It's not surprising if some of the themes sound similar. Rousseau's Discourse was completed in 1754, and Scottish political economists became interested in his argument quite quickly. Adam Smith, for example, translated three of the passages of Rousseau's French into English in an anonymous "Letter to the Edinburgh Review" of 1756, and all three -- one of which included one of the fragments I quoted in my earlier post -- were discussions of the problem of mutual dependence in human society. (Smith, of course, takes quite a different view of the merits of the division of labour in society, and presents a very different account of inequality in the 1759 "Theory of Moral Sentiments".)
But Steuart's argument about dependence seems to me to be quite different from Rousseau's. He *sounds* like Rousseau, for example, when he asks (in Ch. II of the first book of the "Principles") "Can any change be greater among free men, than from a state of absolute liberty and independence to become subject to constraint in the most trivial actions?" -- but he makes it clear that the freedom and independence he is celebrating is the freedom to buy and sell and to enjoy the use of one's property free from the interference of the state, which is entirely alien to Rousseau's account of the end of natural freedom and independence. And in general he is keen on mutual dependence -- of the kind a division of labour promotes -- and calls it "the only bond of society" in a quite unRousseauian way. Here he is, for example, in Chapter XIV of Book One: "Hence I conclude, that the best way of binding a free society together is by multiplying reciprocal obligations, and creating a general dependence between all its members. This cannot be better effected, than by appropriating a certain number of inhabitants, for the production of the quantity of food required for all, and by distributing the remainder into proper classes for supplying every other want." From Rousseau's point of view, this is a recipe for a rather unpleasant form of modern slavery.
Chris.