Adam Smith, in his lectures at the University of Glasgow, is reported to have professed that ‘opulence and freedom’ were ‘the two greatest blessings men can possess’ (LJA iii.111/185). Smith here couples together what many have held asunder as contraries. One such thinker, with whose thought Smith was well acquainted, was Rousseau. He reviewed Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality for the second edition of the short-lived Edinburgh Review of 1755/6 and, as was characteristic of eighteenth-century reviews, Smith's account contained lengthy quotations. The first passage that Smith thought worthy of reproduction begins:

The second passage contains the judgement that

Smith is aware that, despite the presence here of what he terms ‘rhetoric’, Rousseau represents a persistent and important strand in European political thinking. This strand, frequently referred to as civic humanism, linked the ideas of freedom and independence and identified threats to the latter as inimical to the former. The essence of civic humanism, as outlined by John Pocock – the writer who has done most to bring out the presence of this tradition in European thought – lay in the link between virtue and the practice of citizenship as understood by the Greeks and Romans.