Rousseau’s treatment of civil religion in Social Contract IV.8 is best understood as an effort to grapple with religion’s relationship to national unity and international unity. Put in terms of a question, Rousseau asks: What form of religion brings both national unity and international unity? Restated in Rousseau’s specialized terminology, the central question at the heart of this chapter is: what (if any) religion is capable of bringing unity to, and thereby reconciling, particular society and general society? The aim of this chapter then is to show that the civil religion of Social Contract IV.8 is developed with an eye towards political unity – and indeed not political unity in any ordinary sense, but political unity that is at once national and international, at once a unity of the particular society and a unity of the general society.

Defoe was not a philosopher, yet his work demands attention from a philosophical perspective for two reasons. One is contextual. Defoe’s literary career in the first quarter of the eighteenth century coincided with a remarkable period in the history of British philosophy. Second, Defoe frequently takes up themes addressed by the major philosophers of his day, and thus familiarity with their central concerns and arguments will be helpful to his readers. This chapter offers a general and necessarily brief survey of four philosophical contexts likely to be of interest to Defoe’s readers: practical philosophy, natural philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology, and philosophy of religion. In so doing, it seeks to call attention to (and specifically with reference to Robinson Crusoe) several of the ways in which Defoe’s thought intersected with concerns being taken up by some of the leading philosophers of early eighteenth-century Britain.

In this chapter, Ryan Patrick Hanley surveys some of the best-known Enlightenment sources of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. He considers in particular the respective influences of René Descartes, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal on the arguments and methodology of Democracy in America. Rather than conceiving of Tocqueville as either pro- or anti-Enlightenment, Hanley argues that we should instead understand Tocqueville as an example of a “Moderate Enlightenment” that eschews the rationalism and materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment.” By way of illustration, Hanley identifies specific affinities between Tocqueville and the moderate Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith.

Hume’s signature contribution to the theory of justice has long been taken to consist in the Treatise’s argument for justice as an artificial virtue. Yet Hume’s re-presentation of his theory of justice in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals makes no reference whatsoever to justice as an artificial virtue. Given this fundamental difference, interpreters are compelled to explain what exactly changed in Hume’s shift from one sort of account to another, as well as what, if anything, is significant in Hume’s mature theory of justice once the idea of justice’s artificiality has been taken off the table.  The present essay focuses on two key sections of the second Enquiry – “Of Justice” and “Some Farther Considerations with Regard to Justice” – to argue for two claims. First, in shifting away from the debate over whether justice is natural or artificial, the second Enquiry focuses instead on how political actors and political orders enable natural justice to be operationalized in practical life. Second, Hume’s account of justice in the second Enquiry reveals a crucial albeit underemphasized aspect of his moral epistemology, namely the crucial role played by reason in moral motivation and evaluation.

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.