In this paper I present Adam Smith as a practical moralist who thought that his account of the principles of morals and social organization would be of use to responsibly-minded men of middling rank, living in a modern, commercial society. In this account Smith will appear as a philosopher who was concerned with the principles of propriety as well as with those of virtue and valued the spirit of independence and sense of ego of commercial man rather than the libertarian civic virtues of the classical republican. He will, above all, appear as the philosopher who saw the province as the true source of the opulence, freedom and political wisdom that was needed to maintain the fabric of a commercial polity in a modern age.

It is now customary to think of the Scottish social philosophers as moral philosophers who were anxious to introduce the methods of the natural into the moral sciences. As an intellectual historian, I prefer to think of them as practical moralists who had developed a formidable and complex casuistical armoury to instruct young men of middling rank in their duties as men and as citizens of a modern commercial polity. Hutcheson, Smith, Ferguson, Reid and Stewart were professors of moral philosophy who saw their curricula as devices to teach their pupils to ‘adorn your souls with every virtue, prepare yourselves for every honourable office in life and quench that manly and laudable thirst you should have after knowledge.’