This book is an explication of Adam Smith's remark in the early pages of the Wealth of Nations where he writes, ‘Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.’ I here argue that the judgment that a ‘society’ can be typified as ‘commercial’ is significant. It involves a twin conceptualisation. That is to say, it articulates a notion both of ‘society’ (rather than say regime-type) as an appropriate ‘unit’ for analysis and of ‘commercial’ as the encapsulation of a distinctive mode of organisation. To adopt this articulation is to subscribe to the ‘idea of commercial society’.

I want to claim that this ‘idea’ has particular resonance among that group of thinkers standardly grouped as the Scottish Enlightenment. Whether or not W. R. Scott's use of the term ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’ in his book on Hutcheson, published in 1900, was the first reference the term is now well-established. Even while its content and contours are generally agreed, there remains, of course, a divergence in interpretation and nuance. This book highlights a particular aspect and makes a case for its special significance. It does not pretend to foist on the Scots some homogeneity of perspective – indeed it is one of the striking elements of their writings that they are contesting the meaning and implication of this idea.