History of Economic Thought - Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations

Main articles: The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke See also: Industrial revolution and Anders Chydenius

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is popularly seen as the father of modern political economy. His publication of the An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 happened to coincide not only with the American Revolution, shortly before the Europe wide upheavals of the French Revolution, but also the dawn of a new industrial revolution that allowed more wealth to be created on a larger scale than ever before. Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, whose first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He argued in it that people's ethical systems develop through personal relations with other individuals, that right and wrong are sensed through others' reactions to one's behaviour. This gained Smith more popularity than his next work, The Wealth of Nations, which the general public initially ignored. Yet Smith's political economic magnum opus was successful in circles that mattered.

Read more about this topic:  History Of Economic Thought

Famous quotes containing the words adam smith, adam, smith and/or wealth:

    “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.”
    —Adam Smith (1723–1790)

    “I wish you would not let him plunge into a ôvortex of
    Dissipation.ö I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the
    expression; it is such thorough novel slang—and so old, that I
    dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.”
    —Jane Austen (1775–1817)

    “The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.”
    —Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)

    “We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Crsus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)