Is the well-being of the nation to be fundamentally linked with the wealth of the nation? Is it possible to reconnect moral philosophy with political economy? We explore selections from two of Adam Smith’s classic texts — the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — to examine what we, in the last fifty years, have come to call human capital, social capital, and most recently spiritual capital, alongside his commentary on physical capital.

SPEAKER

Dr. Craig Smith
Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment, University of Glasgow

Dr. Craig Smith is the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Glasgow. A graduate of Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, he researches the moral and political philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (Routledge, 2006), Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 2019), and Adam Smith (Polity, 2020). He was one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of the forthcoming second edition of The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment.

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