I really shouldn’t have embarked on this book as I am totally unqualified to judge it, being woefully ignorant about economic theory. I should have paid more attention to the description – I thought it was a straightforward biography. Which, to an extent, it is, and that aspect of the book I did enjoy. But when it came to the description and analysis of Adam Smith’s thinking I was out of my depth. It appeared, nevertheless, to be an authoritative and well-researched tome and thus I feel fairly confident in rating it highly. Others certainly have.

Journalists, commentators and even academics are prone to quoting the best soundbites from The Wealth of Nations in ways that show that they haven't read the original work. The temptation is great because Smith appears to have been uncannily prescient and some of his critique seems directly pertinent to the modern economic environment. But there is much more to Smith's work than those choice morsels. In this book Jesse Norman gives a brief biography of Smith - necessarily brief as little is known about his personal life - and then places his work in its historical context, which is important to any useful interpretation. Norman then provides Smith's intellectual biography, demonstrating links contemporaneous thinking which influenced him and very effectively showing the breadth of Smith's thought and its links beyond economics. Enough of a taste of Smith's less famous writings is included to tempt the interested reader to go back to the original sources. I enjoyed reading this book very much: Norman manages to write in a way that engages the general reader but does not lose academic rigour, no easy task. I remain somewhat astonished that a serving government minister could find the time to produce a work of this nature!

This book is not only a biography of Adam Smith, one of the greatest economists of all time, but it also provides insight and information on the economy and even on how Adam Smith's effects on sociology. Very fascinating read!

Adam Smith is the most influential political economist ever lived and without much doubt one of the most influential social scientists of any kind. According to Jesse Norman, a British politician and one of the few conservative thinkers today in Britain, Smith is not only the father of economics but also the father of social psychology. He urges us to think about Adam Smith not only as an economist but also as a moral philosopher. In his eloquent book Adam Smith: What he thought and why it matters, Norman deals with the two great works of Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, as well as his unpublished works such as his lectures on jurisprudence and an early essay on astronomy, not individually, but as one coherent account of Smith’s thinking.

Norman says that there are two views of Adam Smith which can we contrast, one is the Smith the market ‘fundamentalist’, an advocate of selfishness and in a way an apologist for human inequality, and the other view, that of the ‘libertarian’ Smith who advocates the abolition of interventions. Neither of these views is correct, he argues.

For Smith, markets are not merely the economic atomistic entities of the current, prevailed economic thinking. They are dynamic and evolved institutions comprised of people (individuals) who have different preferences, change their minds, and react differently to other people’s needs and preferences.

‘Smith’s science of man is not merely a theory of evolution: it is certainly a core part of the theory of evolution,’ writes Jesse Norman and argues that Smith’s writing “exercised a strong indirect influence on Charles Darwin,” who studied both Adam Smith and John Locke.

Smith’s message was a liberalizing market, away from 18th century interventions from state, church and guilds. He believed that the removal of impediments to trade would not only create wealth and prosperity but also greater equality. Adam Smith is not a theorist of capitalism-Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations 50 or 60 years before the development of capitalism-he is a theorist of markets, of a commercial society where no man is subordinate, but every man is a merchant and lives by exchanging goods and services. Smith founds this commercial society on moral values and on a role for government in the state, which also evolve over time.

The outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis wiped out much of the public credibility of economics itself and initiated a discussion about the failure of Adam Smith’s optimistic vision of history. But this again shows a misunderstanding of Smith’s work, in which one of the main themes is that markets fail without a moral culture. It also explains why Smith viewed political economy as part of moral philosophy. Smith was in fact “far from being a believer in the importance of great wealth,” says Jesse Norman. He wrote in The Wealth of Nations:

‘All for ourselves, and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.’

A fascinating book, which highlights some of the misconceptions of Adam Smith and asks us all to reflect more deeply about societies, cultures and economics.

The author puts a little too much of his own opinions into this biography. It's really obvious that there's a motive and Norman may be using some historical contexts to fit what he wants to say more than staying true to the history of the father of economics.

I DNF after the first chapter.

If you want to learn more about Adam Smith that the fact that he is the most famous economist in history you should read this memoir. A mix of personal life and work, Adam Smith by Jesse Norman also puts his ideas in the context of modern times and how his thoughts affect present day. A must-read biography for anyone who wants to find out more about the life of a great man.