The thinking of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers The theme of "unintended and unanticipated consequences of social action" implies that social change occurs through social action without foreseeing the outcome. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson each provide their own theory on the unanticipated effects of human action. Smith's theory is implicitly historicist; Ferguson's, by contrast, is empirical and anti-historicist (Smith, 1998: 30). In Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", private and selfish interests are converted into collective social good by an "invisible hand" that promotes the "interest of society" without intending or knowing it (Smith, 1998: 30- 31) Smith illustrates this through his discussion of the development of commercial society. "Smith initially described the structural forces that led to the decline of feudal society and property and the necessary evolution of trade and manufacturing" (Smith, 1998:30) This social change, in Smith's view, was "an unintended and unanticipated consequence of social action." The key to understanding this transition, Smith argued, was the actions of two competing social groups: the wealthy barons, whose concern for social status and ornamentation led to their gradual impoverishment and a more secular and efficient merchant class, whose manufactures led to the ruin of the world (Smith, 1998: 30). The social action of the merchant class thus determined that unexpected social change in feudal society. Therefore, this social change that Smith explains illustrates his perspective of how social change was brought about unintentionally by individuals serving their own self-interest. Adam Ferguson saw the workings of society as a whole. Ferguson, unlike Adam Smith, developed no connection between the social actions of individuals, as members of social groups, and the broader collective historical process (Smith, 1998: 30). “Man is a member of a community, 'part of a whole', his social actions because they are collective (Smith, 1998:30). Thus for Ferguson, social change through social action is not seen as the It is instead the social efforts and actions of society as a whole that are responsible for social change. There is nothing of Smith's individualism in Ferguson's concept of the unanticipated effects of social action, or easy optimism. which separated historical meaning from the human subjects who themselves constituted history (Smith, 1998:30-31).