ABSTRACT
The Scottish philosophers like David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith were extremely aware that the processes associated with the production of wealth, refined manners and societal diversification, were themselves to some extent harbingers of terrible forms of reification. The philosophers seem to have hoped that by calling attention to the worrying tendencies of the division of labour and industrialization, they could sound a caution which would always be kept in mind by following generations. Locke was apparently fairly sure that once individuals had entered into civil society, they would not wish to return to the state of nature. The imaginations of civil society as they appeared in the work of social philosophers and fed into the problems, assumptions and interpretations of sociology with the modern form of the myth assuming a pseudoscientific aspect in the various theories of the psyche currently clamoring for attention. The remythication of man and civil society can also be seen in modern sociology.
