In the prologue to Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, historian Nicholas Phillipson acknowledges the difficulty of writing about a man who left little to write about. A fastidious author and scholar who disdained any prospect of misinterpretation, Smith had his letters, notes, and unfinished manuscripts destroyed before his death in 1790. As opposed to such literary contemporaries as Diderot and Voltaire, who wrote letters with a passion that transcended mere communication, Smith was a notoriously bad correspondent, sending letters only when business was at hand. For a philosopher who dedicated his life to studying man’s inherent sociability, Smith cherished his own privacy, spending most of his life with his mother in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow, away from the social and political spotlights of London and Paris. With a minimum of conventional biographical material available, Phillipson admits that “there is a general lack of visibility in Smith’s life.” (In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik uses similar imagery when he describes Adam Smith as “a shadowy figure in a clear light.”)  

And yet, Phillipson is neither frustrated nor deterred by the superficial banality of his subject’s life. Rather, he convincingly argues that Smith was one of the most probing and influential intellectuals in an era defined by a flourishing of ideas. “His biography”, Phillipson asserts, “must be, first and foremost, an intellectual biography, one which traces the development of his mind and character through the making of those [extant] texts, one that is set in a country that was generating its own forms of Enlightenment.” The book thus proves to be a testament to the tremendous insight and erudition which intellectual biographies are capable of. Rather than dwell on the apparently mundane and static details of Smith’s life, Phillipson brings to life the mind of a great man with great ideas, as well as the vibrant historical context in which that mind developed: the Scottish Enlightenment.

Born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Adam Smith grew up in the middling Scottish intelligentsia, raised by a widowed mother whose husband had died six months before Adam’s birth. Located ten miles north of Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy was a small but burgeoning town in the early 18^th century. A focal point of linen production and trade after the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, Kirkcaldy would provide Smith with his first glimpse of the dynamic sociability of the marketplace.

Although Phillipson makes sure to track Smith as his academic career takes him from Kirkcaldy to Glasgow, from Oxford to Edinburgh, from Paris back to Kirkcaldy, the focal point of the biography is always the intellectual development of both his subject and the age in which he lived. Phillipson discusses Smith’s reading in his youth of Epictetus and the Stoics, from whom he learned the social value of restraint and inner peace; his tutelage in Glasgow under Frances Hutcheson, who upheld man’s intrinsic sympathy and “moral sense”; his discussions in Paris with Quesnay and the French Physiocrats, who further emphasized the centrality of economics to the understanding of human nature; and his lifelong friendship with the Scottish naturalist and skeptic, David Hume, whose belief in the interconnectivity of industry, knowledge, and humanity would most profoundly shape The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.

With Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, Nicholas Phillipson has written what the New York Times describes as an “unabashedly intellectual biography.” Although initially surprising, considering the subject is often considered to be the first and most eloquent proponent of free-market economics, Phillipson’s biography masterfully restores Adam Smith to the philosophical context in which he lived and worked. This book illustrates time and again that Smith was not merely a man interested in the exchange of material goods, but rather an intellectual interested in the moral, social and philosophical forces that define human relationships.