Adam Smith

I was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. From 1748 to 1751, I gave lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres in Edinburgh. During this period, I met a Scottish philosopher, David Hume, and we became best of friends until his unfortunate death in 1776. He contributed a lot to the development of my ethical and economic theories.
I was appointed professor of logic in 1751 and then professor of moral philosophy in 1752 at the University of Glasgow. Then, I systematized the ethical teachings I had propounded in my lectures and published them in my first major work, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In 1763 I resigned from the university to accept the position of tutor to Henry Scott, 3rd duke of Buccleuch, whom I accompanied on an 18-month tour of France and Switzerland. I, then, 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. I was particularly influenced by the French philosophers François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, whose theories were later adapted in part to form a basis for my own works. From 1766 to 1776, I lived in Kirkcaldy preparing The Wealth of Nations (1776). Meanwhile I worked as a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh in 1778 and in 1787 I was also named lord rector of the University of Glasgow.
My central thesis of The Wealth of Nations is that capital is best employed for the production and distribution of wealth under conditions of governmental noninterference, or laissez-faire, and free trade. In my opinion, the production and exchange of goods can be stimulated, and a consequent rise in the general standard of living attained, only through the efficient operations of private industrial and commercial entrepreneurs acting with a minimum of regulation and control by governments.
This concept of government maintaining a laissez-faire attitude toward commercial endeavors is the principle of the “invisible hand”: Every individual in pursuing his or her own good is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all. Therefore any interference with free competition by government is almost certain to be injurious.