Occasionally it's a worthy endeavor to pay a moment's tribute to the eminent Scot for whom this site is named, and in the on-line world there are few better starting points than The Adam Smith Institute (London). There you can find a highly abbreviated list of Adam Smith quotes, search the text of The Wealth of Nations, browse their very own blog, and even read a fascinating timeline of his life.
For example, did you know that among his contemporaries—many of them acquaintances if not friends—were:
- Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Burke, John Wesley, David Hume, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Jethro Tull, Alexander Pope, Benjamin Franklin (and all the American Founding Fathers, for that matter), Charles Louis de Montesquieu, William Pitt, Joseph Priestley, William Blake, Captain Cook, Sir William Blackstone, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, James Watt, Jane Austen, Edward Gibbon, and Dr. Samuel Johnson; and noteworthy events during his lifetime included:
- The invention and subsequent refinement of the steam engine; the discovery of New South Wales; the American and French Revolutions; the founding of the British Museum, Covent Garden Opera, and the Royal Academy of Sciences; and publication of Blackstone's Commentaries and the first edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica.
Of more intellectual substance is a review by Leo Rosten of The Wealth of Nations, which begins as follows:
"It is a clumsy, sprawling, elephantine book. The facts are suffocating, the digressions interminable, the pace as maddening as the title is uninviting: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But it is one of the towering achievements of the human mind: a masterwork of observation and analysis, of ingenious correlations, inspired theorizings, and the most persistent and powerful cerebration."
Alternatively, try a delightful 1994 "interview" with the master himself.
For the last word, see this.
Now get back to work.
September 26, 2005 2:02 PM
Leave a comment