This reissued biography of Adam Smith, first published in 1982, presents both an intellectual and personal portrait of the man. It is not intended as a full-scale scholarly biography burdened with heavy footnotes. Although written by two of the world's foremost authorities on Adam Smith, the book is intended as an accessible study of a great thinker and philosopher which will help to introduce the reader to both his ideas and his period.

This Pickering edition of Adam Ferguson's correspondence contains over 400 letters, most of which have never before been published. The correspondence includes letters between Ferguson and Adam Smith, David Hume and Alexander Carlyle and many other central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains essays that range across all of Ferguson's works to investigate his engagement with contemporary events and his contributions to our understanding of history and human action.

John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text’s political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.

Säkularisierung wird oft mit der Aufklärung in Verbindung gebracht. Jedoch wurde sie nicht von allen Denkern der Aufklärung verfochten. Mithilfe dieses Buches soll Licht auf die von den schottischen Aufklärern aufgedeckten Probleme und Lösungen geworfen werden, die sich bei der Untersuchung des Stellenwertes der Religion in der Gesellschaft auftaten. Tatsächlich sahen Hutcheson, Reid, Hume, Smith, Ferguson und Millar die Situation der Religion in der Gesellschaft aus verschiedenen Perspektiven und kamen oftmals zu sehr unterschiedlichen Schlüssen. Dieses komplexe Verständnis von Religion führte zur Zusammenstellung dieses Buches, welches sich auf drei Fragen konzentriert: Welche Rolle nimmt die Religion in der Gesellschaft ein? Inwieweit beeinflussen die Existenz Gottes und die Naturreligion die soziale Ordnung? Wie sollten bestimmte religiöse Überzeugungen in einem säkularen Kontext verstanden werden, und was haben sie für soziale und moralische Folgen? Diese drei Kernfragen sind eng mit den wesentlichen gemeinsamen Anliegen der schottischen Denker verbunden: der Verteidigung der natürlichen menschlichen Geselligkeit gegen kontraktualistische Theorien sowie der Feststellung, ob die Religion die politische und moralische Gesellschaftsordnung behindert oder bestärkt. Secularization is often associated with the Enlightenment. However, not all Enlightenment thinkers defended it. This book aims to cast light on the problems and solutions that the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment uncovered when studying the place of religion in society. In fact, Hutcheson, Reid, Hume, Smith, Ferguson and Millar saw the situation of religion in society from different perspectives and often reached very different conclusions. This complex understanding of religion is what led us to compile this book, which focuses on three questions: What is the role of religion in society? How does the existence of God and natural religion affect the social order? How should certain religious beliefs be understood in a secular context, and what are their social and moral repercussions? These three key issues are closely connected to the Scottish thinkers’ chief common concerns: defending natural human sociability from contractualist theories and determining whether religion hinders or strengthens the political and moral order of society.

The thought of Adam Ferguson generated great excitement among many of his philosophic contemporaries in the late eighteenth century, and it continues to inspire the modern reader. This major study by David Kettler is an ideal introduction to Ferguson's life and thought. The new introduction to this first paperback edition discusses Ferguson's work in relation to his better-known contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, while the afterword offers an in-depth reconsideration of Ferguson's most renowned work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, with emphasis on present-day disputes about the concept of civil society. Ferguson welcomed the advent of critical and analytical philosophy as an ally against superstitious credulity and confused obscurantism, but he was afraid that it might also dissolve into incomprehensible technical complexity and ethical relativism. He was attracted by the manifest practical accomplishments of modern science, as well as by its masterful ordering of natural phenomena into a unified theoretical structure, but he feared that its adherents would debase the notion of man to that of a machine at the mercy of mechanical forces. Ferguson thought well of ambition, but he also believed that a frenzy of ambition and frustration might tear at man's self-respect and peace of mind. The decisive phenomenon manifested by Ferguson's writing is the emergence of an intellectual's point of view toward the conditions of modern society. Many of the questions that he posed have been restated in more profound ways, some of the questions and most of the answers have been eliminated or transformed beyond recognition; and all of the issues he raises are now expressed by others in harsh, new words. But, however formulated, Ferguson's concerns clearly foreshadow the problems of over-rationalization, dehumanization, atomization, alienation, and bureaucratization that have been repeatedly canvassed by intellectuals in our time.