This essay is designed to study two approaches to the interpretation of early modern political and social thought, and of Scottish historical and economic theory in particular. The title chosen for the essay suggests that Cambridge is a ground on which both approaches are flourishing, as was clearly demonstrated by the King's College symposium out of which this volume grows; and I shall take the opportunity to comment upon some recent developments in Cambridge study of the history of political and social thought. The essay itself, however, is written at a distance from Cambridge, and reflects some of the current preoccupations of American and Canadian scholarship in the field.

The so-called civic humanist paradigm, with which the author of this essay is associated, makes its starting point a certain early modern articulation of the idea of virtue. In this sense, the term ‘virtue’ referred not simply to morally desirable practices or the inner disposition of the self towards them, but to the practice of citizenship in the classical or Graeco-Roman sense of that term. It entailed the maintenance of a civic equality among those who passed the often severe tests prerequisite to equality, and the moral disposition of the self towards the maintenance of a public (a better adjective than common) good, identifiable with the political association, polis or respublica, itself.