Adam Smith :: Philosophers Philosophy Economists Essays

Adam smith The British philosopher and economist Adam Smith was innate(p) in kirkcaldy, Scotland. He was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. In 1751 he became a professor at Glasgow. There he wrote The Theory of Moral thinking in 1759. This philosophical work gained Smith an appointment in 1764 as tutor of the young duke of Buccleuch. The tutoring took Smith to France, where he started writing The Wealth of Nations in 1776. It was the first complete work on political economy. The book discusses the family relationship between broaddom and order, analyzes economic processes, and attacks the British mercantile systems limits on free trade. All three aspects are woven together to create a unified social theory. In France Smith met and associated with m either of the leading Continental philosophers of the physiocratic school, which based its political and economic doctrines on the supremacy of natural law, wealth, and order. He was specially influenced by the French philosophers Francois Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, whose theories Smith later adapted in part to form a basis for his own. The book dealt with the basic difficulty of how social order and human progress can be viable in a society where individuals follow their own self-interests. Smith argued that this individualism led to order and progress. In order to make money, people stupefy things that other people are willing to buy. Buyers spend money for those things that they choose or want most. When buyers and sellers meet in the market, a pattern of yield develops that upshots in social harmony. Smith said that all this would happen without any conscious control or direction, as if by an invisible hand. Smith also believed that labor, not land or money, was both the source and the terminal measure of value. He said that wages depended on the basic postulate of workers, and rent on the productivity of land, Profits, he said, were the difference between selling prices and the cost of labor and rent. Smith said profits would be employ to expand production. This expansion would in turn create more jobs, and the guinea pig income would grow. Smith believed that free trade and a self-regulating economy would result in social progress. He criticized the British governments high tariffs and other limits on individual freedom in trade.