Today Adam Smith is known mainly as an economic theorist, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and virtual patron saint of the free market. In his own time, however, Smith first gained fame for his treatise on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he develops a psychologically oriented account of moral judgment, similar to David Hume's account but more elaborate in its treatment of the phenomenon called sympathy, the emotional response of one person to another person's situation. Smith's views on this subject are often cited respectfully by social psychologists and have, in recent years, again attracted the attention of philosophers.

Smith grew up in Kirkcaldy, a mid-sized industrial town on Scotland's east coast, near Edinburgh. Agriculture in the surrounding Fife countryside was gradually picking up following the union of Scotland and England in 1707, but local coal and...