to become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. There, he was deeply influenced by Francis Hutcheson, a famous professor of moral philosophy from whose economic and philosophical views he was later to diverge but whose magnetic character seems to have been a main shaping force in Smith's development. Graduating in 1740, Smith won a scholarship (the Snell Exhibition) and travelled on horseback to Oxford, where he stayed at Balliol College. Compared to the stimulating atmosphere of Glasgow, Oxford was an educational desert. His years there were spent largely in self-education, from which Smith obtained a firm grasp of both classical and contemporary philosophy. 

Returning to his home after an absence of six years, Smith cast about for suitable employment. The connections of his mother's family, together with the support of the jurist and philosopher Lord Henry Kames, resulted in an opportunity to give a series of public lectures in Edinburgh - a form of education then much in vogue in the prevailing spirit of "improvement" . 

The lectures, which ranged over a wide variety of subjects from rhetoric history and economics, made a deep impression on some of Smith's notable contemporaries. They also had a marked influence on Smith's own career, for in 1751, at the age of 27, he was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow, from which post he transferred in 1752 to the more remunerative professorship of moral philosophy, a subject that embraced the related fields of natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy. 

Glasgow Smith then entered upon a period of extraordinary creativity, combined with a social and intellectual life that he afterward described as "by far the happiest, and most honourable period of my life" . During the week he lectured daily from 7: 30 to 8: 30 am and again thrice weekly from 11 am to noon, to classes of up to 90 students, aged 14 and 16. (Although his lectures were presented in English, following the precedent of Hutcheson, rather than in Latin, the level of sophistication for so young an audience today strikes one as extraordinarily demanding.) Afternoons were occupied with university affairs in which Smith played an active role, being elected dean of faculty in 1758; his evenings were spent in the stimulating company of Glasgow society. 


The Theory of Moral Sentiments In 1759 Smith Published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory lays the psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built. In it Smith described the principles of "human nature ", which, together with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well as social behavior, could be deduced. 

One question in particular interested Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This was a problem that had attracted Smith's teacher Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question was the source of the ability to form moral judgments, including judgments on one's own behavior, in the face of the seemingly overriding passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith's answer, at considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an "inner man" who plays the role of the "impartial spectator" , approving or condemning our own and others' actions with a voice impossible to disregard. (The theory may sound less naive if the question is reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are socialized through the superego.) The thesis of the impartial spectator, however, conceals a more important aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as created by their ability to reason and - no less important - by their capacity for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often "led by an invisible hand... without knowing it, without intending it, to advance the interest of the society." It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations, which followed it.






The Wealth of Nations Despite its renown as the first great work in political economy. The Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of the philosophical theme begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The ultimate problem to which Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions and the "impartial spectator' explicated in Moral Sentiments in terms of the single individual - works its effects in the larger arena of history itself, both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the immediate characteristics of the stage of history typical of Smith's own day. 

The answer to this problem enters in Book 5, in which Smith outlines he four main stages of organization through which society is impelled, unless blocked by deficiencies of resources, wars, or bad policies of government: the original "rude' state of hunters, a second stage of nomadic agriculture, a third stage of feudal or manorial "farming" , and a fourth and final stage of commercial interdependence. 

It should be noted that each of these stages is accompanied by institutions suited to its needs. For example, in the age of the huntsman, "there is scar any established magistrate or any regular administration of justice. "With the advent of flocks there emerges a more complex form of social organization, comprising not only "formidable" armies but the central institution of private property with its indispensable buttress of law and order as well. It is the very essence of Smith's thought that he recognized this institution, whose social usefulness he never doubted, as an instrument for the protection of privilege, rather than one to be justified in terms of natural law: "Civil government," he wrote, "so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." Finally, Smith describes the evolution through feudalism into a stage of society requiring new institutions such as market-determined rather than guild-determined wages and free rather than government-constrained enterprise. This later became known as laissez-faire capitalism; Smith called it the system of perfect liberty. 

There is an obvious resemblance between this succession of changes in the material basis of production, each bringing its requisite alterations in the superstructure of laws and civil institutions, and the Marxian conception of history. Though the resemblance is indeed remarkable, there is also a crucial difference: in the Marxian scheme the engine of evolution is ultimately the struggle between contending classes, whereas in Smith's philosophical history the primal moving agency is "human nature "driven by the desire for self-betterment and guided (or misguided) by the faculties of reason. 

