Politics in Commercial Society (Hont 2015) is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, it is the final work of one of the twentieth century's great students of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. Its author, the late Istvan Hont, was a pre-eminent voice in the scholarly debates on Smith and the Scots for many decades, and through both his consummately erudite published work and his teaching at Cambridge he did as much as any scholar in recent decades to shape our understanding of these subjects.

Politics in Commercial Society is also remarkable for a second reason. Its aim is to present a comparative study of the political theories of Smith and Rousseau – a subject that, as readers of this volume know well, has become a thriving industry in recent years. Hont himself was long interested in the Smith–Rousseau connection; his 2015 book owes its genesis to several sets of lectures on Rousseau and Smith that he delivered between 2009 and 2010 in Oxford, Boston and Jena.

As a contribution to the comparative study of Smith and Rousseau, Hont's book is valuable on two fronts, one methodological and one substantive. Yet the book, it must be said, is far from the magnum opus for which some might have hoped. The author's untimely passing seems to have rendered it impossible for him to have added any citations to scholarship. The text also makes several substantive claims that one wonders whether he might not in time have revised or reworked, or at least provided further evidence to support. In light of this, what follows has three aims: first, to call attention to the work's most valuable substantive and methodological claims; second, to frame it by setting its claims in the context of recent scholarship; and third, to raise some questions regarding three of the book's core theses.

Hont's book begins with a striking claim. In its opening sentence we are told that it ‘is about commercial society and how to understand politics in it’ (1). The methodological significance of this claim deserves attention. The suggestion is that this is no mere exercise in the study of the history of political thought as it has been conventionally understood.