As a professor at King's College in Aberdeen for nearly sixty years, William Ogilvie was an active participant, along with celebrated colleagues like Thomas Reid, George Campbell and James Beattie, in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (or ‘Wise Club’), as well as a prominent member of Scotland's academic community from the 1760s onwards. Yet despite the facts that he had also been Reid's pupil and then studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh when those institutions were at the very height of their intellectual distinction, Ogilvie's relationship with the wider Scottish Enlightenment has gone almost completely unrecognised. This is the more surprising because, while the ideas of the principal Scottish philosophers about the material aspects of human existence have most often been considered as having broadly conservative political implications, Ogilvie's sole publication, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781), indicates that inquiries of that kind might also have provoked profoundly radical conclusions about the causes and consequences of social inequality. In Ogilvie's case, moreover, the revolutionary analysis that he constructed would go on to earn him an honoured place in the history of progressive thought. He was later bracketed, for example, with Spence as one of the early ‘Agrarian Socialists’, paired with Paine as an authentically ‘radical social reformer’, included by other hagiographers among the ‘left-libertarians’, and even, in a particularly wrenching mis-contextualisation by Tolstoy, classified simply as an ‘Englishman’. What follows therefore attempts to reposition Ogilvie and his peculiar arguments about property, society and government where they actually originated, in the distinctive intellectual environment of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Ogilvie was in many ways the archetypal mid-eighteenth-century product of both King's College and Marischal College in Aberdeen – a man with slightly obscure origins in the city's regional hinterland, who achieved such significance as he later acquired by dint of an education at one of its two independent and rival university-level institutions. Born in 1736, he was the only son of James Ogilvie of Pittensear, the owner of a relatively modest ancestral estate near Elgin in Morayshire.