Speaking of Smith Archives

January27, 2019


Adam Smith had a life-long interest in the arts.  He was surely a man of taste.  However, his biographer, Dugald Stewart, suggests Smith’s interest in the arts and fashion was primarily “on account of their connexion with the general principles of the human mind” (Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 173).  Smith, it seems, was ever the theorist.  

January 13, 2019


Although Adam Smith produced no systematic treatise on aesthetics (or “criticism” as it was called among Eighteenth century Brits), Smith touches on these issues at a number of places in his work.