Adam Smith is famously difficult to pin down when it comes to his views on religion. One reason for this is the absence of any student notes on that part of his moral philosophy lectures that covered natural religion. This paper attempts to re- construct an outline of what Smith may have covered in these lectures by examining the circumstantial evidence available to us. The paper examines the...
In the Wealth of Nations, Smith points out that because of the expansion of the division of labour, “Every man (…) becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society” (L. I, c. 4). The understanding and implications of these ideas about the merchant’s job and the idea of “commercial society” has had, among Smith's scholars, different...
Chapter XIII of John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith recounts many of the most salient events and encounters during the middle phase of Adam Smith’s Grand Tour--specifically, the time between Smith’s departure from Toulouse (about October 1765) and his arrival in Paris a few months later (at the end of January or beginning of February 1766). Although Rae devotes only 2000 words to this part of...
