In the period following the tumultuous 1720s, the United Kingdom experienced a time of extraordinary economic growth and political success. By mid-century it became clear that the new banking institutions and monetary instruments that ushered in the Financial Revolution were part of a permanent transformation of politics and economics in Britain. Similarly, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century the British political class generally coalesced around a hardened orthodox Whig interpretation of the nation's constitutional system of balanced government. Well gone now was the grand political and theological struggles of the previous century, as the fierce battles ‘pro aris & foci’ were replaced by Walpole's bland managerialism and Bolingbroke's perpetual campaign against the administration. In philosophical terms, the highlight of British thought in this period was without doubt the Scottish Enlightenment. The broad, path-breaking movement that emerged from the great Scottish universities and the educated classes on Britain's northern Celtic-fringe at this time included the contributions of Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid in moral philosophy and James Steuart and Adam Ferguson's works of political economy, but arguably the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were the philosophic dynamic duo and long-time friends, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Locating Hume and Smith in the tradition of classical liberalism perhaps requires some explanation inasmuch as the Scottish Enlightenment is frequently associated with the communitarian critique of the English natural rights philosophy we have encountered in Hobbes, Locke, and Trenchard and Gordon. Indeed, Hume in particular was often identified as a political conservative, even a Tory on account of his rejection of the state of nature concept as an unhelpful fiction, his predisposition against rapid or violent political change and his condemnation of Wilkite radicalism. However, I join those scholars who caution against the conservative characterisation of Hume. Rather, I suggest that Hume's liberalism reflects the profound influence of Mandeville, and the interest-based, as opposed to rights-based, elements of the earlier liberal tradition. Politically Hume was not a Tory for throughout his career he supported the Glorious Revolution settlement and Protestant Succession without hesitation or any perceivable admixture of Jacobite sympathies.