Adam Smith /1723 – 1790/
Adam Smith gave the first scientific explanation of the working of the capitalistic market economy in the conditions of a free competition. For the first time in the history of economic thought Adam Smith worked out a complete economic theory that corresponds exactly to the interests of the developing industrial capital. The interesting is that he made it in the time when a men organizational form of the large scale industry (едрото производство) was the manufacture and the manual labor was predominant. Adam Smith was born in a small village in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. There his widowed mother raised him until he entered the university of Glasgow at age 14 as was the usual practice on scholarship. He later attended Balliol college of Oxford, graduating with an extensive knowledge of European literature and an enduring contempt for English schools. He returned home and after delivering a series of well-received lectures was made first chair of logic (1751), then chair of moral philosophy (1752) at Glasgow University. He left Academia in 1764 to tutor the young duke of Buccleuch. For over 2 years they lived and traveled throughout France and into Switzerland – an experience that brought Smith in contact with contemporaries Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. With the life pension he had earned in the service of the duke Smith retired to his birthplace of Kirkcaldy to write “The Wealth of Nations”. It was published in 1776. In 1778 he was appointed commissioner of customs. This job put him in the uncomfortable position of having to curb smuggling which in “The Wealth of Nations” he had upheld as a legitimate activity in the face of unnatural legislation.
Adam Smith never married. He died in Edinburg on June, 19th 1790.
1. Methodology
The most distinctive feature of the methodology of Smith was the dualism. The reason for it was that Smith did not manage to