Life of Smith Ross'

Abstract

The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.

Citation

Henderson, W. (2011), " Life of Smith Ross'", Biddle, J.E. and Emmett, R.B. (Ed.) Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 29 Part 1), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 141-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-4154(2011)000029A012