Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and broke new ground for political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish, Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The second, typically given a shorter title of The Wealth of Nations, is regarded as his work of genius and the primary contemporary work of economics. It earned him a massive reputation and turned out to be one of the highly significant works on economics ever printed. Smith is extensively quoted as the father of modern economics and capitalism.
Smith took up social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he released a booming chain of public lectures at Edinburgh, which brought about his collaboration with David Hume in the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith acquired a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and at this time he authored and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He later embraced a tutoring position that let him to journey all over Europe, where he brushed elbows with other intellectual leaders of his day. When he got home, Smith used his next ten years writing.
In 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, Great Britain was in the midst of a colossal sovereign debt crisis that wouldn’t again be experienced until the 21st Century when U.S. got to face a swiftly-increasing $12.4 trillion national debt, soon mounting to 100% of the Gross Domestic Product contained in a mere few years. The last chapter of his tour de force, “Of Public Debts,” was committed to convincing the British Parliament of the tragedy the British Empire was faced with. And regrettably, they didn’t pay attention.
Reading through it now, one may simply construe that Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and Enlightenment political philosopher, was in fact a time-traveler who had foreknowledge of the catastrophe the world faces today. Since, the crisis he superbly expresses, haunting detail is, almost to the letter, unmusically evocative of the mishap that now terrorizes the economic survival of the modern world and threatens to bind upcoming generations for decades to come.
If truth be told however, there is nothing new under the sun. The crisis the United States faces in this day and age and concerned European debtor-nations like Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy with the growing danger of a national debt default, is merely the most recent case in the realistic and alas, oft-repeated economic history of the world. And Smith saw it coming.
