Adam Smith

Craig Smith is Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book is Adam Smith (Polity, 2020).

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is often still considered narrowly as the “Father of Classical Economics”, but if we take a broader view of his lectures and writings, he emerges as one of the most ambitious and methodologically sophisticated thinkers of the European Enlightenment. In this interview, Craig Smith discusses how we can read Adam Smith as a cautious social scientist whose systematic and empirical approach led to innovative writings of immense importance.