This book points to a perennial problem in liberal modernity: how to balance commercial considerations with the public interest. We do not need to look further back than the subprime crisis and the subsequent Great Recession to see the practical results of an ethos that assumes an unproblematic reconciliation of these ends. An illustrative example is the establishment of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, US government–sponsored corporations created by the Roosevelt administration in response to the United States’ banking crisis during the 1930s. Such initiatives show how moral hazard may become a concern under any regulatory system. Despite their benevolent origins and effectiveness in stabilising banks during the Great Depression, these institutions provided private financiers and bankers with a disincentive to judiciously consider risk in their dayto- day lending practices. They inadvertently encouraged financiers to provide loans for the purposes of reselling them to larger institutions that securitised them and assumed the entire risk. The resulting economic fallout eroded citizens’ trust in public institutions. What is more, the subsequent piecemeal erosion of the Dodd–Frank regulatory regime in the United States – established in 2010 to rein in the excesses of Wall Street – has fed into a culture of populism, reflected by the hostility of underprivileged classes towards public and private elites whose indiscretions became an acknowledged cause for their overarching financial distress. Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment considers this dilemma through the lenses of Enlightenment-era political philosophers who met similar challenges during capitalism's nascent stages. Their works contain elegant theories of moderate government, germane to our own thinking about political morality in liberal modernity.

Montesquieu is well known as a paragon of the ‘Moderate Enlightenment’ – a theorist of constitutional balance. However, underexplored affinities between him and key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment can enlarge our understanding of their moderation. They highlight that it is not a merely legalistic notion but a deeper vision of how commercial ends and public spiritedness may be harmonised. In recounting how Montesquieu and his Scottish contemporaries responded to the civic challenges associated with Europe's gradual financialisation, I recapture a conceptual space in the famous eighteenth-century commerce and virtue debates. I present Montesquieu as a pivotal figure in these debates.