Das Adam Smith Grand Tour Problem

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.) “The first letter Adam Smith wrote after arriving in Paris in February of 1764 was his official letter of resignation.[1] Smith’s resignation letter is addressed to one of his former students, Thomas Miller,[2] who was the Lord Rector of University of Glasgow from 1762 to 1764.[3] In this letter, Smith does two things. First, he officially resigns his professorship for good, and secondly, he asks that the remainder of his salary go to Thomas Young, another former student of Smith’s, who had taken over the Scottish philosopher’s lectures at Glasgow when he (Smith) had first notified his academic colleagues in the fall of 1763 that something was afoot.[4] But why did Adam Smith decide to resign his prestigious professorship instead of just taking a temporary leave of absence?[5] After all, Smith, by all…