The essays in this volume represent a selection of my work on the Scottish Enlightenment, written over a period of more than forty years. My principles for selection were to make available some early pieces, which were often published in outlets not usually associated with the Scots, and to collect together more recent pieces that have appeared in various places. There were, in addition, a couple of negative considerations. I wanted to avoid excessive duplication (though I hope some complementary overlap will still be detected) and also to exclude some pieces that I judged (often on balance) as peripheral; that is, I wanted this volume to have some coherence rather than comprise a more or less random collection of writings. I also chose to omit some pieces that were more fully worked up in my books (1997, 2009, 2013). This last point partly explains some slight unevenness in the contents. The briefest of the three parts into which this volume is divided is devoted to Smith and the explanation for that is that he figures prominently in my 2013 book The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. This further explains that, of the three new pieces that I include, two (both of them unpublished lectures) are on Smith; the other is on Hume. In addition to these three, I have written an opening chapter on the general study of the Scottish Enlightenment over the period covered by these essays, related to my own intellectual biography. Also added are postscripts to each chapter that comment on the provenance of the essay and refer to some subsequent commentary on them and more generally on work done subsequently on the subject.

Throughout this book I have standardised the references, in particular inserting into the original texts and notes a uniform set of abbreviations. I have also inserted cross references to other chapters in this volume and to my other writings. On occasion (especially in Chapters 11 and 12) I have made some excisions to eliminate obvious reiteration. There are some silent corrections of citation locations, style and grammar. Those aside, I have decided to leave the previously published pieces ‘as is’ (the postscripts attend to where I would or should have said something different).