The Scottish Inquiry: The Division of Labour and Modes of Subsistence

Abstract

It is in the period of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, one of its foremost historians tells us, that ‘the prehistory of the social sciences gives way to its history’.40 While the development of social science can no doubt be endlessly reconstructed and its origins continually resited from different standpoints — sometimes with scant regard for discursive specifities — Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, Millar’s The Origin of Ranks and many other writings do testify to a profound interest, probably without precedent in intellectual history, in the nature of social formations and their evolution.41 The social thought of the period received a powerful stimulus from the growth in knowledge of other, totally different societies and cultures provided by travellers. Indeed there developed an incipient cultural relativism; the eighteenth century discovered the world to be infinitely more varied and interesting than it had ever been.