A striking illustration of the difficulties in assessing William Playfair's awkward course in enlightened Europe can be found in Robert Chambers's Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (1835). In the opening lines of the article devoted to him, it is stated that:

Indeed, when compared with his elder brother John, eminent member of the literati, renowned Professor of Mathematics, then of Natural Philosophy, at the University of Edinburgh, William Playfair does not conform to the traditional image of an eminent Scotsman in any respect. Playfair was a restless entrepreneur, an engineer, an inventor of statistical graphics, a theoretician of political economy, a ‘miscellaneous writer’ and editor; but he was also a swindler, a blackmailer and a bankrupt. Operating across the Channel between the 1780s and the 1820s, he died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1823, banned from any ‘good society’, while his elder brother was commemorated with a mausoleum on Calton Hill.

How could such a ‘blunderer’, a ‘daring worthless fellow’, be of any interest other than as an incidental figure in the literary and intellectual ‘underworld’ in Britain and France at the time of the French Revolution? Why allocate him a seat (albeit an inferior one) in the Scottish pantheon, as Chambers did years after Playfair's death?