adam ferguson: history, progress and human nature (the enlightenment world: political and...

ADAM FERGUSON:HISTORY, PROGRESS AND HUMAN NATURE

The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the

Long Eighteenth Century

Series Editor: Michael T. DavisSeries Co-Editors: Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul PickeringAdvisory Editor: Hideo Tanaka

Titles in this Series

Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular EnlightenmentDavid Worrall

Th e Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832Michael Scrivener

Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic ColonialismCarol Bolton

Forthcoming Titles

Th e Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth CenturyJonathan Lamb

Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and SocietyEugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds)

Th e Scottish People and the French RevolutionBob Harris

www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld

ADAM FERGUSON:HISTORY, PROGRESS AND HUMAN NATURE

edited by

Eugene Heathand

Vincenzo Merolle

londonPICKERING & CHATTO

2008

british library cataloguing in publication dataAdam Ferguson: history, progress and human nature1. Ferguson, Adam, 1723–1816 2. Civilization – History 3. Enlightenment – ScotlandI. Heath, Eugene II. Merolle, Vincenzo 192

ISBN-13: 9781851968640

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Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) LimitedPrinted in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

CONTENTS

Contributors viIntroduction – Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle 1

I. Life and Works1 Ferguson’s Epistolary Self – John D. Brewer 72 Ferguson and Scottish History: Past and Present in An Essay on

the History of Civil Society – David Allan 233 Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library: 1764–1806

– Jane B. Fagg 39

II. In History4 Ferguson’s Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia

– David Raynor 655 Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions

– Yasuo Amoh 736 Political Education for Empire and Revolution – David Kettler 87

III. On History7 Ferguson, Roman History and the Th reat of Military Govern-

ment in Modern Europe – Iain McDaniel 1158 Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in Combining History and Sci-

ence: Th e History of Historiography Revisited – Annette Meyer 131

IV. Human Nature, Action and Progress9 Ferguson’s Politics of Action – Fania Oz-Salzberger 14710 Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind – Craig Smith 15711 Providence and Progress: Th e Religious Dimension in Ferguson’s

Discussion of Civil Society – Jeng-Guo S. Chen 171

Notes 187Works Cited 227Index 245

CONTRIBUTORS

David Allan is Reader in History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Yasuo Amoh is Professor Emeritus at Kochi University, Japan.

John D. Brewer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Jeng-Guo S. Chen is Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Jane B. Fagg is Professor Emerita of History at Lyon College, Batesville, Arkan-sas.

Eugene Heath is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

David Kettler is Research Professor at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Professor Emeritus of Political Studies at Trent University, Peter-borough, Ontario.

Iain McDaniel holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, England.

Vincenzo Merolle teaches History of Political Th ought at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Annette Meyer is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Th ought at the University of Haifa, Israel, and Professor and Chair in Modern Israel Studies at Monash University, Aus-tralia.

David Raynor teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, Ontario.

Craig Smith is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

– 1 –

INTRODUCTION

Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle

Th e writings of Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) off er insights into history, society and politics, challenging us to reconsider our conceptions of human nature and to refl ect more deeply than we otherwise might on the moral demands of modernity. Renowned for his masterwork, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson is also the author of political pamphlets, treatises of moral and political theory, a history of the Roman Republic and, late in life, numerous unfi nished essays. Infl uenced by the Stoics and by Montesquieu, among others, he was in steady engagement with (and was sometimes critical of ) contemporaries such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Th omas Reid. Not a formulaic thinker, Ferguson seeks to defend and articulate the institutions of liberty, while nonetheless reminding us of the call to lead good, rather than merely pleasurable, lives.

Ferguson’s works, spanning several decades, exhibit a general consistency of outlook. He rejects the claims and assumptions of social contract theory and argues instead for man’s immersion in history. He accepts our natural sociality but recognizes that we are also prone to confl ict and opposition (and that these quali-ties help ensure progress). Th ough he embraces ideas of liberalism, he nonetheless worries over some of its moral consequences. He adheres to Stoic and teleologi-cal perspectives on human nature and moral goodness, and he espouses a theory of objective moral judgement that also grants a place for ethical sentiment. And though he suggests that the institutions and patterns of society may emerge in an unintended fashion, he defends vigorous political participation and moral leader-ship.

Despite Ferguson’s sometimes diffi cult writing style, its content conveys a sense of ease and congeniality, perhaps because his originality has the familiarity of genuine insight. For example, he describes us as animal and rational, ambi-tious and indolent, competitive and social; we are prone to habit yet obliged to maintain moral vigour. Th us does Ferguson – no reductionist he – recall the complexity of human nature, how it manifests countervailing tendencies. Such plural and varying dispositions may balance each other, but they also demand

2 Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature

the individual’s moral guidance and energy. We are, aft er all, creatures whose natural end is to live in liberty and for whom despotism is a continual threat. In sum, Ferguson is a modern thinker, not wholly comfortable with modernity. At one point in his Essay (II.iii) he remarks how ‘We are generally at a loss to conceive how mankind can subsist under customs and manners extremely diff er-ent from our own … But every age hath its consolations, as well as its suff erings’. Such a conclusion refl ects the character of Ferguson’s thought. An evaluation and assessment of a nation or period must weigh the varying goods of life, the plural character of our dispositions, and the possibilities of circumstance.

During the eighteenth century, Ferguson’s works were widely known and translated. Over the course of time, his fame has receded somewhat, but his books, pamphlets and essays still fascinate. It is not altogether surprising, then, that an increasing number of scholars have come to recognize his signifi cance, as mani-fested by scholarly essays, by a new edition of his Essay, and by the publication of both his letters (Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson) and, more recently, his papers (Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson). Given the growing interest in his thought, it is surprising and lamentable that there is no collection of scholarly essays devoted to this thinker. Two tandem volumes seek to remedy this lacuna. Refl ecting Ferguson’s breadth of interests, the essays collected here (and in a second volume, entitled Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society) are authored by historians, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists. Th is fi rst volume takes up topics relating to the intersection of Ferguson’s life and work, his political and diplomatic activity, his understanding of history, and his perspectives on human nature, action and progress. Th e second volume focuses on Ferguson the philoso-pher, moralist, and political theorist, taking into account his critiques of the moral thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as the complex and varying interpretations of his political, social and moral theories. Each essay, original to the volume, seeks to re-evaluate an idea, theme or argument, or to reassess Ferguson’s relations to other important thinkers. As a whole, the essays range over all of his major works, as well as his pamphlets, unpublished essays and lecture notes.

Life and Works

Born in Perthshire, on the edge of the Highlands, Adam Ferguson studied divinity, became a chaplain to the Black Watch Regiment and later secured a professorial chair at Edinburgh University. Engaged in the political life of his nation and immersed in the social and intellectual circles of Edinburgh, Fergu-son has long been regarded as a thinker whose Scottish identity must be germane to his writing (and, thus, to our understanding of his thought). In the opening essay of this volume, ‘Ferguson’s Epistolary Self ’, John D. Brewer challenges this interpretation. Drawing from Ferguson’s letters, Brewer argues that Ferguson

Introduction 3

makes no connection in his correspondence between his identity as a Scot and his intellectual work. Brewer suggests that Ferguson’s work is mediated through his private self, a self that does not, in fact, reveal a Highland identity. Brewer concludes that Ferguson was striving to advance knowledge in general and not the particular perspectives of Scotland.

From a divergent vantage point, David Allan contends in ‘Ferguson and Scot-tish History: Past and Present in An Essay on the History of Civil Society’ that even though Scotland does not fi gure explicitly in the Essay, that absence does not show that Ferguson was uninterested in the land of his birth. Indeed, Ferguson’s Essay was part of a distinct Scottish historiographical tradition. Although that work off ers refl ections derived from events and changes in eighteenth-century Scotland, it is also part of a European debate on the nature of society; thus, Ferguson aims to avoid a Scottish perspective that would render his analyses less than general.

In canvassing some of the Scottish historical texts within Ferguson’s ken, Allan illuminates some of the intellectual (and cultural and experiential) infl u-ences on Ferguson’s work. However, it is no easy task to trace the particular books that might have infl uenced Ferguson’s varied and broad perspectives. As Jane B. Fagg points out in her essay, ‘Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library: 1764–1806’, there exists scant information about his personal library. Nonetheless, it is possible to reconstruct Ferguson’s borrowings from the uni-versity library. Interweaving an account of his life and works, Fagg charts the 42-year period in which Ferguson borrowed 272 books from the library. She notes the breadth of his borrowing, including the great quantity of works on Roman history and classical sources more generally.

Ferguson in History

Some of Adam Ferguson’s library visits were undertaken with an eye to prepar-ing his classroom lectures. As a professor, he aimed to educate within a moral framework that stipulated the necessity of vigorous and virtuous political par-ticipation. Political activity should not be the preserve of specialists or experts but the concern of all citizens. In his essay, ‘Ferguson’s Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia’, David Raynor off ers a reconsideration of Fergu-son’s argument for a citizens’ militia. In his pamphlet of 1756, the Scot contends that the manners necessary for the members of a militia are born not from mili-tary training or discipline but from the traditional use and knowledge of arms. A militia is not, therefore, a training ground for virtue but an institution that presupposes it. In this sense, Ferguson advocates a small and voluntary militia restricted to men of virtue and honour.

Ferguson took an active interest in two of the defi ning events of the late eight-eenth century. In ‘Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions’,


Yasuo Amoh delineates Ferguson’s arguments against Richard Price, an advocate for the colonies, and chronicles his work with the Carlisle Commission, dispatched in 1778 to seek reconciliation with the Americans. Amoh describes how Ferguson’s regret at the loss of the colonies reveals, among other concerns, some mercantilist assumptions. In the case of the French Revolution, Ferguson is less the agent than the observer. Despite his hope that the ‘new Republick’ would ensure peace, he also feared a social revolution and, having lived long enough to witness the rise of Napoleon, came to worry about the threat that France posed to other nations.

Ferguson’s engagement with the Carlisle Commission had given him a prac-tical education that supplemented his worries – evident in his animadversions about the American Revolution – about trade, political expansion and the mili-tary. In ‘Political Education for Empire and Revolution’, David Kettler reviews Ferguson’s lecture notes of 1775–85 with an eye to how these notes off er students a political education on the topics of empire, expansion and despotism, not to mention the pragmatics of constitutional change. Kettler suggests that Ferguson came to believe that the despotic elements of empire might be controlled, and that even in the midst of drastic constitutional change, practical compromises and political bargaining would remain necessary.

Ferguson on History

A recognition that we are situated within history, that we are creatures of circum-stance and nature, is a crucial characteristic of modernity. As a historian, Ferguson was never concerned solely with a chronology of events or facts. For him, history is not one element of human experience; rather, human experience is within history. History reveals the dispositions of human nature. And natural history shows how humanity develops out of the crucible of nature, circumstance and institution. In the fi rst part of An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson employs history – including the historical literature of and about the ancients, as well as reports submitted by modern travellers – to understand and to illustrate human nature. In other instances, he employs history to reveal patterns, shift s and changes that con-stitute progress or decline. Just as Montesquieu sought to locate the various causes of distinct modes of governing, Ferguson recognizes that the events of history cannot be encapsulated in a single agent’s intention or some moment of explicit agreement. Th us the task of historiography, both in its narrative form (as in his his-tory of the Roman Republic) and as natural history (as in his Essay) remains that of providing explanatory narrations. However, Ferguson never abandons prescriptive or didactic insights into the nature of government, the relevance of virtue or the threat of political and moral lassitude.

In ‘Ferguson, Roman History and the Th reat of Military Government in Modern Europe’, Iain McDaniel notes how Rome’s progression to empire had

Introduction 5

oft en been invoked, in the eighteenth century, to raise the spectre of military government. In contradistinction to Montesquieu, Ferguson contends, for exam-ple, that military and political functions should not be separated and that liberty prevails only if the spirit of the nation remains vigorous. A military dominated by the lower ranks of society could result in the usurpation of political power by demagogues, not to mention international conquest and military empire. Fergu-son defends Rome’s constitution and argues that Britain’s military and political system, suitably reformed along the lines of the early Roman Republic, should include a citizens’ militia and the union of civic and military functions. Having examined the damage to the Republic from the strains of empire, Ferguson con-cludes that, for modern societies, the risks of despotism arise less from monarchy than from a military dominated by the populace at large.

