Adam Smith was a distinguished man in his native Scotland, especially in Edinburgh, where he taught not economics, since the subject did not exist yet, but moral philosophy. But as a friend and guest at dinner parties, he could be trying. When he spoke, which was rarely, he spoke at interminable length, which was embarrassing to guests and hosts alike. One remembered him as “the most absent man in company that I ever saw, Moving his Lips and talking to himself, and Smiling, in the midst of large Company's.” One time at table he suddenly began excoriating a leading Scottish politician; someone pointed out that the man's closest relative was sitting within earshot. “Deil care, deil care,” Smith grumbled, “it's all true.”
Today Smith's reputation as the prophet of free market economics, and of the “invisible hand” of self-interest guiding the wealth creation those markets produce, has swollen almost to the point of caricature. Jesse Norman, a prominent Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party in Britain and the author of Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, now offers us a biography of “the father of economics,” as Adam Smith'sthe subtitle dubs Scotland's most famous thinker.
Read Full Article »
