Political Vanity: Adam Ferguson on the Moral Tensions of Early Capitalism

Political Vanity aims to illuminate the central debates over the historical, moral, and political legitimacy of market capitalism by engaging central theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular the philosopher and sociologist Adam Ferguson. Ferguson was a contemporary of philosophers and economists David Hume and Adam Smith, and actively questioned many of the pillars of early capitalism on theological grounds. Namely: conjectural histories used to justify economic liberalization...