Ferguson also adumbrates methodological considerations on the writing of history. In ‘Ferguson’s “Appropriate Stile” in Combining History and Science: Th e History of Historiography Revisited’, Annette Meyer contends that his conception of history rests between two distinct historiographical traditions, a German-dominated and theoretical understanding of historiography and a more empiricist and Anglo-American tradition. As a result, Ferguson’s methodological contributions have been slighted. In revisiting his conception of history, Meyer explains how, in moving beyond David Hume’s understanding of the ‘science of man’, Ferguson unites an empirical understanding of historiography with a more philosophical one. In so doing, he approaches the hermeneutic understanding developed by nineteenth-century historians and thinkers and sets forth a new object of historical research – mankind.

Human Nature, Action and Progress

Vigorous action has a singular importance for Ferguson. Th e human being is a restless creature, working to improve his circumstances, altering or modifying some feature of the landscape, or engaging in adventure or play. In ‘Ferguson’s Politics of Action’, Fania Oz-Salzberger takes up Ferguson’s belief that the human being is fully realized only in activity and exertion. Such a claim, she notes, is typically utilized with men in mind: their active and masculine natures are best cultivated and realized in civic and political life. Indeed, Ferguson understands his own account of politics to express the perspective of a participant rather than an observer. Since political freedom is a product of activity – thus does Ferguson employ the language of political virtue – politics is not to be reduced, as David Hume suggested, to a science.

In ‘Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind’, Craig Smith describes how the concept of action is, for Ferguson, both a description of an essential aspect of humanity and the basis of a standard of moral excellence. However, our actions oft en


generate unintended consequences. In what sense, then, are we morally responsible for these unintended outcomes? According to Smith, Ferguson deploys the idea of the ‘nation’ to suggest that moral responsibility for the unintended accrues at the corporate rather than the individual level. National spirit may go into decline as we dissipate ourselves in pleasure or amusement, perhaps leading to corruption as we pursue luxury to the detriment of the serious business of life.

Human activity, appropriately guided, helps to secure progress. Th at we have the capacity to progress is a given for Ferguson and emblematic of Enlightenment thought. For him, progress, as opposed to mere change, should be understood not in terms of material wealth but as the moral, if not spiritual, capital of individuals. Many scholars take Ferguson’s theory of society to be a secular theory, in which the development of the individual or the group is unrelated to anything outside of history. Indeed, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society there is very little discussion of religion – even less, perhaps, than of his native Scotland! However, as Jeng-Guo S. Chen explains in ‘Providence and Progress: Th e Religious Dimension in Ferguson’s Discussion of Civil Society’, the former divinity student embeds his account of progress and civil society within a providentialist understanding of the universe. Aft er describing Ferguson’s religious moderation, Chen discerns his use of a two-fold account of history, according to which a providential God ensures that, despite the travails of particular individuals or nations, there is an ongoing and universal progress. Th e thesis of universal progress, as Chen elucidates, owes much to Ferguson’s teacher, William Cleghorn. And although God ensures that progress will occur, Ferguson maintains that individuals remain responsible for their individual fates and those of their particular nations.

Th e reader will fi nd, in these essays, new and interesting considerations of a thinker too oft en neglected. Adam Ferguson’s texts not only provide insights into the events and debates of the eighteenth century but they delineate ideas that resonate still. Ferguson’s rich learning, his varied interests and his moral seri-ousness well justify a reassessment and a renewed appreciation of the uniqueness and fecundity of his works.

AcknowledgementsAn interdisciplinary collection such as this would not have been possible with-out the generous assistance of scholars who, through timely critical advice, have assisted the editors and contributors towards an improved volume. Th ese indi-viduals include Th omas Ahnert, Fiona A. Black, Richard A. Boyd, Henry C. Clark, Roger J. Fechner, Michael Fry, Ronald Hamowy, Th omas D. Kennedy, Colin Kidd, Emma Vincent MacLeod, Neil McArthur, Mark Salber Phillips, Nicholas Phillipson, Paul A. Rahe, Mark G. Spencer and Eduardo Velásquez. Th eir counsel has been invaluable.

– 7 –

1 FERGUSON’S EPISTOLARY SELF

John D. Brewer

Th e renaissance of interest in Adam Ferguson lies mostly in the contemporary importance of civil society as a process to manage the growth of governmental and state power and smooth the vagaries of the economic market, and thus rests on Ferguson’s 1767 exposition of civil society in his famous An Essay on the His-tory of Civil Society. Ferguson is thus associated by generations of new devotees with ideas of active citizenship in the form of engagement by people in civic aff airs, ‘small government’, which has the state interfering as little as possible in people’s lives to preserve their freedom, and individual liberty and autonomy, the release of which allows individuals’ inherently benevolent natures to create economic growth, social harmony and personal enjoyment. Th is view neglects more long-standing interpretations of Ferguson as a civic humanist1 and critic of classical liberalism,2 and renders him an essentially American writer, speaking to themes that were redolent to the founders of the US constitution and which still strike the hearts of the American public.3 It is ironic, therefore, that Fergu-son vehemently opposed the American War of Independence. He insisted on the necessity of the Americans submitting to lawful authority and his hawkish-ness intensifi ed aft er visiting the colonies in the course of the war as secretary to the Carlisle Commission, which briefl y brought him into contact with George Washington. ‘As for America’, he wrote in a letter to his friend Sir John Macpher-son in 1779, ‘I thought our cause there was good and might be brought to a favourable issue’;4 he was more tolerant of the French and Irish Republicans than of the American revolutionaries.

Th is attempt to Americanize Ferguson is deeply paradoxical for it runs coun-ter to another long-standing and popular representation of him as a very Scottish writer, to the extent that Michael Kugler describes him as provincial in his iden-tity and concerns.5 Ferguson much loved his native land, and never wanted to be away from it for long. In one of his letters from London in 1779, Ferguson writes to his great friend Alexander Carlyle, ‘you may tell that I pant aft er Scotland as


the hart panteth aft er the water brooks and I have always thought myself within ten days or a fortnight of it’.6

However, there are three senses in which Ferguson was a Scottish writer over and above the obvious point that he lived there and had strong and warm feel-ings towards it.

First, as both moralist and political philosopher, Ferguson engaged in long-standing intellectual debates within Scotland about morality, human nature and virtue, and with a plethora of other Scottish writers, amongst others.7 Second, as a precursor of sociology, Ferguson’s work was infl uenced by social change in Scotland at the time of his writing. Political stability and economic growth in Scotland, especially aft er the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion,8 the development of an urban and commercial society and a civic culture that integrated commerce, industry, the universities and the intellectual social networks around the gentle-men’s clubs, coff ee houses and literary and scientifi c societies,9 all helped to shape Ferguson’s intellectual agenda. New social and political problems arose, which Ferguson was chief in addressing, such as the alienating eff ects of the social divi-sion of labour, the diffi culties of adjusting to the collapse of traditional mores, and the increasing risk of political instability and national decline. Th e popular claim amongst generations of sociologists that Ferguson was a founder of the discipline revolves around these concerns, such as his anticipation of the social functions of confl ict,10 the stress laid on the negative consequences of the social division of labour,11 in particular the emergence of class confl ict and exploita-tion,12 and the role accorded private property in social development,13 which is said to be proto-Marxist.14 Th e whole intellectual eff ervescence in social and political thought throughout eighteenth-century Scotland has been explained in a similar way as refl ecting peculiarly Scottish circumstances.15

Th e third sense in which Ferguson is thought of as essentially Scottish is in his background as a Scotsman, in particular as a Highlander. Th is is the common assessment of Ferguson as a person and is deployed extensively in the secondary literature to explain his work. Biographers allude to his Highland roots, the most well-informed and dedicated of which, Jane Fagg, points to the signifi cance of him being the only one of the Scottish literati born there.16 David Allan makes the main conclusion of his new exposition of Ferguson’s life and work that he was a Highlander from a Gaelic-speaking community personally acquainted with the subjects he wrote about.17 One purpose of this essay therefore is to reas-sess the impact of Ferguson’s Scottish background on his work and to suggest that the conventional view is in serious need of revision. Th e main evidence used is Ferguson’s correspondence, usefully collated into two volumes by Vincenzo Merolle.18 Attention is focused on the ‘epistolary self ’ that this correspondence displays – the self that is written about in the letters – and a second purpose behind the essay is thus to establish the usefulness of this approach for examin-

Ferguson’s Epistolary Self 9

ing the connection between a writer’s life and work. I argue that Ferguson did not narrate a Highland Scots identity and makes no connection himself between his life and work. First it is necessary to show how popular is the contrary view that locates his thought in the context of his biography.

Ferguson in Scotland and Scotland in Ferguson

Th ere are three issues worth separating when addressing the image of Ferguson as a Highlander whose biography supposedly shaped his work: the fi rst is the way others routinely perceive Ferguson to be a Highlander and attach signifi cance to this background in explaining his work; the second is whether these origins genuinely aff ected Ferguson’s own self-image to make him avowedly Highland in his sense of identity; the third is whether Ferguson narrates a self-image that makes its own connections between his life and work. In this section, I intend to deal with the fi rst issue, pointing to its reasonableness as a possible interpreta-tion of Ferguson the person and as an explanation of his thought, aft er which Ferguson’s letters are used to dispute these claims and to analyse the epistolary self they actually disclose.

With respect to the image of Ferguson in the secondary literature, it is very fashionable to argue that his position as a Highlander undergoing social and geographical mobility by moving to the Scottish Lowlands gave him special biographical experience of the new social problems that fi red his sociological imagination.19 Sir Walter Scott’s anecdote of Ferguson abandoning the Bible for the claymore at the Battle of Fontenoy and having to be told by his colonel to desist from killing, only to have a broadsword tossed at him by an unwilling warrior shouting ‘damn my commission’, is enthusiastically reiterated as proof of Ferguson’s enduring Highland ways.20 As a school friend of two of Ferguson’s sons in Edinburgh, who later became a close friend of their father, Scott’s anec-dote has some authority (although Donald MacRae is the only one to attribute it to Scott). Th e anecdote is repeated in academic sources,21 in David Stewart’s 1822 Sketches of the Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland with Details of the Military Service of the Highland Regiments, in the 1895 Record of the Clan and Name Fergusson, Ferguson and Fergus compiled by clan members, and in peculiar places like ‘Th e Gathering of the Clans’ website. Even though the anecdote is mythology, the battle being fought before Ferguson even joined the Highland Black Watch Regiment as chaplain, and is omitted from early accounts of Ferguson’s life, Ferguson’s friends undoubtedly saw him as a Highlander. Carlyle’s posthumous autobiography, which is unusually candid for the time and which Ferguson recommended not be published,22 probably because of its frankness about Ferguson’s unsuccessful proposals of marriage to two women, describes his family as Highland.23 Robert Adam expressed concern


about the deployment of his friend’s regiment to America, writing to his family, ‘he will be slain as sure as he’s a highlander’.24 In one of his letters to Ferguson, Macpherson expressed the hope that his friend’s ailments would be healed by his ‘Highland stamina’.25

It is not diffi cult to understand why friends and commentators so routinely invoke the Highlands to locate Ferguson’s work. Even though Logierait, the place of his birth in 1723, was only on the edge of the Highlands, a mere day or so away then by horse-drawn carriage from the commercial central belt of Scot-land, in terms of the social construction of space in Scottish society at the time the place would have been perceived to be in the Highlands, especially to Low-landers from the southern cities.26 Pitlochry, a few miles north up the Tay Valley from Logierait, was about as far as Lowlanders went when ‘doing the tour’ of the Highlands in the eighteenth century. Th us, despite Logierait being the seat of the head regality court of the Dukes of Atholl and the site of the large regality prison, and shown by the later Statistical Account of Scotland 1791–1799, the fi rst of its kind, to have been prosperous and anti-Jacobite – ‘the general charac-ter of the people is suffi ciently respectable; the virtues of humanity, frugality and industry, the best ornaments of human nature, fl ourish everywhere’27 – Logierait would have placed Ferguson as a Highlander. He spoke Gaelic and ministered in the Gaelic-speaking Highland Black Watch Regiment, reinforcing the percep-tion of Ferguson’s Highland-Scots identity.

