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capacity to render us sociable (p. 151); and most innovatively, he reconstructs what a “legitimate” governmentmight look like for Smith, using arguments from the Lectures on Jurisprudence (pp. 204–10). Although Sagar’s debts to István Hont are many and obvious throughout the text, he makes good on his promise to articulate a new and complementary “alternative” to Hont’s framework for understanding the modern state (p. 9). In sum, Sagar is a meticulous reader of all the Enlightenment thinkers he treats, and specialists and new readers alike will profit from his often novel and always instructive retelling of the emergence of our contemporary understanding of political obligation. My only minor interpretive differences from Sagar stem from his treatment of Smith and how he conceptualizes Smith’s relationship with Rousseau. Unlike Sagar, I read the famous passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the “poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition” (p. 174) in light of what Smith says elsewhere about ambition (in passages Sagar himself quotes on p. 176). It seems odd to me to remove status concerns from and neutralize the negative tone in Smith’s account of the ambitious if futile pursuit of the poor man’s son, given that Smith explicitly identifies shared sympathy as the end of all ambitious pursuits. Although Sagar is correct to highlight that, for Smith, we often mistake the means of happiness for the end, and that such mistakes in fact help ensure that more have the actual means to achieve happiness than would be the case if we were fully informed about our interest and merely self-interested, he misses Smith’s insistence onmutual sympathy itself as an important means to happiness. As Smith contends, mutual sympathy gives us “that relief which nothing can afford [us] but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with [our] own” (Theory of Moral Sentiments [TSM], I.i.4.7), which is critical because the “chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved” (TMS, I.ii.5.1). Even though the good opinion that other people hold of us might not be the immediate cause of any particular individual’s effort to attain wealth, it is clearly the reason why we value wealth as such for Smith. Relatedly, I wondered whether Sagar’s investment in divorcing Smith’s conception of ambition from vanity was the driving force in his decision to include a chapter on Rousseau. This chapter, although incredibly sharp in its identification of the key shortcomings of the Discourse on Inequality, seemed less natural than one devoted to Montesquieu, given the unique approach to sovereignty that the latter made available to Hume and Smith. Sagar seems to include a chapter on Rousseau only because others see Smith as indebted to him (incorrectly, he strongly contends); Sagar insists that Smith was “largely unmoved” (p. 167) by Rousseau’s concerns about the enduring challenge posed to commercial society by amourpropre. These questions nevertheless do nothing to diminish the real worth of Sagar’s careful study, which will be an invaluable resource to anyone interested in normative questions about political legitimacy. By bringing Hume’s and Smith’s empirically minded understanding of authority to bear on critical questions about state legitimacy, Sagar has made a powerful case for considering Scottish Enlightenment political theory as integral to understanding the justifications for the modern state, as well as how we might think through political obligations beyond it.