An introduction to Adam Ferguson's life and thought. The introduction discusses Ferguson's work in relation to his better-known contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, while the afterword offers an indepth reconsideration of Ferguson's most renowned work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society.

Ferguson thought well of ambition, but he also believed that a frenzy of ambition and frustration, might tear at man's self-respect and peace of mind. The decisive phenomenon manifested by Ferguson's writing is the emergence of an intellectual's point of view toward the conditions of modern society. Many of the questions that he posed have been restated in more profound ways, some of the questions and most of the answers have been eliminated or transformed beyond recognition; and all of the issues he raises are now expressed by others in harsh, new words. But, however formulated, Ferguson's concerns clearly foreshadow the problems of over-rationalization, dehumanization, atomization, alienation, and bureaucratization that have been repeatedly canvassed by intellectuals in our time.