Hegel

Abstract

Smith died only a year after the French Revolution and before the impact of the industrial revolution on restructuring the social order could be fully understood. But he had a profound influence on the generation of thinkers in the early part of the next century who tried to make sense of the social currents unleashed by the French and industrial revolutions. It was especially in Germany — ironically a country yet to experience either a bourgeois or an industrial revolution — that Smith’s writings and those of the Scottish Enlightenment had the most influence. Not surprisingly the ideas were viewed, evaluated, absorbed and reworked through an intellectual tradition very different from the hard-headed empiricism of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the process they were transformed to yield a new discourse which combined the traditional preoccupations of German Idealism with a social philosophy more appropriate to the particular, uneven development of the German social formation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.