Clem tto prce je ukzat Fergusonovy zkladn teze tkajc se pojet lidsk pirozenosti a zkoumat, jak z nich plynou zvry a jestli mohou tyto zvry neproblematicky koexistovat. V prvn sti prce se chci pokusit najt vnitn jednotu ve Fergusonov teorii lidsk pirozenosti a ukzat, e Fergusonovo pojet lovka je konklusivn. Zkoumn pirozenosti lovka je pro Fergusona velmi tsn spjato se zkoumn vztahu jedince a spolenosti. Prv v pojet tohoto vztahu vznik problmov situace, pokud budeme chtt podret Fergusonovu verzi a pidat (...) k n teorii morlnho citu. Na rozbor tto problematiky se zamm v posledn sti prce. Prce se zabv Fergusonovou teori spadajc pouze do obdob, kdy napsal "An Essay on the History of Civil Society". (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the sciences of social action (...) and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology. (shrink)

The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of civilization grounded in (...) more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. (shrink)