Adam Smith was the founder of economics, as we know it today. His thoughts have shaped modern ideas about the market economy and the role of the state in relation to it. Smith laid the intellectual framework that explained the free market, which still holds true today, and laissez-faire a government belief that the commerce and trade should be permitted to operate free of controls. Translated from the French language “leave alone to do”, which explain itself. Both are connected with the underlying theme of economic growth. Smith's analysis is not confined to showing the interrelation between the different elements of a continually maintained system. It also explains how the system can generate the continual accumulation of wealth.
Adam Smith was born in a small village in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. There his widowed mother raised him until he entered the University of Glasgow at age seventeen on scholarship. He later attended Balliol College at Oxford, graduating with an extensive knowledge of European literature and an enduring contempt for English schools.
He returned home, and after delivering a series of well-received lectures, was made first chair of logic, then chair of moral philosophy, at Glasgow University. He then left the school in 1764 to tutor the young duke of Buccleuch. For over two years they lived and traveled throughout France and into Switzerland, an experience that brought Smith into contact with contemporaries. With the money he had earned in the service of the duke, Smith retired to his birthplace of Kirkcaldy to write The Wealth of Nations. It was published in 1776, the same year the American Declaration of Independence was signed and in which his close friend David Hume died. In 1778 he was appointed commissioner of customs. This job put him in the uncomfortable position of having to curb smuggling, which, he had upheld as a legitimate activity in the face of "unnatural" legislation. Adam Smith never married died in Edinburgh on July 19,...