Title page from An Essay on the History of Civil Society

An Essay on the History of Civil Society

A pioneering work of the Scottish Enlightenment in the field of “philosophical history”, or what we would today call sociology. It deals with the social, political, economic, intellectual, and legal changes which accompanied societies as they made the transition to modern commercial and manufacturing society.

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Economics

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

Philosophy

Love is an affection which carries the attention of the mind beyond itself, and is the sense of a relation to some fellow-creature as to its object. Being a complacency and a continued satisfaction in this object, it has, independent of any external event, and in the midst of disappointment and…

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