From progression of manners to natural history of mankind: Scottish thinking on historical temporality

Abstract

At the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish thinkers David Hume, William Robertson,Adam Smith, Lord Kames (Henry Home), and Adam Ferguson wrote extensively on the stages ofhuman society, from its origins to civilisation. These works fashioned a typically Scottishhistoriographical genre, the ‘Natural history of mankind’. This genre, intimate of the Age ofEnlightenment in its Scottish form, divided the evolution of mankind in stages and establishedmoral values for each one. Here, my goal is to draw a summary of this historiographical trend.