《旅游管理专业英语》（第二版） 讲义 Lesson01 Smith, Adam.docVIP

Adam Smith 1723-1790. British philosopher and economist, whose celebrated treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations国民财富的性质和原因的研究was the first serious attempt to study the nature of capital and the historical development of industry and commerce among European nations. Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. From 1748 to 1751, he gave lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres in Edinburgh. During this period, a close association developed between Smith and the Scottish philosopher David Hume that lasted until the latters death in 1776 and contributed much to the development of Smiths ethical and economic theories. See also Thematic Essay: British Political and Social Thought. Smith was appointed professor of logic in 1751 and then professor of moral philosophy in 1752 at the University of Glasgow. He later systematized the ethical teachings he had propounded in his lectures and published them in his first major work, Theory of Moral Sentiments 道德情操论(1759). In 1763 he resigned from the university to accept the position of tutor to Henry Scott, 3rd duke of Buccleuch, whom he accompanied on an 18-month tour of France and Switzerland. Smith met and associated with many of the leading Continental philosophers of the physiocratic school, which based its political and economic doctrines on the supremacy of natural law, wealth, and order. He was particularly influenced by the French philosophers Fran?ois Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, whose theories Smith later adapted in part to form a basis for his own. From 1766 to 1776, he lived in Kirkcaldy preparing The Wealth of Nations 国富论(1776). Smith was appointed commissioner of customs in Edinburgh in 1778, serving in this capacity until his death. In 1787 he was also named lord rector of the Smiths Wealth of Nations represents the first serious attempt in the history of economic thought to divorce the study of political economy from the