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A philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson occupies a unique place within eighteenth-century Scottish thought. Distinguished by a moral and historical bent, his work is framed within a teleological outlook that upholds the importance of action and virtue

In his lectures of 1978–79, published posthumously as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault addressed versions of liberalism in which an invisible market appears immune to government intervention. Among the thinkers discussed were Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. This essay offers critical reflections on Foucault's description of Smith as emphasizing the invisibility of the economy, as well as on Foucault's interpretation of the "invisible hand" and his ascription of egoism to Smith's economic agents. Foucault also appeals to Ferguson's notion of civil society to resolve incompatibilities between economic agents and the sovereign. However, Ferguson's theory of society does not provide the assistance that Foucault thinks it does. Moreover, like Smith, Ferguson holds no egoistic view of economic motivation. Nonetheless, and surprisingly, Foucault would have found enticing Ferguson's use of conjectural history, with its appeal to the unintended, contingent, and conflictual basis of social change.

AbstractSeventeenth-century English common lawyer Sir John Davies sets forth, in hisIrish Reports, a provocative and interesting argument on the nature of custom and its relation to the common law. This relatively unexplored argument shows how actions may emerge from conditions of liberty and slowly acquire qualities of social benefit and agreeability that are essential if the common law is to be identified with custom. Davies not only provides a coherent account of how custom might possess some reasonability, but he also seems to suggest that custom is unintended, thereby anticipating a theme found in eighteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, and Burke. In addition, Davies's account has important implications for political theory: the priority of the social over the political and a notion of political consent that arises via custom itself.

Hayek's social theory presupposes that rules are unintended consequences of individual actions. This essay explicates one kind of Hayekian explanation of that claim. After noting the kinds of rules that Hayek believes are subject to such a theory, the essay distinguishes three functional explanations advocated by Hayek. He combines one of these functional explanations with an invisible hand explanation. A schema suitable for constructing invisible hand-functional evolutionary theories is employed to outline this combination.

The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.

The moral dimensions of how we conduct business affect all of our lives in ways big and small, from the prevention of environmental devastation to the policing of unfair trading practices, from arguments over minimum wage rates to those over how government contracts are handed out. Yet for as deep and complex a field as business ethics is, it has remained relatively isolated from the larger, global history of moral philosophy. This book aims to bridge that gap, reaching deep into the past and traveling the globe to reinvigorate and deepen the basis of business ethics. Spanning the history of western philosophy as well as looking toward classical Chinese thought and medieval Islamic philosophy, this volume provides business ethicists a unified source of clear, accurate, and compelling accounts of how the ideas of foundational thinkers - from Aristotle to Friedrich Hayek to Amartya Sen - relate to wealth, commerce, and markets. The essays illuminate perspectives that have often been ignored or forgotten, informing discussion in fresh and often unexpected ways. In doing so, the authors not only throw into relief common misunderstandings and misappropriations often endemic to business ethics but also set forth rich moments of contention as well as novel ways of approaching complex ethical problems. Ultimately, this volume provides a bedrock of moral thought that will move business ethics beyond the ever-changing opinions of headline-driven debate.