ABSTRACT
When I switched from law to economics in my third year as an undergraduate I knew very little about Adam Smith. I had heard that he was a great economic theorist, perhaps one of the greatest, but I was wholly ignorant of the breadth of the subjects-moral sciences and jurisprudence as well as economics-on which he lectured and wrote, and of his strong empirical streak, obtained from his wide reading in history, his travels in France and Switzerland, his discussions with Glasgow businessmen and his own acute powers of observation. I also did not realize that, despite his somewhat austere appearance, he seems to have been of an optimistic disposition and generally speaking to have been on the side of the underdog.
