Commercial Society: Promise and Peril

1. Scope and evidence

The core claims on this card are Established. That Hume defended commerce and luxury, that Ferguson feared their effect on civic virtue, and that Smith took a middle position, are all documented in the thinkers' own published texts and confirmed by the leading modern scholarship. The most important framing point — that this was a genuine internal debate, not a uniform celebratory consensus — is the settled view of specialist historians such as Christopher Berry and Istvan Hont. What remains interpretively disputed among scholars is matters of degree and influence: exactly how far Rousseau shaped Smith, and how to reconcile Kames's contradictory statements. We flag these as live scholarly questions rather than settled fact.

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2. The pan-European luxury debate: Mandeville and Rousseau

The Scots were not inventing a question but intervening in one. For more than two millennia, "luxury" (luxuria) had been a term of moral abuse: for Plato, the Roman moralists and the Christian tradition alike, the appetite for superfluous refinement was a corruption that made citizens soft, selfish and unfit to defend a free state. Christopher Berry's The Idea of Luxury (1994) traces precisely this long career of the concept as an essentially negative one — and its eventual "de-moralisation" in the eighteenth century, when it slid from a vice threatening social virtue toward a neutral or even positive engine of prosperity.

The provocation that forced the issue was Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (poem 1705; expanded 1714; scandalising second edition 1723). Mandeville's bee-hive thrives on vanity, greed and luxury; the moment the bees turn virtuous and frugal, the economy collapses and the hive empties. His deliberately shocking conclusion — "private vices, public benefits" — was that the appetites moralists condemned were exactly what generated employment, trade and national greatness. (This card builds on the brief reference to Mandeville in Card #4 on Hutcheson, who was among his earliest critics.)

At the opposite pole stood Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the era's most celebrated critic of commercial modernity. His Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) argued — reframing the Dijon Academy's question to admit the possibility of corruption — that the progress of the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than purified morals, sapping men of virtue and of the capacity to defend themselves; he pointedly praised austere Sparta over refined, elegant Athens. His Discourse on Inequality (1755) traced moral decay to the rise of property and amour-propre (vanity born of social comparison), engaging Mandeville directly. Rousseau's barb — "The politicians of the ancient world spoke constantly of morals and virtue; ours speak of nothing but commerce and money" — captured the civic-republican anxiety in a sentence.

The Scottish debate should therefore be read as a set of responses to this shared European frame. As Istvan Hont argued in Jealousy of Trade (2005) and his posthumous Politics in Commercial Society (2015), the eighteenth-century "luxury debate" was the matrix within which political economy itself was forged; Hont explicitly set out to overturn the older, tidy narrative in which "Mandeville and Hume had successfully legitimated luxury, leaving only Rousseau and his followers unconvinced." The reality, on the current scholarly understanding, was messier and more interesting: the Scots divided among themselves.

3. Hume's defence of commerce and refined luxury (the new material)

This is the position the earlier cards in this cluster have not yet developed, and it is the intellectual counterweight to Ferguson. Hume set out his case in two essays in his Political Discourses (1752) — the one book of his that, as he recalled in "My Own Life," "was successful on the first publication" and "was well received abroad and at home."

"Of Commerce." Hume opens by linking private wealth and public power: "The greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects, how independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce." A nation abounding in industry and manufactures maintains a "storehouse of labour" that the sovereign can, in emergencies, convert to the service of the state — fleets and armies. Crucially, Hume argued that "industry and arts and trade increase the power of the sovereign as well as the happiness of the subjects," rejecting the older assumption that austere, poor, martial nations (Sparta, early Rome) were the model for modern states. He conceded these ancient cases as genuine historical exceptions, but held them neither desirable nor feasible for the modern world. The essay also contains the seed of Hume's famous rejection of mercantilism, developed in the companion essays on money and the balance of trade, that trade is mutually beneficial rather than a zero-sum contest.

