Protagoras Resurrected: Moral Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment

FAIN: FT-51481-03

James R. Otteson
University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0001)

I plan to use the stipend to fund work on my book, Protagoras Resurrected: Moral Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment. In my book Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2002), I argue that Smith develops a market-style model for understanding the creation, growth, and maintenance of large-scale human social institutions. Others working in the same veins include notably David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Dugald Stewart. In Protagoras Resurrected I propose to look at the work of these figures to see exactly what their explanations for social institutions were, in what ways they used market-style explanations, and what exactly these models were intended to explain.