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of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is November 18, 2010, and my guest is Nicholas Phillipson, honorary research fellow in

history at Edinburgh University, and the author of Adam Smith, an enlightened life. Nicholas

Welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks very much for asking me.

So a biography of Adam Smith is a big challenge for a whole bunch of reasons. One is of course

his intellectual status and his contributions to the world, but also because of what we do

and do not know about Smith's life. So talk about the process of writing this book.

Well, it can indeed be a challenge at a technical level, actually, which is not altogether

usual when you're dealing with 18th century thinkers. Because the thing is that Smith is

very badly documented in conventional ways. We don't have much in the way of correspondence.

What correspondence we have comes from a very late period of his life. And one of the reasons

for this is that Smith kept himself to himself, and at the end of his life had a great

bonfire of his papers, nearly everything he had was destroyed, not everything, but nearly

everything. And that means you have to try and bring Smith to life and try and make sense

of what he wrote in ugly, immature, unconventional, biographical sources. And so what I decided to

do when I started was to try and say the only way of bringing Smith to life is write

his text. What I've got to do is bring his text to life in a historical way. And what

...