ABSTRACT
In 1754 Adam Smith had not yet published a work of argument, but in that year he delivered his first oration. The occasion was the founding of the Select Society of Edinburgh, a society intended to promote ‘philosophical inquiry, and the improvement of the members in the art of speaking’.2 The fifteen original members of the Society did not mean entirely to keep among themselves. Along with schedules for admitting new members, organizing debates and presenting prizes for schemes of improvement in different fields of Scottish life, there was also a publishing project. At the suggestion of Alexander Wedderburn, some of the founders secretly agreed to produce a new magazine for the general public. The authorship of texts was to be kept anonymous and thus unrelated to the activities of the Society and its public voice. What is more, the editorial project was itself kept secret from one of the Society’s founders, David Hume, presumably so as to avoid his participation and the polemical reactions that might thereby be aroused in the public. This paper on Smith’s sources sets out from his formal (though anonymous) beginnings as an author in the pages of that magazine, the Edinburgh Review, in 1755 and 1756. It looks inside the world of Smith’s intellectual experience, towards one of those essays in particular and then at the opening of the Wealth of Nations, in order to gauge the way in which Smith turned the occasion into a creative experience. Smith belonged to a variety of clubs, he was a practised lecturer, but it is here that his writing career began.
