This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of western political thought during the European Enlightenment. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes that is now firmly established as the principal reference source for the history of political thought. Every major theme in eighteenth-century political thought is covered in a series of essays at once scholarly and accessible, and the essays are complemented by extensive guides for further reading, and brief biographical notes of the major characters in the text, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and David Hume. Of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics and history at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and rewarding of all periods in the development of western thinking about politics, man (and increasingly woman), and society.

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The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought

The Scottish contribution to what are now known as the ‘social sciences’ has often been noted, not only by economists and historians, but especially by sociologists. Albion Small produced a study of Adam Smith and Modern Sociology as early as 1907, building on an established German tradition, to be followed, amongst others, by W. C. Lehmann’s Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (1930). Gladys Bryson, influenced to a considerable extent by the work of sociologists such as Small and Franklin Giddings, published two important articles in 1932 and 1939, respectively,1 prior to the appearance of her main contribution, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (1945). This (rather underrated) work, while explicitly building on the findings of others, broke some new ground in commenting on the contributions of a ‘Scottish group’ or ‘school’ whose members were part of a close-knit community. The contributions to which Professor Bryson referred include the subject area of psychology as well as of sociology —both of which are shown to have been deployed in the treatment of history, ‘the absorbing interest’ of the period. This distin-guished tradition was continued with the later works of Lehmann, on Kames and Millar,2 not to mention Professor Macrae’s Ideology and Society (1961).3

A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology

(1981). Republicanism, popular constitutionalism and the radical platform in early nineteenth‐century England. Social History: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-32.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4285043

Republicanism, popular constitutionalism and the radical platform in early nineteenth‐century England

The spectre of luxury A spectre was haunting the modern world, wrote the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani in 1751, the spectre of ‘luxury’. It ‘wanders among us never seen in its true light, or recognised for its efficacy and it, perhaps, never occurs to the virtuous‘. It was akin to the idea of ‘terrestrial happiness’, but ‘no-one knows or dares to say’, Galiani grumbled, ‘what luxury might properly be’ (Galiani 1977, p. 214). Denis Diderot was in a similar quandary. Defining the term in the Encyclopedie , he called for a ‘discussion among those who show the most discrimination in their use of the term luxury: a discussion which has yet to take place, and which even they cannot bring to a satisfactory conclusion’ (Diderot 1755, v , p. 635). The article on ‘Luxury’, published in 1762, and written by the marquis de Saint Lambert, was asmuch a summary of the luxury debates of the first half of the eighteenth century as an attempt to resolve them. The purpose of this chapter is to present the work of eight important contributors to these debates in France and Britain before 1748, the year of publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , that supplied Saint Lambert with the resources he needed to try to say what luxury actually was. As Saint Lambert presented it, luxury was not merely an economic phenomenon, but the central moral and political issue of modernity. The standard definition of luxury’ was excessive individual consumption (Butel- Dumont 1771), but Saint Lambert followed the definition of V´eron de Forbonnais (the author of the articles Commerce’ and Agriculture’ and the original assignee for Luxury’): [Luxury] is the use men make of wealth and industry to assure themselves of a pleasant existence’ (Forbonnais 1754, p. 221; Saint Lambert 1965, p. 202).

The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury

In 1882, when Dicey's so-called age of ‘Individualism’ was over and the high tide of laissez-faire was receding, there emerged for die first time in Britain a thoroughly dogmatic pressure group for extreme laissez-faire. This was the Liberty and Property Defence League. The League originated as part of what Beatrice Webb described as the ‘reaction against empirical socialism [which] came to a head under Mr Gladstone's administration of 1880–85’. But it out lasted Gladstone's second government and defended laissez-faire widi some effect until the end of the century.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0018246X00008888

The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism

Democracy and the labour movement

Tom Mann and his times

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Democracy and the labour movement

Tom Mann and his times