The Possibility of the Study of the Scottish Enlightenment in Terms of the History of Political Economy

Abstract

The study of the Scottish Enlightenment began in the west in the 1960s. One of the most influential works produced in this field was Wealth and Virtue (1983), which has been read with great interest in Japan. Forbes and Pocock are two great masters in this field of study, but the former is less influential due to his restricted interest than the latter whose interests lie in various topics and studies such as Civic Humanism, British Historiography, and the history of political thought. Under their influence, the natural law tradition and civic humanist ideas and their interrelation have been closely studied by many scholars, and their trends and characteristics are reviewed in this essay, whose aim is to reconsider the possibility of the Scottish Enlightenment for the formation of the political economy. Therefore, by viewing many works concerning the Scottish Enlightenment, the formation of Britishness, the British Nation, the British Empire, and many other topics in the fields of history and the history of ideas, this paper reconsiders some new possibilities in the field of History of Political Economy which will be found out by responding to such many new studies.