Those interested in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought will want to know of a new book from Edinburgh University Press. David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith were the most important and influential thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. But whereas the political and economic writings of Hume and Smith are famous and intensively studied, Reid’s work on politics and political economy is known to only a handful of specialists. Part of the reason why Reid’s views on political and economic matters have been so little studied is that he published virtually nothing on these subjects, even though he taught both politics and economics as a university professor and discussed topical issues in these fields in learned societies in Aberdeen and Glasgow. However, the most recent volume in the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid (http://euppublishing.com/series/EETR), Thomas Reid on Politics and Society: Papers and Lectures, edited by Knud Haakonssen and Paul Wood, publishes for the first time Reid’s manuscripts related to his politics lectures given at the University of Glasgow, as well as the texts of his papers on political and economic topics read before the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and the Glasgow Literary Society. The volume also includes an extensive editorial introduction which sets Reid’s political and economic thought in context and provides the first systematic interpretation of Reid as a political and economic theorist. The book makes it clear that Reid was an independently minded systematic theorist. In politics, he drew selectively on the liberal Whig ‘Commonwealth’ writers, on Montesquieu and on utopian thought. In political economy, his lectures presented a complete system prior to the publications of both Sir James Steuart and Adam Smith. Reid’s theoretical ideas were closely interwoven with his engagement in topical economic, political and social issues in Scotland, as well as Europe more generally. The result of the interplay between theory and practice was a very different form of Enlightenment from that promoted by Hume and Smith.
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