However, this assessment is complicated by the fact that, irrespective of where Logierait might be placed in terms of the social construction of the Scottish Highlands, Ferguson’s family background would not have encouraged a High-land identity. Allan dramatizes his family background as ordinary28 but, while it may have been less affl uent than many in the Lowlands, his mother was the sister of the tenth Laird of Hallhead in Aberdeenshire and descended from the Dukes of Argyll; his father, although able to speak Gaelic, was a strong supporter of the Protestant conversion of the Highlands and of the use of the English language in instruction at school. He was sometime Moderator of the Perth and Stirling Synod of the Church of Scotland and lifelong friend of the Dukes of Atholl. Fer-guson grew up with the children of the second Earl of Atholl as playmates, with whom he developed an enduring friendship, and was warmly recommended for his fi rst post as minister to the Black Watch – a regiment established to quell the clans – by a letter from the Duchess Dowager of Atholl. Th e Atholls were Prot-estant and Hanoverian – or at least, that branch of the family which patronized Ferguson occupied the ducal house because four more senior relatives were dis-qualifi ed on grounds of their Jacobitism – and participated in Lowland politics; their feudal hold on land in the Scottish Highlands facilitated their position and infl uence in Hanoverian Edinburgh, such that the family bestrode both the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, living life as much in cosmopolitan Edin-


burgh as in the hills and glens. Moreover, from the age of nine Ferguson was educated in Perth, the county town, and by fi ft een was studying at St Andrews, moving him to the Lowlands and away from whatever infl uences the Highlands might have had on the youngster. Th us Carlyle describes his close friend as hav-ing ‘the demeanour of a high-bred gentleman’.29

Ferguson had no bucolic little croft er upbringing, although it remains pos-sible that he had the aristocratic aff ection for the Highlands of this social class. Th ere is a complication to even this speculation however. Ferguson did not write a memoir and there is no direct reference by him in any of his published works to either his biographical Highland background or to Scotland. Th e work for which Ferguson is best known in sociology, An Essay on the History of Civil Soci-ety, makes mention of neither. Th e public writings at least provide no evidence of the writer’s self; Scotland – and the Highlands – are written out of the public record. Th is situates the importance of Ferguson’s correspondence, for it opens up the possibility of establishing Ferguson’s ‘epistolary self ’. Liz Stanley has argued that letters constitute a theatre ‘for the construction and performance of self in which the distances of time, space and the absence of face-to-face contact enables rather than disables communication’.30 In the absence of public disclo-sures, the Ferguson letters therefore off er the opportunity to explore in private correspondence whether he accorded Scotland a place in his sociological work and possessed a self-image that was bound up with the Highlands, as so com-monly portrayed. Before these issues are explored, it is fi rst necessary to establish the signifi cance of letters as a genre and the nature of the epistolary self.

Th e Epistolary Form

It is perhaps ironic that sociology’s ‘cultural turn’, which encouraged the focus on personal narratives, life-history methods and autobiographical writings, and thus raised the importance of letters as one mode of access into private worlds, has occurred just as letter writing is being superseded by new technologies that in future will make letters scarce. However, letters have existed since the inven-tion of writing and became particularly popular with the introduction of offi cial postal services. Letters have functioned as history, in revealing accounts of events and opinions thereon, as biography, in providing a window into the subject’s life, and as literature, in the sense that they can be about literature and be of such quality as to constitute good writing. Letters have functioned as social science to a much lesser extent. Inasmuch as history has been democratized and the sig-nifi cance of even ordinary people’s lives duly recognized, collections of letters from people of all social classes now entertain and inform us. Sociology’s use of letters fi ts this democratization of the epistolary form and, while there is some focus on the use of letters left by the grandees of the discipline and the famous,


such as Stanley’s analysis of Olive Schreiner’s letters,31 most address the letters left by ordinary people in order to access the private worlds of the laiety. Th at letters emerge directly from the writer and were written without foreknowledge that they would become public documents encourages analysts to see them as containing less ‘narrative smoothing’ than autobiographies, possessing a freer style of refl ection.32

Th eir privacy however, is both strength and weakness. Letters might open the window into people’s private thoughts, but the glass is clouded. Th e disclosures in letters are oft en partial because so much is assumed between the correspond-ents to require no detail or specifi cation; so much is known to permit the need for no retelling. Sociologists of language refer to conversationalists’ tendency to ‘over suppose and under tell’ and it applies equally to letter writers. Letters are partial in another sense for they are one-way communications; the recipient rarely speaks back. Th e recipient, however, is the particular person to whom the correspondence is directed and helps to shape the dialogue in ways that oblige the responses of the central subject. Letters are thus not unreconstructed texts somehow unobtrusively indicative of true feelings, for the interlocutor in part socially constructs them. Every letter thus speaks of the writer’s world only as fi ltered through an anticipation of the recipient’s reaction. Reconstruction of the writer’s private world can also be made diffi cult by the fragmentary nature of the correspondence, its incompleteness and the chronological ambiguity that arises from not knowing what is missing. As well as warning us against unre-alistic expectations of their personal disclosures, texts on sociological research methods caution us to be suspicious of the factual accuracy of events described in letters33 in much the same way as we should be of oral history.34 Collections of letters, irrespective of their completeness, also suff er from what the research textbooks call the dross rate,35 since they contain so much mundane catalogu-ing and most lack suffi cient focus to be analytically interesting (unless it is the textual accomplishment of mundanity that drives one’s interest in letters); and editors who select the ‘interesting’ correspondence thereby introduce unknown sources of bias.

As Stanley persuasively argues, however, we continue to use letters despite these weaknesses precisely because they are dialogical and thus reveal something of the dynamic between the interlocutors; because they are perspectival, in that they disclose the writers’ standpoint of the moment as this changes between par-ticular correspondents and over time; and because they are emergent, in refl ecting the preoccupations, no matter how mundane, of the writers and the cultural and rhetorical conventions for the articulation of these concerns.36 Th ere is another strength. Letters are both located in actual things, as Stanley puts it,37 and about actual things: they are referential of the social setting in which they are written and disclose something of the lives of the writers. In this lies their usefulness


to social scientists, historians and biographers. Th ey have another value to soci-ologists, however, for letters involve what Stanley calls ‘a performance of self ’ by the writer but, crucially, one that is aff ected inter-subjectively by the writer’s awareness of the ‘writing self in waiting’ of the intended recipient.37 Th is gives the epistolary self, as it might be called, the same ‘looking glass’ quality as the self-presentation done in normal social interaction, making it no diff erent from the way sociology understands the social self generally. Even so, Stanley reminds readers that letters ‘do not contain evidence of “the real person” but traces of this person in a particular epistolary guise and as expressed at successive points in time and to a variety of people’.38

If we refer to this capacity to perform the self in letters as the epistolary self, it seems to have at least three dimensions: a) the rhetorical styles, literary con-ventions and epistolary devices the writers adopt in the correspondence as part of their performances of self; b) the traces of personality, personal life and per-sonal preoccupations the writers disclose; and c) the tendency to narrate self, either deliberately in order to convey a preferred self image or unintentionally. It goes without saying that the epistolary self changes over time and with particular correspondents and that multiple selves are likely to be performed, sometimes simultaneously. In archives of long-established correspondence, these changes in epistolary self across time and interlocutor permit longitudinal analysis that is impressive in its range. In the following section, I begin to apply this formula-tion to Adam Ferguson, in particular to reassess the connection between his life and work.

Ferguson’s Epistolary Self

Th e collection of Ferguson letters is an unusually complete and comprehensive archive that includes the occasional letter from his correspondents; and since his was a particularly long life (1723–1816) the archive, which begins in 1745, stretches for nearly three quarters of a century. Th ere is much in it that would interest the historian and biographer as Ferguson describes some of the events he was involved with, such as the American War of Independence, or which occurred during his lifetime, such as the Gordon Riots, the United Irishmen rebellion and the French Revolution. He refl ects on important scandals that touched him, such as instances of political corruption and religious censorship. His correspondents include important literary and historical fi gures – Adam Smith, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Scott and Carlyle – as well as family, booksellers, publishers and politicians. He corresponded with aristocrats and artisans, and there was ‘high politics’, notably in his correspondence over international and domestic policy issues, whether about colonial policy or the formation of a Scottish militia, and ‘low politics’, as Ferguson machinated over


university appointments or the state of the Church, and manoeuvred about his pensions and over jobs for himself, his family and friends. Th e settings in which the letters were written change in physical space, from places he visited abroad to his several homes and places of work, as well as in their political and cultural context, as governments came and went, events unfolded, empires were lost and extended and as cultural values developed. Th is could not be otherwise for an archive that begins at the time of the last Jacobite Rebellion and ends within sight of the Great Reform Act. Th e nepotism that so off ends modern sensibili-ties as jobs were sought for the boys – literally, as it was the fate then of women of standing not to have a career – is just one of the cultural changes that aff ects the letters. Th e preoccupations that he wrote about are as diverse as one might expect from someone who had been an army chaplain, university professor, government civil servant, popular author, member of several literary societies, farmer, enthu-siastic cultural tourist and a devoted family man with a large extended family to be catered for. Overall, however, the ‘dross rate’ in the archive is high irrespective of the social class or standing of the interlocutor. Regardless of the dross though, there is much for the sociologist who is interested in glimpsing the traces of Fer-guson’s epistolary self.

Space forbids an extensive treatment of each of the three dimensions that comprise the epistolary self, but with respect to the fi rst it is worth noting the diff erent rhetorical devices Ferguson employs to assist in the performance of self. Obsequious toadying was a rhetorical device, conventional for the day, which Ferguson deployed in his performances when writing to aristocrats, extending over several lines and replete with impression management. To Lord Milton, for example, Ferguson signed himself in 1756, ‘I am with great respect / your Lord-ship / most obedient / and most humble servant’; not much had changed in the self performance by 1812, when he ended a letter to Lord Melville, ‘I have the honour to be with great respect / my dear Lord / your Lordships most aff ection-ate / most obedient humble / servant’.39 As the social status of the interlocutor diminished, so did the number of lines, although formal respect and aff ection were still rhetorically performed even for family members and close friends, although less eff usively. To Adam Smith, for example, he once wrote ‘My Dear Friend’, ending ‘I am &c’.40 Th ere are touching moments as nomenclature in let-ters to his future bride changes from ‘My Dear Miss Katie’ to ‘My Lovely Katie’, and as he fi rst signs himself off as ‘your humble servant’ and then ‘I am pas-sionately yours’. He clearly understood the rhetorical and epistolary devices to manifest love and devotion as much as he did honour and respect. Th e episto-lary performance as a loving husband endured over decades of marriage and in the last letter to Katharine in the archive, dated 19 October 1793, written from Venice two years before she died, he describes her as ‘My Dear Katey’ and signs himself ‘My dear Katey yours aff ectionately’.41


Th ese rhetorical devices are in part cultural conventions, but they also pro-vide glimpses of Ferguson’s personality and personal life as the second aspect of his epistolary self. Letters display his performance as aff ectionate husband, caring father, reliable and trustworthy friend, and conscientious author, teacher and public servant. He has been described as famous for his temper,42 and while correspondence is unlikely to display this, the letters disclose a stoic man, who wrote to a clergyman friend reminding him that ‘matters are seldom so good as we hope or so bad as we fear’.43 It was not only Ferguson’s Christian convictions which led him to write to one correspondent, ‘the obligation of a man to serve his friend [is] as perfect as the obligation to avoid a trifl ing hurt to a stranger’;44

it was a measure of him as a person. He was a cordial man who liked convivial company, and letters following his retirement reveal his regret at the loss of his friends once he left Edinburgh because of the expense, although when in good health in early retirement his letters also expose an innocent pleasure in farm-ing and country life and he would humorously regale interlocutors with tales of bulls, sheep, haymaking and the like, telling them of his tramping ‘about with unblacked boots or wooden clogs for two or three weeks together’.45 His benevo-lent nature ensured he moved tirelessly to position his sons in careers, to fulfi l the social obligations to extended family members and friends, to place distant relatives in advantageous posts and to guarantee his family’s fi nancial security. Altruism can be strangely self-serving though. A letter to Ferguson from Hume has his friend exhorting Ferguson to network in strategically important ways. Hume writes: ‘I had a letter from Lord Marischal today who tells me that he is to pass the winter in Edinburgh. Wait on him: you will like him extremely; carry all our friends to him and endeavour to make him pass his time as agreeably as pos-sible.’46 He oft en arranged with publishers to have gratis copies of his work sent to infl uential people, sometimes no less than to prime ministers.47

