A number of canonical figures who deeply admired Montesquieu were equally committed to protecting the integrity of the public sphere from commerce. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville and, more recently, Hannah Arendt each revised Montesquieu's theory of free, moderate government to make political honours available to a broader citizenry. However, they disagreed over the degree to which the commercial and political worlds needed to be kept separate. One will find a divergence on this question in the political thought of Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith who were considered heirs to Montesquieu in their immediate contexts. Both Scottish philosophers embraced modern commerce as the organising principle of eighteenth-century Europe. However, like Montesquieu, they were not unconcerned with the civic challenges posed by the new commercial order. In considering how Ferguson and Smith approximate political virtue in their respective works, this chapter delineates how each thinker appropriated Montesquieu's moderation to a more egalitarian, burgeoning commercial world of mass production and capital accumulation – one marked by the new civic challenges that advanced commercial specialisation introduced to European nations.