ABSTRACT

During the Scottish Enlightenment, philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson developed spontaneous-order or ‘market’ models for understanding large-scale human social institutions like law, language and morality (Hamowy 1987). For these Scots, and for Adam Smith in particular, these models served two principal purposes: explanation and strategy. They explained, first, where such institutions came from, how they developed over time, and what their stages of development were. They also served as bases for policy recommendations: once knowledge of the nature of such institutions could be coupled with knowledge of relatively stable human nature, strategies for realizing human ends could be developed.