Ferguson was mean with publishers and former employers to get his fi nancial due and tenacious in fi ghting for it. Some early letters to Lord Milton detail the expenses incurred when Ferguson accompanied Milton’s son on an educational tour of Holland, and Ferguson takes care to convert the local currency into ‘Brit-ish money’ and explain that he could not include sundries ‘such as candles, tea, sugar &c’.48 Even when not writing letters seeking preferment, the corpus is full of woes at the expense of buying it. Seeking funds to buy promotion for his son Adam, the third generation named thus and later to become Sir Adam, Ferguson wrote to the son of a merchant family in Edinburgh with perhaps a little too much detail for this to be just a casual enquiry as to the father’s health: ‘Adam is threatened with a remove to far and distant parts and presses for aid to buy pro-motion. We are straining every nerve for that purpose … You should have told me how your father holds out. He is to me the principal fi gure in the picture.’49

Ferguson’s constant ill health is in part excuse. His friends – and perhaps also the


man himself – expected him to die early before realizing the means of securing his family from destitution, although the editor of Carlyle’s autobiography, John Burton, was able to record that ‘though attacked with hopeless-looking symp-toms in middle life, [Ferguson] wore on to a good old age and through various chances became wealthy in his declining years’.50

High ambition for himself and his family was only in part a function of his concern with fi nancial security, for he had a strong sense of his reputation and legacy. Letters disclose that he off ered himself to aristocrats, governments, trad-ing companies, universities and publishers in the belief that he could be useful and in order to achieve advancement. His pamphleteering had a similar impulse: the politician Sir John Dalrymple, while admitting that some of his pamphlets had been useful to the government, described Ferguson as throwing them out unsolicited.51 Carlyle describes him as haughty, jealous of rivals and indignant against any assumed superiority over him.52 However, arrogance can oft en be a psychological front and there was perhaps insecurity deeper than fi nancial wor-ries, for Ferguson veered between excessive self-promotion and uncertainty. In a letter to Bishop Douglas, when referring to his forthcoming work on Roman history, Ferguson penned: ‘I should be unwilling to make booksellers risk their money without some better grounds than their belief in my industry and tal-ents’.53 Th us, while Ferguson could coquettishly demur on some occasions, referring to himself in one letter as merely someone who mixes ‘a little newspa-per politics with natural philosophy’,54 such that an early biographer complains in one letter aft er Ferguson’s death that his surviving relatives ‘have not favoured me with a single article of information which has not been begged or almost extorted’,55 the attention he devoted to writing numerous iterations of his epi-taph suggests someone both conscious of his social and intellectual reputation and desirous to control how it is disseminated.56 A letter to his close friend John Macpherson in 1798 fi rst marks Ferguson’s interest in his legacy,57 meaning that he spent some parts of the last eighteen years of his life thinking about such mat-ters, an inordinate amount of awareness. He was being only half ironic when he described himself in one of the last letters in the archive as becoming ‘my own monument’.58

Self-promotion, however, was perhaps another cultural convention of the time. Hume was heavily criticized in the nineteenth century, by Th omas Hill Green and James McCosh among others, for writing My Own Life, as if it were about cultivating fame, but the income of eighteenth-century Scottish profes-sors like Ferguson depended largely on their popularity as teachers and writers and on preferments from the privately wealthy. Financial insecurity was thus addressed in part by excessive ambition and intellectual arrogance. Ferguson is conventional in another sense for weaving together his self and his soul.


Iterations of Ferguson’s epitaph manifest a persistent concern with both the fate of his own salvation and those who would read it, which reveals him to have remained a devoutly religious person. Th is part of his personality and private life features prominently in his letters. As Allan argues,59 high levels of paternal piety and Evangelicalism, unusual for upland Perthshire, left a permanent impression on young Adam, making it unsurprising that he should join the ministry. On leaving it Ferguson implored Smith never to address him with clerical titles, ‘for I am a downright layman’,60 but Fagg notes that Ferguson never resigned from the clergy and remained a lifelong supporter of what was known as the Moderate Party of the Church of Scotland.61 An Elder who oft en attended gen-eral assemblies, he was critical of institutionalized religion, especially the more conservative wing of Presbyterianism, leading on one occasion to him being described as an ‘avowed deist, play-hunter, and companion of the wicked … a vile blasphemer and maligner of our Lord and his apostles’.62 Nonetheless his personal faith remained strong. Th ere is little evidence of this from his published writings, but the letters reveal him as a religious man. Th is might be expected to be the case as his mortal end approached, for the year before he died Fergu-son wrote to Lord William Robertson, eldest son of the historian, that he was content with ‘the happy thought that there is somewhere aft er death to which this nursery and school of life is no more than preparation or a prelude’.63 James Lorimer later records that a close friend of Ferguson reported that on his death-bed Ferguson turned to his daughters to remark ‘there is another world’.64 Such a comment might also be expected in times of tragedy (for example, see the letter to the soon-to-be deceased John Johnstone65), for Ferguson outlived his young wife, one son and all his contemporaries in the Scottish literati, but letters from earlier stages of his life off er no contradiction. Th us in a letter to Hume from Geneva on 6 June 1774 Ferguson wrote proudly, ‘I am now writing on the very spot where Calvin reformed the reformed churches and I feel the warmth of my zeal suffi ciently against all reprobates’, although sensitive to Hume’s lack of belief Ferguson wisely added, ‘I shall not indulge it in this letter’.66 In describing to Car-lyle a meeting with ‘the pious apostle Voltaire’, one of Ferguson’s letters has him self-refl ecting that he has been ‘a person true to [his] faith’;67 and he occasionally quoted Scripture to his friends.68

In these and numerous ways the Ferguson letters disclose many facets of his personality too capacious to continue without neglect of the fi nal dimension of his epistolary self, his narratives of self; in particular, the extent to which he had a self-image as a Highlander that made him aware of an experiential and biographical basis to his sociological analysis of civil society. Th is view, although popular, is in serious need of reassessment.

Ferguson does not consciously write a self-narration – there is something in the nature of eighteenth-century sociological writings that precluded it69 – but


his letters are replete with a writing self. He was proud of his service in the High-land Black Watch, donating a subscription in 1802, adding agreement that his name be publicly listed: indeed he begged them ‘to insert my name’.70 He even recommended ‘a few draughts of Highland air’ for longevity,71 teased London-ers that they only seemed to travel north in its rainy season, thus to see it at its worst,72 and on one occasion urged on friends the beauty of the Highland moun-tains that could compare with any in Switzerland.73 But he was Scottish, not Highland, in identity, and then not nationalist. Aft er leaving the 42nd Regiment Ferguson sought Lowland parishes, his mother, wife and some close friends were from the fl at east in Aberdeenshire – his close friend John Macpherson studied at the University of Aberdeen – and aft er working in Edinburgh Ferguson retired to border country with England before moving to St Andrews in the central belt. Ferguson was anti-Jacobite, involved in the Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland and a strong supporter of the Union with England – he referred in some letters to Scotland as ‘North Britain’. He also recommended unifi cation with Great Britain as the solution for Ireland’s travails.74 He referred to Gaelic in negative terms – vulgar,75 a dead language,76

being the language ‘spoken in the cottage but not in the parlour or at the table of any gentleman’.77 In one revealing letter to Henry Mackenzie, later editor of the 1805 Report of the Committee of the Highland Society, written in 1798, Ferguson sought to disassociate himself both from the Highlands and the Gaelic language. As to the language, it was to be avoided by persons who wished to appear loyal to the government in London and a supporter of the Union and who desired to present themselves as fashionable and respectable. It was a language ‘to be learned from herdsmen or deer stealers. It was connected with disaff ection … It was more genteel to be ignorant than knowing of what such a language contained’.78 And Logierait, he asserted, ‘is barely within the limits’ of the Highlands, a place where ‘the mythology and traditions of the highland were likely to be more faint than in the interior parts’.79 To another correspondent in 1793 he described himself as ‘but a bastard Gaelic man’.80

Admittedly, it would have been very diffi cult in the wake of the defeat at Culloden in 1746 and the rout of Jacobitism for any Highlander to appear to be disloyal to the Hanoverians, but if anything Ferguson comes closest to an avowal of aff ection for the Highlands when nearest in time to these events. Th e disavowals are views contained in letters written late in life, aft er living in the Lowlands virtually all his life, which suggests that an old man’s nostalgia for his youth was not impinging on his writing of self. Intriguingly, one of the undated letters in the archive but which appears to come from the period 1748–9, thus from the immediate post-Culloden period when Ferguson was still in the High-land Black Watch and not yet in his third decade, has him refl ecting on a visit to


the Highlands and comparing people’s ‘polite manners’ there with any of those in Edinburgh, Paris and Versailles.

It is truly wonderful to see persons of every sex and age, who never travelled beyond the nearest mountain, possess themselves perfectly, perform acts of kindness with an aspect of dignity, and a perfect discernment of what is proper to oblige. Th is is seldom to be seen in our cities, or in our capital.81

Th ese views are extraordinarily consistent with those in the An Essay on the His-tory of Civil Society, where Ferguson extols the virtues and refi nements of societies at earlier stages of social development and where he tries to disabuse readers of the belief that manners are only modern or that progress is always benefi cial. Indeed, there is early evidence of great aff ection for his birthplace. In a footnote to this letter, Merolle records that the Chambers and Th ompson Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen mentions that in the same year as the publica-tion of the Essay, 1767, Ferguson ‘revisited the scenes of his youth and delighted the old parishioners of his father by recollecting them individually, while they were no less proud that their parish had produced a man who was held in such estimation in the world’.82 We also know from Ferguson’s letters that draft s of the ideas of the Essay were circulating at least as early as 1757–8,83 not long aft er the letter quoted above and before he had become established as a member of the Scottish literati, leaving open the possibility that the young Adam Fergu-son wrote the Highlands into the Essay in a way that the older Adam Ferguson resisted given his later renunciation of a Highland identity. We also know from his letters that he saw the Essay as a product of an early stage of his intellectual life, since he refused any eff ort from publishers to revise the contents in its many later editions,84 even though he admits in other letters that he had subsequently visited places like Birmingham and Manchester and their industrial develop-ment had aff ected his understanding of industry, labour, skill and wealth.85

Th is hints at a possible biographical connection with his sociological writings. Nonetheless, we must dampen this speculation, for there is stronger evidence to the contrary. In a letter to Andrew Stuart in 1798 to thank him for sending a gratis copy of his genealogical history of the Stewarts, Ferguson wrote: ‘I am ashamed to say that hitherto the history of Scotland has interested me less than almost any Other that is Commonly read. Th is I should be sorry to account for without owning the defect to be in myself.’86 Th e force of this admission needs reiterating. Ferguson’s great friend William Robertson, with whom he shared a university, strong religious faith and support for the Moderates in the Church of Scotland, wrote a pioneering history of Scotland in 1759. Personal amity seems not to have inclined Ferguson to share his interest. To abjure a relative lack of interest in Scottish history, Ferguson would also have had to resist one of the main intellectual traditions of Scotland at the time; in one of his letters


Hume said of Scotland in 1771, ‘this is the historical age and this is the historical nation’,87 with one commentator remarking that the ‘veritable craze for histori-ography then formed an integral part of the broader intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment’.88 However, Ferguson as an old man looking backwards in this letter proff ered less interest in Scottish history than in history generally – and thereby wrote Scotland out of the Essay.89

Th is was perhaps obvious to some commentators at the time. Neither the contemporary reviews of the Essay in Th e Scots Magazine in March 1767 nor the December issue of the 1767 Annual Register mention a Scottish backcloth to the work or make reference to Ferguson’s biography. Th e omission in the former, based in Edinburgh, is signifi cant for how the Essay was read by other Scots. James Beattie wrote a letter dated 30 March 1767 to Th omas Gray drawing the latter’s attention to Ferguson’s book, only to complain, ‘it is a fault common to all our Scotch authors that they are too metaphysical: I wish they would learn to speak more to the heart and less to the understanding’.90 Th is might be rendered in modern parlance into a desire for more practical and less abstract knowledge and, if so, it marks the recognition even then that Ferguson was a great analyst of society but had no Highland writing self. Ferguson’s contribution to sociol-ogy was that he developed abstract theories of society; to search for mention of Scotland in them is in vain. Gray’s reply supports this observation, for on 12 August 1767 he wrote back: ‘I have read over (but too hastily) Mr Ferguson’s book. Th ere are uncommon strains of eloquence in it, and I was surprised to fi nd not one single idiom of his country (I think) in the whole work.’91

Conclusion

It might be argued that in a general sense Scotland, and the Highlands in par-ticular, feature as a kind of ‘elective affi nity’ to the Essay, as Max Weber once famously described the circuitous connection between Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism. It seems self-evident to those who claim thus that Ferguson had Scotland on his mind when, for example, he valorized in the Essay small, independent nations, professional armies, mixed government and ‘moderate’ religions, amongst other things. Th e question that confronts this argument is why Ferguson never mentions this in either the public record or his private correspondence. One explanation is simply that he was unaware of it: that the experiential base to his work went unrecognized by him. Th is would unveil a level of negligence so out of character with his intellect to enable us to rule it out instantly. To claim that Ferguson did not realize he had not mentioned Scot-land or his Highland origins in his work, and that he failed to see that he had not refl ected on the connection between his life and work, is absurd. Another


explanation is that he deliberately concealed it: that it was recognized but unac-knowledged. Th ere is suffi cient substance to this claim to warrant elaboration.

In a series of works, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull92 reviewed the state of historiography in Scottish historians writing about their country and pointed to an ‘inferiorism’ that Frantz Fanon observed originally amongst members of colonized countries in relation to the metropolitan society. Th is revealed itself in a ‘Scottish inferiority complex’ towards England,93 in portrayals of Scotland as the rudest of European nations, backward, undeveloped, dismal, primitive, superstitious and the like,94 and in assimilationist attitudes towards the British state that refl ected how their minds as well as their nation had been colonized.95

Scotland thus got written out of Ferguson’s public and private writings in this view because he was ashamed of it; conscious of Scotland’s relative obscurity he was reluctant to harp on about the place and to appear an interloper on a wider cultural scene based around London, Paris or Rome. Th us, the argument runs, Ferguson was intellectually European precisely because biographically he was Scottish. Th is claim is consistent with George Elder Davie’s argument that the Scottish literati wrote about matters in Scottish intellectual discourse with only sparing reference to the national experience that had brought them to light – and sometimes with no reference at all – because they had internalized the mythology of Scottish inferiority.96

By nature this is an inhibition that is supposed to aff ect only the public record, but there is no evidence whatsoever in his private correspondence that Ferguson subscribed to this pejorative view of Scotland. As we have seen, in some letters he waxed lyrical about the Highlands and aspects of Highland life, and on one occasion admitted to panting aft er Scotland as a hart does for water.97 His letters do reveal him to be an assimilationist with respect to the Act of Union, referring, as we have seen, to Scotland as North Britain, but, as Murdoch has argued,98

some eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals enthusiastically embraced the imperialist project and Beveridge and Turnbull later admitted that support for the Union was not always begrudging or belittling, being perceived by some as a gateway to prosperity and opportunity for Scotland.99

Ferguson did not veer to the other extreme and participate in the social construction of the mythology of the Highlands, reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romanticization of the ‘noble savage’, a tendency of which, accord-ing to Charles Withers,100 some eighteenth-century Scottish writers were guilty. In their analysis of Scottish historiography, Beveridge and Turnbull argue cor-rectly that Ferguson was opposed to the ‘collection of fi ctions’,101 and preferred instead to proceed in an empirical manner consistent with the great successes of natural scientists. Th is realism perforce prevented Ferguson from contribut-ing to the idealization of Scotland, and the Highlands in particular, and may constitute another reason why no overt idiom of his country can be found in his


work. To imbibe either inferiorism or idealization would have off ended Fergu-son’s burgeoning sense of social scientifi c realism. Th is reinforces the argument here about the quality of Ferguson’s sociological perspective. He was seeking to advance knowledge of society in general rather than of a specifi c country, lead-ing to the development of knowledge about society in the abstract rather than of Scotland in particular. Hence the public record is denuded of any specifi c refer-ences to his homeland, not because he felt it inferior nor simply that he refused to idealize it, but by reason of his sociological perspicuity.

However, the main thrust of this essay has been to suggest that there is a spe-cial connection between the public-private spheres in Ferguson’s life that shapes his thought. It has been argued that Ferguson’s writings in the public sphere are mediated by a private self that, as revealed in his letters, opens a window to his senses of self and identity in epistolary form, an epistolary self, as it were, that is constructed and displayed in his letter writing. Contrary to conventional portrayals of the biographical impulse to his thought, Ferguson’s private cor-respondence discloses no Highland identity and self image and Ferguson avoids narrating his own connection between his life and work. Th is private self medi-ated the public work and is primary among the factors explaining why Scotland was written out of Ferguson’s sociology.102 Th e secondary literature is dominated by the view that Ferguson was a Highlander by selfh ood and identity and wrote the Essay as a biographical account of his own transition to the Lowlands. Fer-guson does not directly refl ect on these matters in his letters but, as we have seen, the epistolary self that is nonetheless glimpsed is more complex than popularly portrayed. Th e analysis of Ferguson’s letters thus supports the case for a modern reassessment of the connection between his life and work.

AcknowledgementsI am grateful for the comments of Liz Stanley on this and related work and for the helpful suggestions of the editors and anonymous reviewers.

– 23 –

2 FERGUSON AND SCOTTISH HISTORY: PAST AND PRESENT IN AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORY

OF CIVIL SOCIETY

David Allan

Adam Ferguson has always provided a face for every occasion. To some he is a pioneering theorist of ‘civil society’, a concept (or, rather, body of concepts) that he developed in important new ways to which latter-day exponents like Ernest Gellner have found it easy to relate.1 To others, writing in the wake of William Lehmann and Ronald Meek, he is a founder of academic social science, by turns an early sociologist and an anthropologist.2 To yet another audience, he belongs, along with his friends Adam Smith and David Hume, to the grand tradition of classical political economy. Accordingly An Essay on the History of Civil Soci-ety is, depending upon one’s own tastes, either an early exposition of historical materialism, replete with warnings about the eff ects of ‘alienation’ consequent upon the ‘division of labour’ (an interpretation traditionally favoured both by certain sociologists and by most Marxist readers), or else a notable staging post on the high road to the ideals of free-market liberalism (the view of political phi-losophers such as Friedrich Hayek).3 For still others, particularly among recent historians of political thought, he is a leading representative in eighteenth-cen-tury Britain of the classical republican or ‘civic humanist’ tradition, eff ectively linking the ideological concerns of the ancient city-states directly with those of modern commercial society.4 And this, of course, is to say nothing of yet other roles in which Ferguson can plausibly be cast – his position, for example, as a best-selling historian of Rome, one of Edward Gibbon’s most talented eight-eenth-century colleagues; his long and infl uential career as a teacher and writer on moral philosophy, in which he shaped minds as important as that of Dug-ald Stewart; or even, as a nonagenarian, his slightly melancholy position as the last relic of the Enlightenment, friend of the young Walter Scott and, wrapped against the Scottish winter, Henry Cockburn’s fondly remembered ‘philosopher from Lapland’.5


Small wonder, then, that Ferguson’s most acute modern interpreter, David Kettler, observed more than forty years ago that, despite the quality of the work that has long highlighted the diff erent strands to his intellectual career (and which, it might be added, has continued to accumulate impressively since Kettler wrote in 1965), ‘none of these authors has succeeded in carving out his special subject matter without doing some violence to the integrity of Ferguson’s total production’.6 Arguably the most important reason for this failure to see Fergu-son’s work as a whole has been the tendency, encouraged by the interest shown in his ideas by such radically diff erent scholarly and ideological groupings – many not conspicuously grounded in historical study – to decontextualize his intel-lectual achievements. Th is has meant in particular that Ferguson’s immersion in the peculiar perspectives and concerns of eighteenth-century Scotland, and in the society and politics of Hanoverian Britain, has too oft en been downplayed. Yet the outlines of an argument in persuasive defence of such an approach are not hard to make out. Aft er all, it is a remarkable feature of Ferguson’s greatest work that, on the face of it, it appears oblivious to its immediate Scottish con-text. In fact, the reader of An Essay on the History of Civil Society, then as now, could quite easily work through its densely argued pages, and, if he or she knew nothing about Scotland in the age of the Enlightenment, still emerge without having identifi ed any specifi c connections between Ferguson’s arguments and the contemporary preoccupations of his fellow countrymen.

Th e almost complete invisibility of Scotland as a formal presence in the Essay is, the more one thinks about it, one of the work’s starkest and most intriguing aspects. It is certainly a highly unusual characteristic for what has become one of the most widely praised works of the Scottish Enlightenment, and something that clearly distinguishes it from the other similar works with which it is now most commonly bracketed. In Th e Wealth of Nations, for example, Scotland, the Scots and things Scottish intrude explicitly on dozens of separate occasions. At times they are introduced merely to exemplify general points. At others they form a signifi cant part of Adam Smith’s overt argument. In Book II alone, Smith discusses inter alia the Scottish provincial banking system and the eff ects of the growing circulation of money.7 In Book III, mention is made of Scottish lease-hold tenancies and the customs of Highland hospitality.8 In Book V he turns to the administration of justice, the parish school system and the organization of the Presbyterian Church.9 Similarly in Hume’s History of England (or Great Britain, as the work, signifi cantly, began its life), Scotland again features promi-nently. We are treated to a typically equivocal analysis of Mary, Queen of Scots, for example; and we hear repeatedly of Scottish events that aff ect the course of English and British history, from the fi rst invasions of the Scots and the Picts to the Convention Parliament in Edinburgh in 1689.10 As to other works from out of the same stable, it would be otiose even to ask the same question of William

Ferguson and Scottish History 25

Robertson’s History of Scotland, or, for that matter, of parts of the oeuvres of Lord Kames, Robert Henry and the two Dalrymples, Sir David and Sir John.11 Suffi ce it to say that Scotland looms predictably large for each of these writers not only as a familiar and convenient source of specifi c historical examples but also from time to time as the main focus for more concerted argument and polemic.

However, An Essay on the History of Civil Society is strangely and singularly diff erent from these companion pieces that emerged at roughly the same time, in approximately the same intellectual environment and from within Ferguson’s own Edinburgh-based circle of friends and colleagues. Th e word ‘Scotland’, aft er all, occurs in the Essay but once, in Part III. Even this, moreover, is merely a cross-reference, tersely footnoted, to a passage in Robertson’s history of the country.12 On closer inspection it turns out to be only the exception that proves the unvary-ing rule. For Ferguson’s borrowing from his friend’s work actually concerns not Scotland itself but rather the general feudal settlement of early medieval Europe. Th eir own country is not mentioned at all in the Essay. Nor are the Scots as a people; and, as strikingly, one would also look in vain for the words ‘Edinburgh’ or ‘Highlands’. Even ‘Clans’, which the knowing reader might easily associate with Scotland, are in fact referred to on fi ve separate occasions, but always as a form of social organization broadly characteristic of ‘rude’ and ‘primitive’ tribes living in extended territories: again, specifi c connections with the inhabitants of the Scottish mountains are never drawn out.13

We cannot, of course, explain this simply by insisting that Ferguson was unconcerned with Scotland. He was, as we know, prominently involved in a series of symbolic national campaigns – over the Scots militia and over Ossian – throughout the years during which the Essay was being conceived and written. His patriotic credentials, in short, are unimpeachable. It is also not possible to argue that he was studiously uninterested in subjects that bore directly upon Scotland’s past development and present condition – notwithstanding his seem-ing candour in 1798 in a letter to Andrew Stuart in reporting that ‘I am ashamed to say that hitherto the history of Scotland has interested me less than almost any Other that is Commonly read’.14 As we shall see, the Essay was actually brim-full with material that refl ected Ferguson’s deep curiosity about matters very close to home. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Essay having taken the form that it did without Ferguson’s profound indebtedness to a rich tradition of Scottish histo-riography, as well as to contemporary social and political commentary on the country and its distinctive circumstances. It is with reconstructing some aspects of this unacknowledged Scottish context to Ferguson’s greatest work, and also with off ering a potential explanation for his unwillingness to foreground his keen interest in Scotland itself, that the remainder of the present essay is chiefl y concerned.


