Adam Smith, one of the leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, tried to build a theory of history and society in accordance with the general spirit of the Enlightenment philosophy. One of the most important components of his comprehensive project is the four-stages theory of socio-economic evolution that Smith formulated in detail in his Lectures on Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow in 1760s. Smith’s four stages theory explains the history of humankind on the basis of successive modes of subsistence as ‘the Age of Hunters; the Age of Shepherds; the Age of Agriculture; and the Age of Commerce’, respectively. According to Smith, the mode of subsistence which prevails in each age, determines the legal and political structure, military organization, social relations, and the codes of individual behaviours. The four stages theory that based on the Enlightenment idea of progress, had been elaborated in historical studies by Scottish historians from the late 1750s and played an important role in the development of the materialist conception of history. The main concern of Smith’s research on different modes of subsistence was to understand the development of private property and, accordingly, the forms of law and state, and thus draw theoretical and practical conclusions to understand the laws of motion of capitalism or “commercial society” as he calls it. However, since Smith reads historical development as a unilinear and gradual process of progress reaching the commercial society, which he calls “the open and simple system of natural freedom”, this theory has an apparent teleological dimension. This teleological understanding of history led the transformation of classical political economy into an unhistorical science and thus paved the way for neoclassical economics.