Adam Smith

By Nicholas Phillipson,

Book cover of Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

Book description

Adam Smith is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas - such as the 'Invisible Hand' of the market - have become icons of the modern world. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Adam Smith as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Phillipson’s book is, for us, the best intellectual biography about Smith.

It provides a balanced overall account of Smith’s economics and wider thought and traces their origins and evolution back to the places where Smith lived. It is a very fine read indeed. Quite possibly it is the most insightful book yet on Smith’s life and work.

It is a must-read for Smith scholars. It is also an important corrigendum to the many accounts that describe Smith as an absent-minded professor, somewhat detached from the world. Phillipson argues convincingly that Smith, while he may have had Asperger’s, was a man…

From Andreas and Benoit's list on the Adam and smith of modern economics.

This is a scholarly book written by one of the leading commentators on Smith and his time. In a fluently written manner it combines in an enlightening way an account of Smith’s life, as it unfolds in his writings, lectures, correspondence, and friendships, with an engagement with his ideas.

What impressed me was how he steered a course between very detailed biography (which exists) and close detailed dissection of the works (of which there are many), a task he accomplished by providing a deft summary account of Smith’s work alongside a deeply informed account of his milieu.

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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Book cover of The Routledge Guidebook to Smith's Wealth of Nations
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