Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Christopher J Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2015-04-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0748684530

Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, looking at key works from Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson alongside lesser-known figures.

Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2018-05-10
Genre: Enlightenment
ISBN: 1474415024

Upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduates and scholars working specifically on the Scottish Enlightenment and early modern political and economic thought more generally.

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Iain McDaniel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2013-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674075285

Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.

The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution
Author: Anna Plassart
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316300323

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment

Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN:

David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, John Millar, James Dunbar and Gilbert Stuart were at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment thought. This introductory survey offers the student a clear, accessible interpretation and synthesis of the social thought of these historically significant thinkers. Organised thematically, it takes the student through their accounts of social institutions, their critique of individualism, their methodology, their views of progress and of moral and cultural values. By taking human sociality as their premise, the book shows how they produced important analyses of historical change, politics and morality, together with an assessment of their own commercial society.

The Infidel and the Professor

The Infidel and the Professor
Author: Dennis C. Rasmussen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691192286

Dearest friends -- The cheerful skeptic (1711-1749) -- Encountering Hume (1723-1749) -- A budding friendship (1750-1754) -- The historian and the Kirk (1754-1759) -- Theorizing the moral sentiments (1759) -- Fêted in France (1759-1766) -- Quarrel with a wild philosopher (1766-1767) -- Mortally sick at sea (1767-1775) -- Inquiring into the Wealth of Nations (1776) -- Dialoguing about natural religion (1776) -- A philosopher's death (1776) -- Ten times more abuse (1776-1777) -- Smith's final years in Edinburgh (1777-1790) -- Hume's My Own Life and Smith's Letter from Adam Smith, LL. D. to William Strahan, Esq

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Birlinn
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2012-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857904981

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.

The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society

The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society
Author: Dennis Carl Rasmussen
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0271045760

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith&’s sympathy with Rousseau&’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith&’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith&’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2003-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521003230

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment offers a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century movement that has been profoundly influential on western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in fields including philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. In addition, the contributors relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy in Europe, America and beyond. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.