The aim of this essay is to reconstruct Pufendorf's theory of sociability so as to bring out its relation to a theoretical model of commercial society. This theory, it will be argued, was the result of Pufendorf's attempt to reconstruct Grotius's jurisprudence by applying the intellectual method of Thomas Hobbes. By doing this, Pufendorf committed himself to an individualistic premise for his argument and to an anthropology, which systematically compared human with animal nature in order to underline the contrast between civilisation and barbarism. The product of this approach was a new concept of sociability which led some eighteenth-century commentators to describe Pufendorf and his close followers as ‘socialists’. This same model of sociability and its concomitant anthropology played a key part in Adam Smith's theory of commercial society and in his conception of the ‘Age of Commerce’ as the decisive fourth stage in human history.

The intimate continuity between earlier natural-law theories of property and Smith's four stage theory of history does not need elaborate demonstration. But it is commonly believed at present that his predecessors and contemporaries in legal theory, while recognising the three earlier stages – hunting–gathering, shepherding and agriculture – had no clear conception of commerce as a further and distinct stage. A closer look at Smith's own position, however, reveals a certain incoherence. His explanation for the emergence of the fourth stage was quite different in kind from those which explained the first three. The principle of progress in the first three stages was simple.