Historiography in ‘the Historical Nation’

‘Th is is the historical Age’, observed an amused and admiring David Hume in August 1770, ‘and this the historical Nation’.15 As an apothegm, this has for many modern scholars come to characterize – rather more straightforwardly than Hume’s equally well-known but far more cryptic obiter dictum about ‘the Science of Man’ – the core intellectual project of what we now know as the Scottish Enlightenment.16 Certainly it appears to describe, with uncommon neatness and accuracy, the enterprise in which Scotland’s eighteenth-century intelligentsia were most oft en involved. For it was already a commonplace that historiography was quantitatively the most signifi cant fi eld of inquiry to which they had contributed, even coming to seem to many contemporary observers a subject that the Scots had eff ectively made their own: ‘Th e fashionable study (for there are fashions in study,) of topography, poligraphy, and partial history’, com-mented the Monthly Review in 1791, though probably at least three decades too late for any of its better-informed readers, ‘has begun to make its appearance in the northern capital of our island’.17 More than moral philosophy, the academic discipline that several of the leading literati (Ferguson included) formally pro-fessed, or even the natural philosophy with which the prestigious methodologies of Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton were associated (again, it is interesting that Ferguson had taught this particular subject before his translation in 1764 to Edinburgh’s vacant moral philosophy chair), history was the territory on which many of the most challenging investigations and insightful theories of the Scot-tish Enlightenment came to be founded. It was also a subject that, despite not yet being properly institutionalized within the university curriculum, was a well-established literary and intellectual pursuit. Moreover, it possessed a substantial and distinctive Scottish heritage that stood behind Ferguson and his colleagues as they wrote their own studies of the past.

One particularly important function that historiography had always served in Scotland had been the defi nition, sometimes in the most perilous circum-stances, of the Scottish people’s collective identity. Most modern scholars trace the origins of formal historical writing back to the fourteenth-century Wars of Independence and above all to John Fordun, whose Scotichronicon (c. 1384–7), in many ways a counterblast to English claims of overlordship, weaved an inspi-rational story of Scottish fortitude and national consciousness stretching far back into the mists of mythical time. Others followed where Fordun and his continuator Walter Bower had led. In eff ect, they conceived the Scottish past in ways that addressed the unresolved problem of Scotland’s hotly contested politi-cal and ethnic autonomy within the British Isles. Hector Boece, for example, used his Scotorum historiae (1526) to re-assert Fordun’s narrative rather less pro-saically, even as his contemporary John Mair, a Paris-based scholar precociously


interested in rapprochement between Scotland and England, produced the Historia maioris Britanniae (1521) in which unionism was promoted by off er-ing a notably irenical account of the two peoples’ intimate relations and natural affi nities. George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582), one of the most controversial works ever written by a Scot, again worked within the Fordun-Boece tradition to defend Scottish separatism even as his king and former pupil James VI was, as things turned out, preparing for a gilded future as the fi rst ruler of both of the British kingdoms.

It is worth underlining that each of these earlier texts actually retained acute relevance in Ferguson’s lifetime and that all of the leading historians and his-torical theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson included, knowingly operated in their looming shadow. For not only did they continue to speak to mid-eighteenth-century Scots readers in ways that still resonated, they also attracted renewed attention and controversy in the more propitious circum-stances for free scholarly exchange and publication created by the dawning of the Enlightenment. Mair’s work, for example, was republished by subscrip-tion in 1740, when Ferguson was still a St Andrews undergraduate. Even more importantly, in 1759, the very year that Ferguson regaled his friends with a draft ‘Treatise on Refi nement’ – the embryonic work from which the Essay would be born eight years later – the Scotichronicon was fi nally published in its entirety by Walter Goodall, long-standing sub-librarian at the Advocates’ Library, the great Edinburgh research institution by which in that same year Ferguson him-self was still gainfully employed as keeper. Buchanan’s text, meanwhile, which had enjoyed a more continuous currency precisely because of its perennially con-tentious nature, remained the focus of much scholarly acrimony. As always this tended to revolve around the work’s espousal of partisan Presbyterianism and populist politics, features which in the eighteenth century principally attracted criticism from yet another long-time employee of the Advocates’ Library, the Jacobite and episcopalian scholar Th omas Ruddiman (who in 1715 had pub-lished Buchanan’s complete works).

Specifi c historical controversies generated by this still-vigorous older tradition also continued to convulse Scottish scholarship in the age of the Enlightenment. Above all, 1754 had seen the publication of Goodall’s own riposte to Buchanan’s allegations of Mary Queen of Scots’ complicity in the murder of Henry Darnley (An Examination of the Letters of Mary Queen of Scots), while in 1759 appeared Robertson’s more measured rehabilitation of the unfortunate queen’s reputa-tion in the History of Scotland, as well as William Tytler’s aggressively supportive Inquiry, Historical and Critical into the Evidence Against Mary, Queen of Scots. Indeed, Mary, mainly vindicated from her Buchananite detractors, now became a lasting fascination for Scottish (as for English and European) writers – a touch-stone not only for less dogmatic approaches to Scotland’s religious history but


also, more widely, for the need for historical impartiality, for the progressive sen-timentalization of the past and for more tolerant attitudes (encouraged, perhaps, by the growing female readership for historical literature) towards women in positions of power.18 Rather than being only of antiquarian interest, therefore, the long heritage of medieval and Renaissance historical writing in Scotland, with its strong focus upon the country’s identity and upon those people and those issues on which it seemed to pivot, still formed a living part of the national culture in which Ferguson and his contemporaries unavoidably thought and wrote.

A second aspect of the historiographical heritage by which Ferguson, like his Enlightenment colleagues, could hardly fail to be infl uenced, was again the product of Scotland’s distinctive cultural development. For the complex inter-weaving of the infl uences of the Renaissance and the Reformation had served to create a tradition of historical writing in which essentially moralistic concerns enjoyed particular prominence. Th is characteristic drew as much from the can-ons of Calvinist preaching as it did from the conventions of humanist rhetoric.19 At one extreme this was displayed in John Knox’s own Historie of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland (1644), one of the most partisan works of Protestant historiography ever penned. Here Scotland’s putatively Presbyterian identity and the moral rectitude of the reformist tradition were not only described but also strenuously asserted. Other works in similar vein followed in Knox’s wake – an important example emerging as late as the decade that saw the birth of Ferguson, Robertson and Smith, the Glasgow minister Robert Wodrow’s mar-tyrological treatise Th e History of the Suff erings of the Church of Scotland (1722). At the other end of the spectrum lay largely secular texts, basically humanist works of aristocratic hagiography and political narrative but also shot through with a strong moralizing fl avour, much concerned with instructing their readers as to values and proper conduct, such as David Hume of Godscroft ’s History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus (1644) and Sir Robert Gordon of Gordon-stoun’s Genealogical History of the Earldom of Sutherland (begun around 1615 in manuscript but properly printed only in 1813). Both of these latter works, incidentally, were strongly shaped by Roman historiography and in particular by a desire to encourage readers in the exercise of morally benefi cial military skills: this emphasis upon the martial virtues was to prove another point of contact with the concerns still being evinced by Ferguson in the Essay in the second half of the next century.20

As a consequence, moreover, the profound moral responsibility of the his-torian himself, and an abiding interest in the judging of individuals’ behaviour, was something that Ferguson’s contemporaries continued to feel all too keenly. As Edinburgh professor John Hill put it in 1784, the year aft er Ferguson’s own long-awaited Roman history had appeared – though he was clearly only voicing


in slightly more decorous language an opinion about the role of the historian that earlier Scots like Knox or Godscroft would again have shared – ‘His sensibility to every moral sentiment not only detects the least symptom of what is good or bad in human conduct, but is accompanied with an immediate apprehension of the one and abhorrence of the other’.21 Most Enlightenment authors successfully translated such thoughts from the traditional idioms specifi cally evoking piety, political acuity and martial vigour into a modish new language, sanctioned by the aesthetic theories of Joseph Addison and the third Earl of Shaft esbury, which spoke more comfortably of the importance of reasonableness and politeness. Yet this emphasis upon instilling moral behaviour in readers was what still seemed to many practitioners to justify the writing of history. Like all art and literature, in the opinion of George Turnbull, sometime professor of moral philosophy in Aberdeen, the only permissible purpose was explicitly to ‘promote and encour-age virtue’.22 Robertson’s insistence in the History of Scotland upon the value of modern religious tolerance and Hume’s in the History that politeness was the key to modern political stability, like Ferguson’s claims in the Essay about the importance of soldierly experience in the formation of the self-respecting mod-ern citizen, thus refl ected an old assumption about the function of history. Th is saw the study of the past primarily as a vehicle for defi ning appropriate values and promoting behavioural norms among those who lived in the present.

A further dimension to the native historiographical tradition that cast an infl uential shadow across Scottish scholarship in the age of the Enlightenment was closely related to this continued emphasis upon moralizing. Th is was the concern to understand the fundamental causes behind events – the reasons, in short, why things had happened, and how far and to what extent what had occurred had actually been inevitable. In the eschatological vision of human his-tory instinctively preferred by religious propagandists like Knox and Wodrow, it was Providence that was predictably the main driving force. But something simi-lar, alternatively (and more ambiguously) called Fortune, had also fi lled the same role in the humanistic writings of Gordon and Godscroft , counterbalancing and oft en overwhelming human will and agency. Th e centrality of this concern with causality, which might equally be explored in a theological or a secular idiom and which was to prove critical to the Scottish Enlightenment’s interest in the general principles underlying historical development, was nicely explained to a modern audience in 1782 by Alexander Tytler, Ferguson’s younger professorial colleague at Edinburgh. For it was Tytler who asserted that ‘the most important purposes of history, [are] the tracing of events to their causes, the detection of the springs of human actions, the display of the progress of society, and the rise and fall of states and empires’.23 Turnbull wholeheartedly agreed about the cen-trality of this concern, seeing it as the task of history ‘to connect human aff airs, and to take an united view of God’s moral providence’, while his Aberdeen col-


league Alexander Gerard, one of the century’s great Scottish theorists of taste and literary endeavour, argued in the Essay on Genius (1774) that ‘the true his-torian’ was one who ‘places facts in connexion, he rises to the sources of actions, and he pursues them through their consequences’.24

Hume’s philosophical works had, as is well known, rendered precisely this subject more problematic than ever before, above all in relation to the explana-tion of everyday occurrences. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), he triumphantly summarized his complete jettisoning of traditional epistemological assumptions about objectively connected cause and eff ect: ‘Th e falling of a pebble may, for ought we know, extinguish the Sun, or the wish of man control the planets in their orbits’.25 Th e same questions raised by the need to account for the unfolding of events within ordinary experience, however, could not be easily separated from those which concerned historical theorists like Ferguson who, in the quest to develop a comprehensive ‘natural history of mankind’, wished to understand the forces that had directed the human past. It was this fascination, very much inherited from earlier generations of Scottish historians, that led in part to the particular priority that the Enlightenment’s theorists now gave to explaining the nature and causes of large-scale historical change. Th e principal product of this focus, much discussed by recent com-mentators, was, of course, the so-called ‘Th eory of Unintended Consequences’, adumbrated by his colleagues in a number of diff erent versions but articulated by Ferguson in the following manner so as to explain the emergence of social structure:

