Alec Macfie was born in Partick on 29 May 1898. He went first to school at Hillhead but later joined his brother at the High School of Glasgow where he had a distinguished career.

When he left school, Macfie, too young to enlist, worked in a munitions factory for a few months. But in 1916 he joined the Second Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, and was commissioned as a lieutenant. He saw action at Passchendaele, and was badly wounded during an action on the Asiego Plateau in the early summer of 1918. After recovering to some extent from his wounds, Macfie entered Glasgow University where he graduated with first class honours in philosophy and English literature in 1922. Thereafter he entered a law office and took his LL.B. But having opted for an academic career, he returned to the university and took a first in economics and politics in 1927.

In the years that followed Macfie held temporary teaching posts in Nottingham and St Andrews (where he deputized for the professor of moral philosophy) before returning to Glasgow in 1932 as lecturer in the Department of Political Economy under W.R. Scott. Scott (the ‘chief’) died in 1940 and Macfie was invited to take the Adam Smith Chair in 1945.

Side by side with his teaching, Macfie produced three books in the period up to 1945, all of which reflect his interest in philosophy and psychology as well as in economics: Theories of the Trade Cycle (1934), An Essay on Economy and Value (1936) and Economic Efficiency and Social Welfare (1943). It was not until the mid-1950s, only a few years before retiring, that he embarked on a serious study of Adam Smith with special reference to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Following the acquisition of the manuscripts, discovered by J.M. Lothian in 1958, Macfie became one of the driving forces behind the Glasgow edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, and acted as co-editor (with D.D. Raphael) of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976). He also produced a little book which has exerted an enormous influence in this field, The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith (1967).

Few modern scholars have been better equipped for the study of Smith. Macfie was a qualified lawyer, with degrees in philosophy, literature, and economics, while Smith was writing at a time when it was possible to think in terms of a global system of thought which might embrace these separate disciplines.

Selected Works

  • 1934. Theories of the trade cycle. London: Macmillan. Reprinted, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971.

  • 1936. An essay on economy and value: Being an enquiry into the real nature of economy. London: Macmillan.

  • 1940. (ed.) Studies relating to Adam Smith during the last fifty years, by W.R. Scott. Proceedings of the British Academy.

  • 1943. Economic efficiency and social welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • 1967. The individual in society: Papers on Adam Smith. London: Allen & Unwin.

  • 1976. (ed., with D.D. Raphael). The theory of moral sentiments, by Adam Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Vol. I of the Glasgow edn of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith.