Adam Smith

Monumental profits

The economist's house is on the (free) market

IN MOST countries it would have been marked by a fanfare of press releases and a long roll of fund-raising drums. Not in Scotland. This week Edinburgh's city council put on the market the house where Adam Smith spent his last 12 years, from 1778 until 1790. Advertisements in the property sections of local newspapers seek offers in excess of £700,000 ($1.4m) for a 17th-century house of historical interest, but fail to point out its connection with the father of modern economics.

This indifference to one of Scotland's greatest sons in the city where he spent much of his adult life is curious, but consistent. His house, recently a municipal centre for troubled boys, has a small, tarnished bronze plaque recording it as the town house of the Earls of Panmure and the home of Adam Smith. His grave just off the High Street was overgrown until 2006 when, thanks to £10,000 from an expatriate Scottish oilman, it was cleaned; visitors still have to hunt for it.

his disregard stems more from modern Scottish politics than from historical ignorance. Smith's most famous work, “The Wealth of Nations”, which describes wealth creation in a competitive commercial economy dominated by the market's invisible hand, has long been appropriated by right-wingers and anathema in left-leaning Scotland.

But a daring bid to claim Smith for the left is under way, led by Gordon Brown. The Labour prime minister's constituency includes Kirkcaldy, where the economist's birthplace and school are now marked with commemorative plaques. The town also hosts an annual Adam Smith lecture, given in recent years, thanks to Mr Brown's connections, by such luminaries as Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, and Alan Greenspan, former chairman of America's Federal Reserve Bank.

Leftists much prefer Smith's other big work, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”. Its deeply Scottish Presbyterian fulminations against materialistic desires for “trinkets of frivolous utility”, and lofty observation that man has some principles “which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it”, can be made to sound almost socialist. This turn in fashion seems to have persuaded Edinburgh's council, then run by Labour, to approve in 2004 a plan by the Adam Smith Institute, a think-tank in London, to erect a statue of the great man. It will go up soon in the High Street.

And the house, which fans of Smith had wanted preserved as a museum or a study centre? It has, say the estate agents, “development potential”—which means there is probably private-sector profit to be made from converting it into flats or offices, for example. Which Adam Smith would certainly have thought a more fitting memorial than getting taxpayers to underwrite a shrine.