This paper will examine several aspects of the intellectual atmosphere in the middle of eighteenth-century Scotland, where Smith had developed his idea of a new social science.
I first introduce mainly through Blair's sermons, that the Moderates' view of providence-based functional society was static and conservative, and lacked the concept of progress or stage theory of society, though they were more enlightened than Presbyterian orthodoxies.
Second, I show empirically the psychological expansion of the idea of moral sense by Kames, who introduced
feeling as a basic factor for moral judgment. This implies an intellectual tendency that would rather insist human autonomy as a moral agent than claim
a priori conscience with an abstract character like benevolence.
The intellectual atmosphere above suggests a basic divergence of the Moderates' thought from Smith's framework which was to be shown in
Theory of Moral Sentiments or
Wealth of Nations. This suggestion would give us an effective device which can rescue Smith from an intricate trap of the so-called civic humanist paradigm that has confined Smith, by applying Q. Skinner's radical relativism, to be just one of eighteenth-century moralists rather than a founder of a new science.
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