Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment

Examines Adam Ferguson''s philosophy, political theory and social thought in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Explores Ferguson''s examines attempt to develop a genuine moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising. Presents a new, revisionary account of Ferguson: far from the stereotyped image of a republican sceptical about commercial society and much closer to the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment and its defence of the new British commercial order. See more