Like the winds, that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations, of men.26

Ferguson expands the same point, further emphasizing the sheer unpredictabil-ity and unconscious sources of change that the historian needs to understand if he is properly to explain the course of human aff airs:

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlight-ened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. If Cromwell said, Th at a man never mounts higher, than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affi rmed of communi-ties, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refi ned politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.27

Th is fl uent account of the unplanned and unknowable nature of large-scale his-torical development addressed a problem that had long preoccupied those major historians who had worked in Scotland – with all of whom Ferguson was himself


thoroughly familiar. Indeed, this passage provides an uncanny echo of the claims of Hume of Godscroft in the early seventeenth century that the historian’s role is to relate ‘men’s actions, which arrive oft en to unexpected events, and sometimes even to such ends as are quite contrary to the actors intentions’.28 Th e fullest theoretical development of these ideas in the context of the natural history of mankind, to some extent encouraged in the eighteenth century by the intriguing treatments of ‘Unintended Consequences’ already off ered by Bernard Mandev-ille, Lord Shaft esbury and especially by Montesquieu, was also in turn to prove a central achievement of the ‘conjectural historians’ of the Scottish Enlighten-ment, and one to whose further popularization Ferguson in the Essay has rightly been recognized as having made a signifi cant personal contribution.29

Natural History as National History

Th e Essay, like the writings of several of Ferguson’s leading Scottish contempo-raries, evidently belonged to a particularly complicated tradition for analysing and making sense of the past that historians in Scotland had been elaborating over several centuries. It was therefore a Scottish work in an especially important sense – in the ways in which history itself was approached and the purposes it was understood to serve – even as its own pages actually contained not a single explicit mention of the country of its author’s birth. Yet the Essay was a Scottish text in another way too. For it is directly concerned with a set of topical issues, aff ecting Scotland in particular, with which Ferguson’s compatriots were clearly obsessed. Indeed, the central point from which much of the intellectual energy of his thinking fl owed was clearly the problem of modernity – not merely its nature and its origins but also the benefi ts and disadvantages that it might have brought in its train. Th e result was that a linked series of concerns became a par-ticular focus of debate for those contemporaries who, like Ferguson (indeed like most subsequent historians of the period), perceived that the Treaty of Union, and the economic and social transformation of Scotland that had followed from that constitutional revolution, had together accelerated the rate of change and helped bring about a process of rapid Scottish modernization. In other words, in Bagehot’s celebrated phrase describing Smith’s endeavours, the problem for Ferguson and his friends – acting as natural historians of their species but also eff ectively motivated by more narrowly national concerns – amounted at one level to a need to explain how, as well as with what consequences, ‘from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman’.30

Most obviously, the Essay’s concern for modernity was the source of its fascination with progress as the process by which present circumstances had apparently come about. Hence, of course, the opening four sentences of the work,


containing a famous description of the organic growth of the species – and by implication of nations and peoples too – as well as of the individual:

Natural productions are generally formed by degrees. Vegetables grow from a tender shoot, and animals from an infant state. Th e latter being destined to act, extend their operations as their powers increase: they exhibit a progress in what they perform, as well as in the faculties they acquire. Th is progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal.31

Ferguson’s account of progress in turn links intimately with his view of our men-tal capacities, his interpretation of how modernity became possible resting upon and leading back to a powerful analysis of human psychology in which a natural and instinctive yearning for advancement and betterment is identifi ed as the very engine of progression. It is the fact that man is ‘equally fi tted to every condition’ but ‘is upon this account unable to settle in any’, that ‘he complains of inno-vations’ yet ‘is never sated with novelty’, which explains why progress occurs.32 Th at Ferguson characterizes mankind’s ‘progressive and slow’ steps towards modernity as taking place in such diverse locations as the banks of the Orinoco, the shores of the Caspian and beside ‘Th e sopha, the vaulted dome, and the colonade’ should not mislead us as to the extent to which this analysis is devel-oped with Scottish conditions and Scottish experiences specifi cally in mind.33 It is the transformation of Edinburgh and the Lowlands, even latterly of the High-lands, and the simultaneous emergence of an urban and commercial society in a country previously known only for its poverty and under-development, that lies behind Ferguson’s explanation of how and why progress has occurred.34

Ferguson’s ambivalence towards its implications can likewise be linked directly to the Essay’s contemporary Scottish context. For the facet of his account that was to attract special interest from Karl Marx and other subsequent readers – namely Ferguson’s evident alarm at the potentially destructive consequences of the ‘division of labour’ and his disquiet at the blighting of modernity by aliena-tion and social atomization – was simply the response of a traditionally-minded moral philosopher who had also had unique fi rst-hand experience of the High-lands and of army life. In particular, it is clear that Ferguson’s background in a Gaelic-speaking community and then in military service had habituated him to the usefulness of precisely those bonds of loyalty, public spirit and self-sacrifi ce that his beloved Roman writers had celebrated and which modern society, held together increasingly only by contractual relations, appeared to be in the process of loosening. Th e simultaneous transition from a past marked by confl ict and perpetual striving to a present and future marked only by peace and languor would further compound this problem, altering the priorities of individuals, and thus the character of the society that they comprised, with potentially lethal implications for its cohesion and ultimate viability.


As Ferguson argues, in one of the Essay’s more passionately moralistic pas-sages, which it is almost tempting to read as a sermon aimed at his compatriots:

We may, with good reason, congratulate our species on their having escaped from a state of barbarous disorder and violence, into a state of domestic peace and regular policy; when they have sheathed the dagger, and disarmed the animosities of civil contention; when the weapons with which they contend are the reasonings of the wise, and the tongue of the eloquent. But we cannot, meantime, help to regret, that they should ever proceed, in search of perfection, to place every branch of administra-tion behind the counter, and come to employ, instead of the statesman and warrior, the mere clerk and accountant.35

Ferguson’s words may speak explicitly of no contemporary community in par-ticular. But their potential application in Edinburgh and London in 1767 could not have been clearer to his fi rst readers. It was Britain, and especially Scotland, that was in danger of becoming a nation of ‘mere’ clerks and accountants; that had lost the capacity to form and to reward courageous military leaders; that now lacked a suffi cient number of far-sighted legislators. Following the worldwide British victory enshrined in the Peace of Paris just four years earlier, the unprec-edented wealth that a combination of industrialization and imperial conquest were bringing to the country, and, for Scotland in particular, the experience of rapid post-Union enrichment, the political setting seemed both strangely famil-iar and reliably anxiety-inducing, especially for those whose horizons naturally encompassed the fall of the Roman Republic (the plunge into what Ferguson elsewhere described as a ‘ruinous abyss’).36

Other dimensions to modernity, again with special pertinence to Scottish conditions in the 1760s and about which Ferguson seems to have been espe-cially exercised, also fi gure prominently in the Essay’s careful anatomization of progress. Th ese include the role of specialization and professionalization in military aff airs, a development that threatened to sever the connection – so important in the Highland society whose communal ties and capacity for collec-tive endeavour Ferguson had always appreciated – between individual citizens and the defence of their community.37 Vital simultaneously to the proper self-expression of each citizen, to the balancing of central governmental authority with meaningful individual liberty and to the more eff ective countering of exter-nal threats to the common good, military service ought to be the right as well as the obligation of members of the political community rather than the occupa-tion of a separate class of paid professionals, as Ferguson argued throughout his campaign on behalf of a Scottish militia. Again the Essay makes recognizably the same point:

If the defence and government of a people be made to depend on a few, who make the conduct of state or of war their profession; whether these be foreigners or natives;


whether they be called away of a sudden, like the Roman legion from Britain; whether they turn against their employers, like the army of Carthage, or be over-powered and dispersed by a stroke of fortune, the multitude of cowardly and undisciplined people must, on such an emergence, receive a foreign or a domestic enemy, as they would a plague or an earthquake, with hopeless amazement and terror …38

In the context of Scotland’s growing importance as a source of professional sol-diers and commanders during the successful wars of the late 1750s and early 1760s, and the hitherto unimaginable expansion in the scale and scope of the British state’s power by the time that Ferguson was formulating the Essay, to draw attention to the potentially fatal consequences of the creation of a discrete class of military specialists for the welfare and liberties of society as a whole was necessarily to provoke uncomfortable thoughts about his own country. He explained the root of the problem elsewhere in the Essay: ‘In the progress of arts and of policy, the members of every state are divided into classes; and in the com-mencement of this distribution, there is no distinction more serious than that of the warrior and the pacifi c inhabitants; no more is required to place men in the relation of master and slave’.39

A fi nal key concern that must link the study of the past in the Essay directly to the condition of Scotland in particular in the late 1750s and 1760s, when Fer-guson was conceiving his great work, should also be noted. Th is, moreover, has been among the least remarked-upon features of his analysis of political history, even though, despite the absence of explicit references to the Hanoverian state, this part of Ferguson’s account clearly amounts to a strongly-worded defence of the British constitution in general and, because it was the specifi c mechanism by which the Scots benefi ted from those arrangements, of the Treaty of Union in particular. Th at Ferguson was an anti-Jacobite and a pro-Unionist, as well as a supporter of the system of parliamentary monarchy by which Scotland and England were governed is, of course, well known. His own father had been a staunch Presbyterian supporter of the Union and the House of Hanover, and the son’s nine years’ service as a chaplain in the British army, where he was eff ec-tively a propagandist for Crown and Church, confi rms that he inherited all of the paternal loyalty. At the same time, Ferguson’s friends, including famously John Home and Alexander Carlyle, had been active in the defence of Lowland Scotland against the onrushing Jacobite host in 1745. Much of the emotional force that sustained their leadership of the militia campaign from the 1750s onwards derived from the fact that Ferguson’s coterie knew themselves to be unambiguously loyal subjects of the reigning dynasty and strong supporters of the prevailing constitution. Th ey therefore objected viscerally to the merest hint, clearly implicit in the position adopted by those in London who refused to allow them to participate directly in the defence of their own country, that the


political judgement of Scots gentlemen such as themselves, muskets and swords lawfully in hand, could not actually be relied upon.

Th is makes the Essay’s arguments in favour of parliamentary monarchy all the more signifi cant, especially given that in order to achieve this polemical out-come Ferguson needed to eff ect a curious sleight of hand that was by no means unknown among contemporary commentators on the Hanoverian constitu-tion.40 Th is involved making the form of monarchy practised in modern Britain take on something of the character (and thus most of the proven advantages) of the republican constitutions that his political theory otherwise led him to sup-port. In particular, establishing the role of an actively participatory version of citizenship at the heart of a properly functioning constitutional monarchy was central to the success of this necessary manoeuvre. Th is is why the Essay makes the intriguing claim that ‘the subjects of monarchies, like those of republics, fi nd themselves occupied as the members of an active society, and engaged to treat with their fellow-creatures on a liberal footing’; and also why it is argued that, in such political systems, ‘every individual, in his separate capacity, in some measure, deliberates for his country’.41 At the same time it also explains Ferguson’s insist-ence that this peculiarly republican type of monarchy, with the institution of an elected parliament permitting substantial public involvement in the business of government, is productive of unusual levels of stability as well as liberty, creat-ing a form of ‘mixed monarchy’ – a concept familiar from Polybius, Cicero and Montesquieu – that combines the distinctive virtues of diff erent constitutional systems whilst avoiding their respective disadvantages. As Ferguson explains:

where the people had by the constitution a representative in the government, and a head, under which they could avail themselves of the wealth they acquired, and of the sense of their personal importance, this policy turned against the crown; it formed a new power to restrain the prerogative, to establish the government of law, and to exhibit a spectacle new in the history of mankind; monarchy mixed with republic, and extensive territory, governed, during some ages, without military force.42

No fi ner description of the constitutional settlement bequeathed to the Eng-lish by the revolutions of the seventeenth century, and no better assertion of the benefi ts that the Scots derived from their voluntary absorption into this pecu-liarly blessed form of government, could have been written, despite Ferguson’s reluctance to fl esh out his point in more specifi c terms. Although ostensibly concerned at a high level of generality with what he chooses to call simply ‘the states of Europe’,43 few well-informed readers, already familiar with the author’s immediate environment, could have doubted that Ferguson’s mind remained fi rmly fi xed on the analysis and the rhetorical defence of the political arrange-ments that currently governed his own country. In short, the Scottish present


was clearly very much in view, albeit that it was perceived through the distorting prism of the historical past.

