 Adam Ferguson at the time was writing about the wisdom of crowds. He was writing about this process, this mysterious process by which people do whatever they want pretty much regardless of the designs of government. They somehow come together and they somehow develop a culture and institutions and solutions to problems in a way that even the smartest politician could not have imagined. This is the 1750s. Think about how radical that concept is. We all love to quote the founding fathers now and it's called conservative. But James Madison's teacher wasn't a conservative at all. At the time the idea that people are smarter than government was not only radical, it was almost unacceptable. This idea of liberty and the power of people figuring stuff out, the wisdom of crowds, this was the basis by which the founding fathers decided that they were going to do something different and put the power with the people and allow for liberty to govern and to strictly limit the power of the government itself. It's a radical idea.