"Of Refinement in the Arts" (published 1752 as "Of Luxury"; retitled 1760) is his direct engagement with the luxury debate. Hume's strategy is to split the concept in two. "Luxury," he says in the opening line, "is a word of an uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as well as in a bad sense." To think that any gratification of the senses is "of itself a vice" is a notion fit only for "a head, that is not disordered by the frenzies of enthusiasm." He then sets out to "correct both these extremes" — the libertines who praise even vicious luxury, and the "men of severe morals" who condemn even innocent refinement — by proving two theses: first, that "the ages of refinement are both the happiest and most virtuous"; second, that "wherever luxury ceases to be innocent, it also ceases to be beneficial."

The heart of the essay is Hume's argument that refinement, sociability, knowledge and virtue rise together. Refined ages produce excellence across the board: "The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters." As the arts advance, men grow more sociable: they "flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge"; clubs and societies form; "both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner." From this comes his signature claim:

> "Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages."

This is a striking inversion of the classical position: for Hume, commercial refinement makes people not more corrupt but more humane — gentler in manners, milder in government, less cruel even in war. He then answers the civic-republican fear head-on. Against the worry that commerce enervates martial spirit, he insists that "the arts have no such effect in enervating either the mind or body," pointing to the "French and English, whose bravery is as uncontestable, as their love for the arts." Against the worry that luxury destroys liberty — the lesson everyone drew from the fall of Rome — Hume replies that Rome fell not from luxury but from "an ill modelled government, and the unlimited extent of conquests," and that in fact:

> "a progress in the arts is rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government."

His mechanism is social and economic: commerce enriches "that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty" — a commercial middle class that neither grovels like dependent peasants nor tyrannises like feudal barons, and that "covet[s] equal laws." Here Hume connects commerce directly to the rise of constitutional, law-governed freedom.

Hume versus Mandeville. Hume's defence of luxury is emphatically not Mandeville's. He accepted the economic insight — that consumption and industry are bound together, and that banishing "vicious luxury" while leaving "sloth and an indifference to others" untouched merely "diminish[es] industry in the state" — but he rejected Mandeville's moral paradox outright. In the essay's closing pages Hume dismisses as "very inconsistent" any author who asserts "in one page, that moral distinctions are inventions of politicians for public interest; and in the next page maintain[s], that vice is advantageous to the public" — a footnote makes the target explicit: Fable of the Bees. For Hume, "vicious luxury" (that which "engrosses all a man's expence, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation") remains a real vice; it is merely, when unavoidable, sometimes the lesser of two evils, "as one poison may be an antidote to another." Innocent luxury — refinement that leaves "ample subject whence to provide for friends, family, and every proper object of generosity" — is no vice at all. This is a moderate, moralised middle path, and it is precisely what distinguishes Hume from Mandeville's cheerful cynicism. Duncan Forbes's much-quoted verdict is that in this essay Hume is "at his least sceptical," lacking "the doubts and misgivings which Adam Smith and all the other leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment had about the all-round benefits of commercial civilization."

4. Ferguson's civic-republican anxiety (synthesis — see Card #10)

Against Hume's confidence stands Adam Ferguson, covered in full on Card #10. Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) devotes its later parts explicitly to "Corruption and Political Slavery," with dedicated sections "Of Luxury" and "Of the Corruption incident to Polished Nations." Drawing on a Machiavellian and classical-republican inheritance, and informed by his own experience as chaplain to a Highland regiment, Ferguson feared that commercial refinement and an advanced division of labour would fragment citizens, dissolve the bonds of political community into mere commercial relations, and — most dangerously — erode the martial spirit and public-spiritedness on which a free state depends. Where Hume saw the commercial "middling rank" as liberty's firmest basis, Ferguson saw a population growing private, effeminate and unwilling to fight, ripe for despotism. The key point for this synthesis is that Ferguson's anxiety and Hume's optimism are the same debate seen from opposite ends: both men are arguing about whether commerce makes a people more or less free, more or less virtuous. (Notably, Hume — Ferguson's friend — disliked the Essay.)

