Adam Smith

Kirkcaldy, a small port on the Fife coast, produced the author of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith was baptised there in June 1723, read moral philosophy at Glasgow under Francis Hutcheson, went on to Balliol College, Oxford, on a Snell Exhibition, and returned to Glasgow as professor of logic in 1751 and took the moral philosophy chair the year after. The Theory of Moral Sentiments grew out of those lectures and appeared in 1759, arguing that moral judgement rests on sympathy and on an imagined impartial spectator. From 1764 he tutored the young Duke of Buccleuch through France, meeting Voltaire and François Quesnay, and the pension attached to that post paid for the decade of work behind the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. He became a Commissioner of Customs in Scotland in 1778 and died at Panmure House in Edinburgh in July 1790. He revised the Moral Sentiments until the end of his life and is thought to have rated it the better of the two.