Recently there has been a revival of interest in the apparent inconsistency between Smith’s conjectural stadial model and the various historical cases of social stagnation, and even retrograde order, as presented in his works. Most scholars tend to adopt an ‘either-or’ approach, suggesting that we must either discard the stadial model or acknowledge Smith’s theoretical incongruence. This...
Smith does not conceive of a “state of nature” as such, which societies exit in the course of development. Rather, as Michel Foucault noted, society, for Smith and his Scottish contemporaries, is a “historical-natural constant”. In Smith’s descriptive account of societies, much emphasis, too, is placed on the naturalness of certain kinds of institutions – institutions of government, for...
