Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains a set of essays that analyse Ferguson's philosophical, political and sociological writings and the discourse which they prompted between Ferguson and other important figures.

Introduction, Eugene Heath, Vincenzo Merolle; Part I Life and Works; Chapter 1 Ferguson the Highlander, Michael Fry; Chapter 2 Adam Ferguson, the 43rd, and the Fictions of Fontenoy, Bruce Buchan; Part II Philosophy; Chapter 3 Why Did David Hume Dislike Adam Ferguson's an Essay on The History of Civil Society?, David Raynor; Chapter 4 Hume as Critic of Ferguson's Essay, Vincenzo Merolle; Chapter 5 The Two Adams: Ferguson and Smith on Sympathy and Sentiment, Jack Russell Weinstein; Part III Politics; Chapter 6 A Complicated Vision: The Good Polity in Adam Ferguson's Thought, Lisa Hill; Chapter 7 Adam Ferguson and Enlightened Provincial Ideology in Scotland, Michael Kugler; Part IV Society; Chapter 8 'But Art Itself is Natural to Man': Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity, Christopher J. Berry; Chapter 9 Ferguson on the Unintended Emergence of Social Order, Eugene Heath;