Introduction

A difficult beginning was made by eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals to develop an empirical theory of long-run unplanned processes that is frequently claimed to be the foundation of classical sociology. This book is centrally concerned, first, with how the Scottish Enlightenment has been selectively appropriated for sociology over the last century or so and, second, with elaborating a historical sociology of pre-sociology beyond a linear historical narrative or a defence of ‘the Enlightenment’ as a static value-laden category. What, in other words, were the social and cognitive conditions of possibility that spawned the specific transformations represented by the Scottish Enlightenment in its collective ambition to construct a science of society?