5. Smith's nuanced middle position (synthesis — see Cards #13–#15)

Adam Smith, covered across Cards #12–#15, is best understood not as a cheerleader for commerce but as the thinker who tried to hold both truths at once. On the promise side (Cards #14–#15): commercial society, through the division of labour, the invisible hand and natural liberty, delivers "universal opulence" that reaches even the poorest labourer, whom Smith judged better provisioned than an African king. On the peril side (Card #13): Smith's Book V of the Wealth of Nations concedes that the same minute division of labour that generates this wealth renders the worker "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," his dexterity "acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues" — a cost Smith proposed to remedy through publicly supported education. Smith also worried, in the final (1790) edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that "this disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise... persons of poor and mean condition" was "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." And it was Smith who delivered the era's sharpest rebuke to Mandeville, branding the "private vices, public benefits" doctrine a "licentious system" whose tendency was "wholly pernicious" and whose author was "in almost every respect erroneous." Smith's position is thus a defended optimism that fully acknowledges the human costs and builds in remedies — genuinely distinct from both Hume's greater confidence and Ferguson's greater alarm.

6. Kames's contribution

Henry Home, Lord Kames — whose four-stages theory anchors Card #9 — added a distinctive and internally conflicted voice in his Sketches of the History of Man (1774). On the one hand, Kames treats the commercial stage as the culmination of humanity's progress toward maturity and refinement, and worked throughout his legal career to free Scots law from feudal encumbrances (such as entails) that obstructed commerce. On the other, his "sketch on luxury" is startlingly bleak. "In all times," he writes, "luxury has been the ruin of every state where it prevailed. Nations originally are poor and virtuous. They advance to industry, commerce, and perhaps to conquest and empire. But this state is never permanent: great opulence opens a wide door to indolence, sensuality, corruption, prostitution, perdition." He warns that "the epidemic distempers of luxury and selfishness are spreading wide in Britain."

As the modern editor of the Liberty Fund edition, James A. Harris, observes, "even the most ardent advocates of the material, moral, and political benefits of commerce — Hume and Smith, for example — were sensitive to its shortcomings and dangers. However, Kames's attitude toward luxury is incomparably more negative than Hume's or Smith's." Harris concludes that Kames "appears not to have a settled and consistent view as to whether the corrupting effects of commerce are outweighed by the possibilities it opens up of refinement and improvement." Kames thus embodies the internal tension of the whole debate within a single author: a committed improver who could not shake the classical fear that opulence carries the seeds of decline. (Tellingly, Kames privately told Elizabeth Montagu that the disease of selfishness and luxury Ferguson sought to cure was "too far advanced to be cured by any characters that can be formed with ink.")

7. Synthesis: a genuine internal debate

Pull these strands together and a clear picture emerges — one that the leading scholarship insists upon. Christopher Berry's The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (2013) is built around exactly this point: the Scots regarded commercial society as wealthier and freer than earlier social forms, but they debated, among themselves, its pros and cons — Berry "highlights both the similarities and the divergences among the Scots in their conceptualizations and assessments of commercial society." As the St Andrews historian Colin Kidd put it, this was "far from the din of today's uncompromising battles over the merits and flaws of the market... a nuanced conversation — on which we are privileged to eavesdrop."

The positions are genuinely distinct and genuinely argued. Hume is the confident optimist for whom industry, knowledge and humanity form an "indissoluble chain." Ferguson is the civic-republican worrier who fears refinement breeds cowardice and servility. Smith is the defended optimist who counts the moral costs and prescribes remedies. Kames is the improver haunted by the fear of decline. All four are responding to Mandeville's provocation and Rousseau's critique, and to each other. To flatten this into a single "Scottish view" celebrating commerce — or, conversely, to caricature it as uniformly gloomy — is to miss the intellectual substance. That, in the site's terms, is where accuracy must prevail over patriotism.

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