Review: An Enlightening Life of Adam Smith

Abstract

Nicholas Phillipson calls his Life of Adam Smith 'first and foremost an intellectual biography', partly due to lack of documentation about him, compared to other great Enlightenment figures, but mainly because he is intent on going beyond previous biographers in adopting Smith's own way of thinking as a philosopher and how it developed in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and Hanoverian Britain. Unlike in the case of Hume, even Smith's letters are inadequate for the task. Not only did Smith make sure that many of his letters and research notes were destroyed, but as his biographer bluntly states, '(h)e was himself a notoriously bad correspondent who only wrote letters when there was business to be done or when he was goaded into it by his friends.' But Smith's published writings, including his two celebrated masterpieces of Enlightenment reasoning, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, enable Phillipson to delve very deeply into Smith's mental make-up, indeed to reconstruct in meticulous detail how he arrived at his vision or, in Smith's own terms, 'conjectural history', of the emerging post-feudal modern world. And he does so primarily by paying close attention to Smith's language. Smith wrote in a conversational and often aphoristic style which reinforced both his logical argument and rhetorical strategy.