Examines Adam Ferguson's philosophy, political theory and social thought in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment Adam Ferguson, a friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, was among the leading Scottish Enlightenment figures who worked to develop a science of man. He created a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising. He was among the first in the English-speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society and political science.
Craig Smith explores Ferguson's thought, and examines his attempt to develop a genuine moral science and its place in providing a secure basis for the virtuous education of the new elite of Hanoverian Britain. The Ferguson that emerges is 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.
Key Features

• The first monograph explicitly devoted to the idea of civil society in the work of Adam Ferguson - its earliest British exponent
• Places civil society at the heart of a study of Ferguson's methodology of social science
• Contributes to the history and understanding of a key concept in contemporary social and political thinking
• Challenges the existing interpretations of Ferguson as a sceptic about commercial modernity who was more of an old-fashioned stoic or republican moralist than a fully signed up member of the Scottish Enlightenment