2023-08-13 13:00:15
A Nobel Prize, a director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), researchers from all over the world… The University of Glasgow is not the center of the world, nor even that of contemporary economic thought, but, for a week, it found herself daydreaming about when she was the beacon of 18th century Scottish lightse century. From June 5 to 10, it celebrated with dignity the tercentenary of the birth of its most illustrious pupil, Adam Smith.
“When I was a kid in Edinburgh in the 1950s and 1960s, we didn’t talk about him anymorerecalls Angus Deaton, Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, in 2015. He is now back to being what he is, one of Scotland’s greatest thinkers. »
The legacy of the inventor of political economy suddenly becomes more alive than ever. The former Chief Economist and now Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, Gita Gopinath, does not say otherwise when she compares the invention of the steam engine by James Watt, at the time of the release of the Research into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776), Adam Smith’s landmark work, to the emergence of artificial intelligence today. “How would the author of The Wealth of Nations faced with this new “invisible hand”? »she wonders, in her conference in Glasgow.
A man of enlightenment
Three hundred years old and still alive, Adam Smith! He laid the foundations of the queen discipline of modern times, economics, and inspired his illustrious successors, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and many others. But he was also a philosopher and a man of the Enlightenment. He rubbed shoulders with Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Turgot. A moralist, he hated wealth that corrupts the mind. And yet, as an economist, he made it the engine of progress and prosperity. A duality which will never leave him and which the German thinkers of his time had called « Das Adam Smith Problem ».
The story begins on June 5, 1723, in Kirkcaldy, a small town lost in the Scottish mists, on the north bank of the immense estuary of the River Forth, which comes to lick, to the south, the citadel of Edinburgh. His mother, Margaret, from a family of officers, was a widow when she gave birth to little Adam. Mother and son will never leave each other. He is a frail child with a quick but distracted mind, punctuated by strange absences and accustomed to talking to himself continuously. He is a good student, at the same time curious, observant and endowed with a great memory.
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