8 - The Idea of Commercial Society: Changing Contexts and Scales

Summary

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.