Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense

Abstract

It has long been recognized that eighteenth-century Scotland gave birth to political economy as a sophisticated scholarly discipline. Hailing from a relatively impoverished nation that had joined its larger southern neighbor in 1707 to form a new British state, Adam Smith and other Scottish political economists were concerned not only with observing, describing, and explaining the realities of economic life as they saw them but also with leading Scotland toward material progress and wealth. It has also been recognized, however, that in Scotland political economy was a branch of a remarkably comprehensive academic discipline known as moral philosophy, and that Scottish moralists were acutely sensitive to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in economic growth. At times this sensitivity was expressed through the language of the civic humanist or classical republican tradition, which emphasized public virtue, a unified civic personality that joined the private individual with the public citizen, and economic independence based on land ownership, as opposed to the blatantly self-interested attitudes and activities associated with the accumulation of commercial wealth. This tension between modernization and morality, wealth and virtue, accounts for much of the recent interest in the social thought of the Scottish Enlightenment.1