National Variants: The Scottish Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung

The Scottish Enlightenment flourished especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow during the second half of the eighteenth century, with David Hume and Adam Smith as its most prominent figures. Francis Hutcheson, who taught Smith at Glasgow, developed a moral philosophy grounded in an innate "moral sense," and Adam Ferguson developed an influential theory of civil society, examining in his "Essay on the History of Civil Society" (1767) the alienating effects of the division of labor on communal bonds. Scottish thinkers more broadly developed what became known as "conjectural history," a theoretical model of the stages of human social development often summarized as a four-stage progression through hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce, intended to explain the general progress of society.