Life of Adam Smith

Adam Smith wasn't always 'the father of economics.' He was once a shy Scottish boy, raised in Kirkcaldy after losing his father at three, nurtured by his mother into a brilliant but absent-minded scholar. This biography traces the formation of one of history's most consequential thinkers, from his early education under the Kirkcaldy minister who taught him to love Cicero, through his years at Glasgow University where he absorbed the Scottish Enlightenment's radical confidence in human reason, to his formative years in Oxford and the London coffee houses where economics was still called 'political economy' and had not yet become a discipline. John Rae, writing in the late 19th century with access to sources now lost, reconstructs the relationships and experiences that shaped Smith's moral philosophy and economic insights. He shows us the mentors, the friendships, the intellectual currents that made Smith's later work possible. This is not hagiography but rigorous intellectual biography: it asks how a quiet, sometimes awkward philosopher came to see markets and human behavior with such startling clarity. The answer lies in the particular world that made him: the Scotland of the Enlightenment, where questions of morality and commerce were intertwined, and where a young man's mind was encouraged to range freely across disciplines.