Society and "the invisible hand" The theory of historical evolution, although it is perhaps the binding conception of The Wealth of Nations, is subordinated within the work itself to a detailed description of how the "invisible hand" actually operates within the commercial, or final, stage of society.

This becomes the focus of Books I and II. In which Smith undertakes to elucidate two questions. The first is how a system of perfect liberty, operating under the drives and constraints of human nature and intelligently designed institutions, will give rise to an orderly society. The question, which had already been considerably elucidated by earlier writers, required both an explanation of the underlying orderliness in the pricing of individual commodities and an explanation of the "laws" that regulated the division of the entire "wealth" of the nation (which Smith saw as its annual production of goods and services) among the three great claimant classes - laborers, landlords, and manufacturers. 

This orderliness, as would be expected, was produced by the interaction of the two aspects of human nature, its response to its passions and its susceptibility to reason and sympathy. But whereas The Theory of Moral Sentiments had relied mainly on the presence of the "inner man" to provide the necessary restraints to private action, in The Wealth of Nations one finds an institutional mechanism that acts to reconcile the disruptive possibilities inherent in a blind obedience to the passions alone. This protective mechanism is competition, an arrangement by which the passionate desire for bettering one's condition - a "desire that comes with United States from the womb, and never leaves United States until we go into the grave "- is turned into a socially beneficial agency by pitting one person's drive for self-betterment against another's. 



Smith's explanation of economic growth, although not neatly assembled in one part of The Wealth of Nations, is quite clear. The score of it lies in his emphasis on the division of labour (itself an outgrowth of the "natural" propensity to trade) as the source of society's capacity to increase its productivity. The Wealth of Nations opens with a famous passage describing a pin factory in which 10 persons, by specialising in various tasks, turn out 48,000 pins a day, compared with the few, perhaps only 1, that each could have produced alone. 


The drive for accumulation, however, brings problems. The manufacturer who accumulates stock needs more laborers (since labour-saving technology has no place in Smith's scheme) , and in attempting to hire them he bids up their wages above their "natural" price. 

Consequently his profits begin to fall, and the process of accumulation is in danger of ceasing. But now there enters an ingenious mechanism for continuing the advance. In bidding up the price of labour, the manufacturer inadvertently sets into motion a process that increases the supply of labour, for "the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men." Specifically, Smith had in mind the effect of higher wages in lessening child mortality. Under the influence of a larger labour supply, the wage rise is moderated and profits are maintained; the new supply of laborers offers a continuing opportunity for the manufacturer to introduce a further division of labour and thereby add to the system's growth. 

Here then was a "machine" for growth - a machine that operated with all the reliability of the Newtonian system with which Smith was quite familiar. Unlike the Newtonian system, however, Smith's growth machine did not depend for its operation on the laws of nature alone. Human nature drove it, and human nature was a complex rather than a simple force. Thus, the wealth of nations would grow only if individuals, through their governments, did not inhibit this growth by catering to the pleas for special privilege that would prevent the competitive system from exerting its begin effect. Consequently, much of The Wealth of Nations, especially Book IV, is a polemic against the restrictive measures of the "mercantile system" that favoured monopolies at home and abroad. Smith's system of "natural liberty" , he is careful to point out, accords with the best interests of all but will not be put into practice if government is entrusted to, or heeds, the "mean rapacity, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind." 




Beyond the few facts of his life, which can be embroidered only in detail, exasperatingly little is known about the man. Smith never married, and almost nothing is known of his personal side. Moreover, it was the custom of his time to destroy rather than to preserve the private files if illustrious men, with the unhappy result that much of Smith's unfinished work, as well as his personal papers, was destroyed (some as late as 1942) . Only one portrait of Smith survives, a profile medallion by Tassie; it gives a glimpse of the older man with his somewhat heavy-lidded eyes, aquiline nose, and a hint of protrusive lower lip. "I am a beau in nothing but my books," Smith once told a friend to whom he was showing his library of some 3,000 volumes. 

From various accounts, he was also a man of many peculiarities, which included a stumbling manner of speech (until he had warmed to his subject) , a gait described as "vermicular" / and above all an extraordinary and even comic absence of mind. On the other hand, contemporaries wrote of a smile of "inexpressive benignity," and of his political tact and dispatch in managing the sometimes acerbic business of the Glasgow faculty. 



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