Sher, Richard B. “Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense.” The Journal of Modern History 61, no. 2 (1989): 240–268.

Excerpt:

“It has long been recognized that eighteenth-century Scotland gave birth to

political economy as a sophisticated scholarly discipline. Hailing from a
relatively impoverished nation that had joined its larger southerneighbor in
1707 to form a new “British” state, Adam Smith and other Scottish political
economists were concerned not only with observing, describing, and explain-
ing the realities of economic life as they saw them but also with leading
Scotland toward material progress and wealth. It has also been recognized,
however, that in Scotland political economy was a branch of a remarkably
comprehensive academic discipline known as moral philosophy, and that
Scottish moralists were acutely sensitive to the ambiguities and paradoxes
inherent in economic growth. At times this sensitivity was expressed through
the language of the civic humanist or classical republican tradition, which
emphasized public virtue, a unified civic personality that joined the private
individual with the public citizen, and economic independence based on land
ownership, as opposed to the blatantly self-interested attitudes and activities
associated with the accumulation of commercial wealth. This tension between
modernization and morality, wealth and virtue, accounts for much of the
recent interest in the social thought of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

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