In recent years we have witnessed an outpouring of books and articles relating Rousseau to the Scots of his day, especially Adam Smith. Overwhelmingly it is students of Smith's thought, not Rousseau’s, who are responsible for this spate of publications. One cannot read their works without noting their worthy intention of demonstrating that Smith was more than the champion of the emerging capitalist order – that he was also willing, where need be, to call attention to the problems that followed in its wake and to offer remedies. There would be every reason to applaud the efforts of the Smith scholars if, when they turned to Rousseau, their labours were directed to harvesting the benefits of comparative analysis. Regrettably, they are often unwilling to settle for comparisons; instead, they insist upon making the extremely dubious argument that Smith wrote in response to Rousseau and defeated him in a debate over ‘commercial society’.

Two decisive problems bedevil the scholarship as it now stands. The first is the paucity of the evidence presented by Smith scholars and their unwillingness to deal with disconfirming evidence. The second is their failure to treat Rousseau fairly: he is said to have lost an argument with Adam Smith over ‘commercial society’ which he could not possibly have won, since commercial society was not his primary focus. Rather, his fundamental target was nothing less than civilisation itself. In more ways than one Smith and Rousseau were not speaking the same language, so if we wish to juxtapose them we must realise that we are the ones engaging in comparisons and debates; they were not.

My intention in this essay is to question the claims that Rousseau wrote in response to commercial society and that a major concern of Smith in his most important works was to repudiate Rousseau. After that I shall suggest how we might rebuild and reclaim our scholarly endeavours by a comparative procedure that can begin with a discussion of Rousseau and Smith but which should end with an invitation to absorb Rousseau and the Scots into the larger framework of studying comparative Enlightenments, French and Scottish.