The Commercial Order And Civic Virtue With The Scottish Enlightenment Thinkers

This paper aims to find out what role the commercial order in the Scottish Enlightenment theories played to transform the classical republicanism into modern republicanism. Classical society and modern society are in sharp contrast with their understandings of the relationship between the public and the private. In classical republics, political community and citizen's political participation were highlighted with the civic virtue being considered as the principal and foundation of existence of the polity. While in modern republics, after the rise of modern state and commercial society, people paid more attention to self-interest seeking, rather than public affairs which were deserted to the hands of bureaucratic governments. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers believed that with the emergence of a commercial society, social interest would be automatically promoted while everyone concerning and pursuing his own interest. This theory on commercial order was first publicized by Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, Private Evil, Public Interest, which was then metaphorized as"the invisible hand"by Adam Smith. The significance of this theory lies on the fact that it not only liberated commerce and self-interest from the constraint of Christian morality and civic virtue, but also made citizen's political participation and civic virtue unnecessary in a new, commercial republic. This theory on commercial order had greatly influenced the basic understanding of politics of the American Founding Fathers and had a clear reflection in the constitutional order they framed out, especially in the mechanism of Checks and Balances which utilizes people's seeking of private interest to enhance the public good according to the same logic of"private interest, public interest".Even if American Republic was founded on the basis of private interest rather than civic virtue and thus provided a different version of political order rather than the classical republics, the most popular political thought in eighteenth century was still classical republicanism. As a Scottish civic humanist, Adam Ferguson emphasized that in modern commercial society, civic virtue still had irreplaceable value to individual's happiness, civil liberty and nation's greatness. However, the theory on commercial order of the Scottish Enlightenment is liable to another extremeness of self-interest pursuing which would undermine in fact the public core of any real polity. This is why in the latest forty or thirty years, communitarianism and contemporary republicanism rose to criticize commercial liberalism, using concepts such as"community","citizenship"and"deliberative democracy". Their criticism will help us to rethink what kind of civic virtue we need in contemporary liberal state, and help us to strike a balance between private interest and public good, as well as to establish some kind of harmonious relationship between individual and modern state.