The Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith

During the eighteenth-century Scotland emerged as a leading force of Enlightenment ideas. Three of its most famous Scottish representatives were Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. None of them were political philosophers in the traditional sense of the term, yet all made lasting contributions to political thought—Hutcheson by laying the conceptual groundwork for a new science of moral philosophy; Hume by criticizing the established views of social-contract theory and the verities of trade and economic transactions; Smith by developing an influential theory of the self-regulating market and pioneering the field of political economy.