The Scottish Enlightenment: Smith's Intellectual World
The remarkable intellectual environment that produced Adam Smith and shaped his thinking about markets, morality, and human nature.
Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Enlightenment
In the mid-18th century, Scotland — a small, relatively poor country on Europe's periphery — produced an extraordinary concentration of intellectual talent. David Hume in philosophy, James Watt in engineering, Joseph Black in chemistry, Adam Ferguson in sociology, and Adam Smith in economics all worked within a few miles and a few decades of each other.
The Scottish Enlightenment was distinguished by its practical orientation. Where French philosophes debated abstract principles, Scottish thinkers asked how societies actually work. They studied human nature empirically, investigated the origins of institutions, and sought to understand how complex social orders emerge from individual actions without central direction.
Adam Smith (1723-1790) studied at Glasgow under Francis Hutcheson — who emphasized that morality was rooted in sentiment, not reason — and then at Oxford, which he found intellectually stagnant. He returned to Scotland to teach moral philosophy at Glasgow, where his lectures covered theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and what he called 'police' — the management of a nation's economy.