ABSTRACT
For several decades – and at least since the landmark publication of the important collection edited by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich – it was customary for intellectual historians of the Enlightenment to regard their subject from the perspective of “national context.”2 For students of Adam Smith, this has largely been beneficial insofar as it has called attention to the ways in which Smith’s moral and political thought was deeply indebted to specifically Scottish political and philosophical contexts.3 At the same time this perspective has its limits. For even if eighteenth-century British philosophy was, as has been recently argued, largely “insular,”4 Smith’s own intellectual debts were hardly confined to the contributions of his fellow Scots or even Britons more generally, and famously ranged across a wide canon of authors, both ancient and modern – as we now appreciate better than ever. But perhaps what especially remains to be appreciated is the degree of Smith’s debts to the French Enlightenment.
