Two decades of Adam Smith revisionism have restored his reputation as a philosopher of some substance and refuted the idea that he was simply the ‘high priest’ of capitalism. Yet all too often Smith is still offered up as an ‘English empiricist’ in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke and Mill. In this article Smith's critique of mercantilism is re-read through a peculiar Scottish tradition of social thought which began with Hume and which delivers up a surprisingly fresh, open and contemporary thinker.
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