The pandemic is still upon us, but the reckoning with its political consequences in Europe has already begun. A commission of inquiry will be set up in the UK to explain why COVID-19 has claimed more than 50,000 lives in a country that once prided itself on its public administration and its health service; public prosecutors in Italy are interviewing the Prime Minister to see whether there was dereliction of duty in the Bergamo region, where the epidemic had a savage impact; in Spain, grieving families are suing politicians for failing to order quarantine early enough. Elsewhere, the daily plebiscite that is democracy is in full swing: Opinion research companies are tabulating how citizens feel their leaders “performed” and the opinion formers on social media are assessing leaders’ records, often according to their own ideological predilections. Future elections will be referenda, in whole or in part, on leadership performance in the pandemic.

By common consent Isaiah Berlin enjoyed a happy old age. The autumn of his life was a time of serenity. But serenity in old age is a philosophical puzzle. Why did he manage to avoid the shipwreck which is the more common fate of us all? The obvious answer is that he was exceedingly fortunate. He married happily, late in life, and he enjoyed good health, good fortune and a growing reputation. His life between 1975, when he retired from the Presidency of Wolfson College, Oxford, and his death in 1997, was a time both of ease and increasing public recognition. Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy, began editing and republishing his previously unpublished essays and lectures, and this transformed Berlin's reputation, giving the lie to Maurice Bowra's joke that like our Lord and Socrates, Berlin talked much but published little. He lived long enough to see his reputation, which had been in relative eclipse, blossom into what he referred to as a ‘posthumous fame’.

Certainly, Berlin's serenity in his final years owed a great deal to good fortune. But there are temperaments which frown even when fortune shines, and even those with sunny temperaments find mortal decline a depressing experience. So Berlin's serenity is worth trying to explain, both for what it tells us about him and for what it tells us about how to face our own ageing. I want to ask whether his serenity was a matter of temperament or a result of conviction, whether it was a capacity he inherited or a goal he achieved, and in particular whether his convictions – liberal, sceptical, agnostic and moderate – helped to fortify him against the ordeals of later life.

Being philosophical about old age implies being reconciled or being resigned or some combination of the two. I want to ask whether Isaiah was resigned or reconciled and in what sense philosophy helped him to be philosophical in either of these senses.

From Socrates onwards, philosophy – especially the Stoic tradition – has made the question of how to die well one of its central preoccupations. Indeed until philosophers became academic specialists devoted to instruction of the young and maintenance of that walled garden known as professional philosophy – in other words until the second half of the nineteenth century – one of the central tests of a philosophy was whether it helped its adherents to live and die in an instructively rational and inspirational fashion.

During the Cold War, the chief threat to human rights came in the form of state tyranny in the Soviet bloc and in authoritarian regimes receiving American support. After 1991, with the end of imperial support for client states and satellites, together with the national independence of groups held in imperial tutelage, there has been an explosion of state formation and state fragmentation. Since 1991 more than fifteen new states have emerged, and while some have made the transition to stability, many of them, Georgia and Armenia for example, are struggling, others like Chechnya are staging a secessionist war that is being brutally put down, while other ex-Communist survivors like Yugoslavia have broken apart. Where states cannot control their territory and are fighting insurgencies or ethnic separatism, massacre and ethnic cleansing become ways of life. As a result, chaos has replaced tyranny as the new challenge to human rights in the twenty-first century.

Some states are struggling to be born, while others that had benefited from imperial assistance, like Somalia, have collapsed altogether. Still others, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, remain states in name only. Sierra Leone has been torn apart by a civil war fomented by its neighbor Liberia, and in Afghanistan, the state was first dismembered by a civil war and then taken over by a terrorist group. In other places, collapse has not essentially been driven by imperial departure or conflict.

A book such as this would not have been possible without the renaissance in studies of the Scottish Enlightenment which has taken place in the past fifteen years. This new work, associated especially with the names of George Davie, Duncan Forbes, Ronald Meek, James Moore, Nicholas Phillipson, John Pocock, Andrew Skinner and Donald Winch, has made possible a complex new understanding of Scottish jurisprudence, moral philosophy and political economy, and their origins in Scottish provincial culture and metropolitan politics. At the same time, new scholarship on Hobbes and Locke and the political philosophy of the three British revolutions of 1641, 1688 and 1776, on the continental natural jurisprudence tradition and on the English neo-Harringtonian forms of Machiavellian civic humanism, have made possible a new degree of precision in siting Scottish political economy on the map of the main traditions of European political, moral and legal philosophy. This book is an attempt to take stock of these achievements in scholarship. The specific occasion which gave rise to it was a colloquium held at King's College, Cambridge, in May 1979 on Scottish political economy and the civic humanist tradition. The papers by Istvan Hont, Nicholas Phillipson, John Pocock, John Robertson and Franco Venturi were originally delivered at that colloquium; the rest were given at the seminar series which preceded it or were commissioned for the volume. Each paper has been rewritten and extended for publication.

Since his death in 1801, Millar has lived on in fitful and contradictory reincarnations. Sombart, Pascal and Meek have laid claim to him as the pioneer of the materialist interpretation of history, while Lehmann and Schneider have revived him as the father of mainstream sociology. Millar's politics are no less divergently interpreted. To Duncan Forbes, he is a Smithian ‘scientific’ Whig, while to Hans Medick he is the social scientist of the radical petty bourgeoisie in the transient heyday of petty commodity production. To John Pocock, on the other hand, he is a latter-day civic republican and Commonwealthman, his categories imbedded in the language of corruption and virtue. There is equal disagreement about his legacy. For A. L. Macfie and for Duncan Forbes, Millar is the ‘bridge’ between Smith and the Utilitarians, while others such as Donald Winch and John Burrow have wondered aloud whether Scottish conjectural history and science of government, as Millar practised them, find any echo at all in the Edinburgh Review or the Utilitarians. Does Millar transmit a tradition, or does he announce its end?

Any new look at Millar has to begin with these interpretations and their contradictions.

The emphasis placed by Sombart, Pascal and Meek on Millar and Smith's ‘materialism’ does capture the radicalism of their challenge to a historiography of kings and queens and to an ethical rationalism which looked down upon ‘hunger, thirst and the passion for sex’ as aspects of human nature unfit to be placed at the centre of historical process.

No clear definition of the identity of political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland can be given unless an account is offered of the central questions which Adam Smith was trying to answer when he wrote the Wealth of Nations. This in turn requires that we should be able to understand the relation between Smith's concerns as a moral philosopher, as a professor of jurisprudence and as a political economist.