How the Scots Bequeathed Us Political EconomyThere is a Genesis Myth for the Anglophone social sciences, or at least one found commonly amongst economists and their campfollowers.It goes like this: before the 18 th century there were markets, but people behaved as though they were enshrouded in a great fog, which prevented them from seeing 'society' with any clarity or perspicuity.Then, something happened to dispel the fog (it could have been the Industrial Revolution, or the Rise of Science, or the Protestant Reformation, or we know not what) in a most unlikely geographical setting, namely, Scotland in the 1700s.In this myth, the Scottish Enlightenment stands as the great watershed in social thought about the modern world; it marked the commencement of 'social science', if not the very birth of modernity in most of its multifarious disguises.Casting off the medieval shackles of feudalism, religion and superstition, figures such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and especially Adam Smith, under the steady guidance of Baconian empiricism, reported the regularities of social life as they really were.Amazingly, far from gathering together a jumble of meaningless data, they were able to distill out of their observations transtemporal and transcultural general principles of human social organization; principles of such compelling universality that they persist (although in much revised formats) down to the present day in the social sciences. 1These 'principles' often boil down in practice to a relatively 1 Perhaps the cultural icon who, by their writings, does their utmost to prevent this paragraph from bootless caricature is Friedrich