First of all, as David Bahnsen and I talked about on the Capital Record, there’s some ambiguity on the exact date of Adam Smith’s birth. His birthdate was not recorded, and all we have is the date of his baptism. For the first part of his life, that date was June 5, 1723. That’s why you may have seen some birthday congratulations to Smith on June 5 of this year. In 1752, Great Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. That decision shifted dates by eleven days, so Smith’s baptism day on the Gregorian calendar is June 16. That’s the date we decided to use for our Adam Smith 300 essay series. If you also celebrated on June 5, we at Capital Matters see no problem with celebrating Smith’s birthday twice. We’ve been celebrating all year, with a new essay each month.

This month’s essay comes from Craig Smith, the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Glasgow. Adam Smith attended Glasgow as a student. He would later become the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow (“economics professor” was not yet a job at this point in history).

Craig Smith writes about the intellectual environment in which Adam Smith lived:

Teaching in the Scottish universities had been transformed by the introduction of the latest work in science and moral philosophy by such figures as Colin Maclaurin and Francis Hutcheson. Maclaurin was a disciple of Isaac Newton and ensured that the modern scientific method was embedded in the university curriculum. Hutcheson, sometimes referred to as the “father” of the Scottish Enlightenment, developed the style of philosophical education that became the backbone of the Scottish universities. His moral-philosophy curriculum ensured that students read widely across ethics, jurisprudence, aesthetics, politics, sociology, and philosophy of religion. Hutcheson provided a system of moral philosophy designed to be useful to students, molding them into virtuous citizens and good Christians. Scottish education had a social as well as an intellectual function, and this notion deeply influenced Adam Smith’s understanding of what was expected of him when, in 1752, he took over the chair at Glasgow that Hutcheson had occupied.

These ambitious young men found their way into jobs in the universities, the Scottish state church, and the law. It is noteworthy that the Union of 1707 meant the dissolution of Scotland’s parliament in Edinburgh, as Scottish parliamentarians now went to Westminster. Scotland was now peripheral to the parliament governing the land. The end of the Scottish parliament may have opened up space in Scottish society for an elite more focused on culture than government.

Among their number were figures such as the “father of sociology,” Adam Ferguson; the judge and critic Henry Home, Lord Kames; Smith’s student and fellow professor at Glasgow John Millar; the great natural scientists Joseph Black, who discovered carbon dioxide, and James Hutton, father of geology; Hugh Blair, the first professor of English literature in the world; the philosopher Thomas Reid, who succeeded Smith at Glasgow; the best-selling historian and church leader William Robertson; the engineer James Watt; the architect Robert Adam; and medical men such as John Gregory, William Cullen, and the brothers John and William Hunter. At the center of it all stood Smith’s great friend David Hume, the brilliant philosopher and historian whose ideas proved so influential on Smith’s intellectual development. The Edinburgh professor Dugald Stewart and others carried the tradition into the 19th century.

It’s Smith of Glasgow on Smith of Glasgow, for the father of economics’ 300th birthday. Read the whole thing here.