Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748645330
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'.

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748645330
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'.

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment

Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Christopher J Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748684530
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
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.

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Iain McDaniel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
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.

An Essay on the History of Civil Society

An Essay on the History of Civil Society PDF Author: Adam Ferguson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civil society
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description


The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857904981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
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 Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521003230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
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.

Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776

Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 PDF Author: David Wootton
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804723565
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
This examination of republicanism in an Anglo-American and European context gives weight not only to the thought of the theorists of republicanism but also to the practical experience of republican governments in England, Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

Republicanism: Volume 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe

Republicanism: Volume 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Martin van Gelderen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139439619
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
These volumes are the fruits of a major European Science Foundation project and offer the first comprehensive study of republicanism as a shared European heritage. Whilst previous research has mainly focused on Atlantic traditions of republicanism, Professors Skinner and van Gelderen have assembled an internationally distinguished set of contributors whose studies highlight the richness and diversity of European traditions. Volume I focuses on the importance of anti-monarchism in Europe and analyses the relationship between citizenship and civic humanism, concluding with studies of the relationship between constitutionalism and republicanism in the period between 1500 and 1800. Volume II, first published in 2002, is devoted to the study of key republican values such as liberty, virtue, politeness and toleration. This volume also addresses the role of women in European republican traditions, and contains a number of in-depth studies of the relationship between republicanism and the rise of a commercial society in early modern Europe.

The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society

The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society PDF Author: Dennis Carl Rasmussen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271045760
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Jealousy of Trade

Jealousy of Trade PDF Author: Istvan Hont
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674010383
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
"The author focuses on Adam Smith and his contemporaries, who pondered these issues, particularly the nature and development of commercial society. They attempted to come to terms with the claim that, on the one hand, the market was a decisive element in economic progress, and, on the other, that its workings depended upon the release of the immoral desires of fallen men and that its consequences were socially and politically destabilizing. Hont reconstructs the salient features of this controversy between the proponents of market sociability and its most trenchant critics. In doing so, he has helped to locate historically the most important arguments at the heart of the emergence of modernity."--Jacket.