Since this essay purports to be a study in intention rather than premonition, and has attempted to show how pursuit of the latter without regard for the former frequently leads to historically meaningless interpretations being advanced, it would run counter to the spirit of the enterprise to close by suggesting latent implications of the reading given here which go well beyond the issues and range of textual evidence already considered. It seems desirable, however, to underline a few points by way of conclusion.

I hope the reader will by now have a clear idea of what is being claimed in speaking of the need for a historical approach to Adam Smith's politics. In attempting to concentrate attention on what Smith appears to have been doing when he wrote on such matters, I have approached the problem in much the same temper as other recent historical studies of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hume, even if I cannot lay claim to equivalent scope and depth. Moreover, although I have not mounted a self-contained case for the criteria and methods of interpretation employed here, I would align myself with others who have expounded the historiographic problems involved in establishing necessary conditions for the recovery of meaning from texts considered within historical and linguistic contexts.

This essay has had two related objectives, one positive, the other negative. First, to maintain that Smith does in fact have a ‘politics’ which is neither trivial nor vestigial. Secondly, to show that the main obstacle in any effort to recapture the eighteenth-century context of Smith's politics is what I have described as the liberal capitalist perspective.