![]() ![]() Along with Hume and Kames, there was Blair, the Protestant minister who could “stop the hounds with his eloquenc” Lord Monboddo, who wrote on the evolution of languages when not hearing cases as a judge and that young “noddle-head,” as Hume called James Boswell. Conceived in 1754 by the portrait painter Allan Ramsay, it brought together the city’s best and brightest. The most select of these clubs was, inevitably, the Select Society. They weighed the gains and losses of technological, industrial, and commercial advances they sought the sources of moral action and why we tend to be good when we could quite easily be bad. ![]() Between sips of claret and gulps of oysters (usually at the Oyster Club), they fearlessly prodded and poked one another (especially at the Poker Club) on the questions of human progress and the nature of being human. These men of genius, when not lecturing at universities like Smith, writing in their studies like David Hume, sermonizing from pulpits like Hugh Blair, or overseeing their estates like Lord Kames, met in clubs and societies to debate the great notions of that enlightened age. Though it boasted scarcely 40,000 residents, Edinburgh also boasted that it was, in the words of an observer, “crouded with men of genius” (Though as a walled city with tottering tenements packed together on wynds, or narrow streets, Edinburgh could hardly be anything but crouded.) Long known as Auld Reekie-thanks to the stifling shroud of coal soot that rose from its forest of chimneys-the city became known as the Athens of the North. Not the sort of club given to drinking, though that certainly took place, but instead a club given to thinking.Ĭrucially, these clubs helped rebrand 18th-century Edinburgh. Whereas he begins the work, in the provocative fashion that endeared him to his students, with a description of a man being tortured on a rack, we can instead begin with a man attending a club in Edinburgh. For Smith, imagination is the activity that governs our social world no less surely than gravitation governs the physical one.Īnd so, let’s take a moment to celebrate Smith’s birthday by trying to imagine why he thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be the better book. ![]() The faculty of imagination is to Theory of Moral Sentiments as gravity is to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. This is what Smith, after all, invites us to do in the book. And even fewer know what Smith knew: that this book, published in 1759, is “a much superior work” to the later one that brought him fame. While many of us know Smith as the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), fewer are familiar with his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. We don’t know exactly when the Scottish philosopher was born, but records indicate that he was baptized on June 5, 1723, in the town of Kirkcaldy, a town just north of Edinburgh. Today probably marks the 300th birthday of Adam Smith. ![]() This portrait of the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith, painted by an unknown artist, is known as the "Muir portrait," after the family who once owned it. ![]()
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