ABSTRACT
The fame of Adam Smith in his own lifetime rested as much on his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) as on his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), but the inuence of the latter book in after times has been beyond comparison the greater. The author cannot indeed claim to have created economical study in England. His friend Hume, following up Locke and Petty and many pamphleteers, had done good preparatory work; and Hutcheson’s lectures at Glasgow, to say nothing of his Moral Philosophy (1747)1 had probably an inuence on Adam Smith’s ways of thinking. There had been considerable public interest in economical subjects, towards the middle of the century, whether through Hutcheson and Hume, or through French inuences. Foulis and other Scotch publishers had reprinted the tracts and treatises of Gee (1750), Law (1750), Mun (1755), and others, as well as Mores Utopia (1743). Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws had been translated for them (1750). Original treatises were fewer; but Sir James Steuart, Jacobite and Mercantilist, had written in 1767 an Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy, being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations, in which he had covered the ground of political economy in the modern sense. Complaint has sometimes been made that Adam Smith borrowed from Steuart without acknowledgment.2 It was, however, to the philosophers of his native country rather than the economists that Adam Smith was indebted; and Steuart, though he wrote a little on philosophy, was hardly a philosopher. Adam Ferguson, himself an eminent writer on political philosophy, says that the author of the Moral Sentiments was the man from whom was expected “a theory of national economy equal to what has ever appeared on any subject of science whatever.”3