Universalism and the History of Humanity

Th e Essay was to this extent and in these various ways unavoidably a series of refl ections upon the multiple predicaments of eighteenth-century Scotland. It was not, however, remotely parochial. Indeed, the complete absence of explicit internal references to local conditions is in need of further explanation because it makes the Essay so unusual among the leading historical texts of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is also puzzling because Ferguson’s interests were so obviously related directly to the country in which he was writing and with whose vital inter-ests, whether as a scholar, a teacher, or a propagandist and public campaigner, he was demonstrably so much concerned. Aft er all, as we have seen, the Essay was certainly the product of distinctively Scottish intellectual traditions; moreover, it plainly addressed problems and questions that Scotland’s social, economic and political development – as these were understood by Ferguson and his close col-leagues and friends among the Edinburgh intelligentsia – were at that very time making even more pertinent. Why, then, did the Essay fail to follow the logic of its own intensely topical agenda and disclose to its readers at least something of its strongly Scottish context? What was the source of what appears to have been Ferguson’s dogged determination – at times, given the Essay’s explicit discussion of clanship in particular, verging on the perverse – to avoid bringing Scotland itself into the spotlight? Unfortunately Ferguson did not provide us with a ready answer to this problem. But enough can be reconstructed about the circum-stances in which he seems to have conceived this work to allow us to speculate about how this curious presentational strategy actually emerged.

Th e key appears to lie in Ferguson’s preoccupations as a mid-eighteenth-cen-tury professional moralist concerned above all with how the techniques required for studying past and present societies might be made to yield philosophical prin-ciples with far-reaching economic, political and ethical implications. Clearly, as the familiar tributes to Ferguson as a ‘founding father’ of sociology have long highlighted, this is at one level merely to underline the Essay’s positioning at the junction point between moral philosophy, as that discipline was increasingly being approached in Scotland by Ferguson’s day, and the social sciences, as they would subsequently come to be identifi ed in later times.44 Whether this situation truly makes him the fi rst of the modern sociologists or merely the last of the tra-ditional moral philosophers is ultimately beside the point. What matters instead is the fact that there are good reasons for thinking that Ferguson’s work, evolving in his mind and in draft versions between the late 1750s and the mid-1760s, was intended specifi cally as an intervention in an ongoing European debate about


how and whether it was possible to investigate human nature and human society by properly empirical means. It was Ferguson’s great good fortune – as it was of compatriots like Hume and Smith but also Reid – that local conditions off ered special encouragement to budding Scottish participants in this debate. But we should be in no doubt that this fundamentally methodological dispute was also central to the working out of the wider Enlightenment project, with ramifi ca-tions far beyond the illumination of Scotland’s peculiar national history – as the enthusiastic (if not always straightforward) reception of Ferguson’s work on the Continent, and especially in Germany, further underlines.45

Th at Ferguson was intrigued by the problems of how and for what purpose human society should be investigated is clear from many of his observations on the subject. Many years later, in his fi nal published work, the Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), he argued that the student of man needed to ‘collect facts, and endeavour to conceive his nature as it actually is, or has actually been, apart from any notion of ideal perfection, or defect’.46 Much the same concern for empirical inquiry, shorn of metaphysical sophistry or other abstract pre-conceptions, had been evinced in the Essay, where Ferguson made sure to insist that the hard evidence of history was the only reliable foundation of all useful knowledge of the species, despite the attempts of some scholars to intrude mere guesswork and wishful thinking into the subject:

… the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to off er conjec-tures. When he treats of any particular species of animals, he supposes, that their present dispositions and instincts are the same they originally had, and that their present manner of life is a continuance of their fi rst destination. He admits, that his knowledge of the material system of the world consists in a collection of facts, or at most, in general tenets derived from particular observations and experiments. It is only in what relates to himself, and in matters the most important, and the most easily known, that he substitutes hypothesis instead of reality, and confounds the provinces of imagination and reason, of poetry and science.47

Ferguson’s principal target, here, of course, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) was explicitly referenced shortly aft erwards. And this underlines how far the Essay itself was an essentially polemical enterprise, intensely conscious of the scholarly debates into which it was pitched and intended from the outset to confront and to demolish a set of arguments about the philosophical study of mankind that seemed to enjoy undeserved currency throughout Europe.

Th is, then, was the thoroughly international context to the Essay that best explains Ferguson’s resolute refusal to fall into the trap of making his analysis lean overtly – and potentially to its considerable detriment – upon the expe-riences of one country in particular. Indeed, by far the most eff ective way of signalling the intentionally general signifi cance of his arguments, and the uni-


versal application of the theories that he wished to propound, was obviously to render them explicitly connected with the experiences of a wide range of past and present cultures, and to do so whilst ostentatiously avoiding reference to the specifi c society – necessarily particular, conceivably also unrepresentative – from which the author himself clearly hailed. It is in this connection, and in light of the perceived need to remain free of even the merest hint of parochialism (a con-cern that in another context Ferguson shared with many of his compatriots, who fretted continually about tell-tale ‘Scoticisms’ marring their use of English), that we would also do well to remember that, for all the unique aspects of his Scottish make-up that his biographers have traditionally and quite correctly highlighted – the Highland origins, the Gaelic fl uency, a professional career in the Black Watch, and so on – Adam Ferguson was also uniquely cosmopolitan among his Scottish circle.48

Certainly he was by any standards – and particularly given the constraints facing the aspiring eighteenth-century tourist – a most intrepid traveller. He planned an abortive trip to India in 1773. Five years later he became the only one of the European Enlightenment’s major theoreticians to visit North America (having already been briefl y considered as a potential governor of West Florida). By way of contrast, Robertson, who wrote famously and lucratively about the New World, never actually went there. Nor did Smith, even though Th e Wealth of Nations off ered a number of judicious observations on the American cause. Ferguson, meanwhile, in 1793, the year that he turned seventy, even toured the ancient battlefi elds of Italy, ignoring the small matter of the continuing interna-tional wars so as to be able to collect useful amendments for the forthcoming new edition of his own Roman history. In short, he was, both by temperament and by dint of long and varied experience, the least insular of Enlightenment philosophers. Appropriately, therefore, his Essay, for all its connections with distinctively Scottish intellectual traditions and urgent Scottish concerns, had already amply demonstrated that it was as expansive, as wide-ranging and as adventurous as its remarkable author.

– 39 –

3 FERGUSON’S USE OF THE EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY: 1764–1806

Jane B. Fagg

Adam Ferguson’s interests were as wide ranging as his writings. Yet the sources of his thought are not always easy to locate. By the standards of the twenty-fi rst century, the citations in his works are quite minimal. If one is to search for the historical, literary and philosophical works that engaged his attention as he pre-pared his lectures, wrote his essays and composed his books, then one must move outside Ferguson’s own writings. Of course, the obvious place to look is his per-sonal library, not to mention his letters and what they reveal about that library. Unfortunately this sort of approach sheds little light on Ferguson’s sources. If this subject is to receive further illumination one must proceed to consider his use of the main library available to him, the Edinburgh University Library. An inveterate user of the university library, Ferguson borrowed some 272 titles over a span of just over 40 years. It is, of course, impossible to guarantee that he read all the books he borrowed, but it is reasonable to assume that he used them in much the same way a modern scholar would.

Th is essay provides philosophers, historians of ideas and scholars of the book with evidence of some of the building blocks of Ferguson’s thought. Such a nar-rated bibliography, interwoven with reminders of his life story, seems appropriate for a biographer such as myself and should provide a new vista into Ferguson’s scholarly preparations, thereby enriching our knowledge of his thought. Aft er describing the diffi culty of discovering the content of Ferguson’s personal library, the professor’s library borrowings are recounted from 1764 (the year that a sys-tem of written receipts was set in place) until 1806, the last year in which there is any record of books being taken under Ferguson’s name. Th e narrative of his library borrowings is placed into the context of his life, with particular attention given to how his library selections correspond with his writing. Th e borrowed books that are cited in his most important publications are duly remarked. As new editions of his works appear, any additional citations of borrowed books are also noted. A brief statistical summary concludes the essay, along with an


appendix that lists, by author, all of the borrowed books and the year in which they were borrowed.

Ferguson’s Personal Library

When Adam Ferguson died in 1816, in his ninety-third year, he left 163 folio and quarto and 1,200 octavo volumes, inventoried and appraised by Andrew and John Scott, booksellers in St Andrews, at £32 12s. and £40 respectively, or 22 per cent of the value of his household eff ects.1 Individual books were not listed. A few years aft er his death, Ferguson’s manuscripts, a collection of 32 unpublished essays which had been in the hands of Sir John Macpherson, were returned to Scotland and, for safekeeping, came into the possession of Hugh Cleghorn, a family friend present when Ferguson died. For these manuscripts, a London bookseller had ‘off ered £500 for the Copy-right’.2 What happened to the books is unclear. In 1818, Dr John Lee, the intended author of Ferguson’s biography, complained to Hugh Cleghorn that when Ferguson’s daughters left St Andrews, they took with them ‘a considerable number of books which might have been of some use to me, such as Translations of Dr Ferguson’s diff erent works, some of which in addition to the prefaces & notes of the translators, possessed [of ] the advantage of having been revised by the author before publication’.3 It has thus far proved virtually impossible to reconstruct Ferguson’s library. His cor-respondence provides few clues. In 1775 he wrote to a friend that he was reading James Macpherson’s new History of Great Britain. He noted that he had not completed the book because ‘the Dissipation of London is inconsistent with any reading but news Papers’.4 Th e following year he informed Edward Gibbon that he was reading Th e Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and wrote to Adam Smith that he was ‘busy reading’ Th e Wealth of Nations and recommending it to his students.5 Th e following year, he thanked Lord Stanhope for Robert Simson’s unpublished posthumous works on mathematics which Stanhope had funded.6

In 1780, Ferguson asked John Macpherson to send him a copy of Th e Code of Gentoo Laws, which Warren Hastings had requested be compiled.7 Fergu-son also read what he referred to as ‘some periodical Publication or Review or Magazine’ and was especially interested in the ‘Life of [ John] Logan’, most likely because Logan was accused of stealing the young Michael Bruce’s ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’ and other poems shortly aft er he died.8 In 1790 he wrote to thank an unidentifi ed lady for recommending Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, remarking that ‘they have given me much entertainment & instruction’.9 In 1796 and 1797, the professor received several books, Th e Dic-tionary of Italian Geography and two copies of An Essay on the Law of Nations by Baron de Chambreis.10 On 23 December, he acknowledged the receipt of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall’s History of France fr om the Accession of Henry the Th ird to

Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library 41

the Death of Louis the Fourteenth, commenting that he had ‘seen nothing else so likely to do good on both Sides of the Water’.11

In the summer of 1797 Ferguson requested that the bookseller William Creech send him the fi rst volume and the rest of the second volume (except for number six which he already had) of Count Rumford’s Essays, Political, Econom-ical, and Philosophical.12 In October, he wrote to his friend Alexander Carlyle that he had John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Government of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illumi-nati, and Reading Societies; Collected fr om Good Authorities. He commented in another letter of the same date that he had read more of the book and thought ‘he had disclosed a scene of Villany to much good purpose’.13 Th e following year, his friend Andrew Stuart sent him a copy of his Genealogical History of the Stuarts that Ferguson complimented by noting ‘that hitherto the History of Scotland has interested me less than almost any Other that is Commonly read’.14 By 1803 Ferguson was nearly blind and the last two books mentioned in the letters are Sir William Jones’s Memoirs of 1804 and the second edition of Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, published in 1811.15

Th ese books are obviously only a fraction of Ferguson’s library. Perhaps scholars studying the history of the book trade will be able to locate the archival materials necessary to reconstruct his holdings. Fortunately, another source is available which provides a window into Ferguson’s literary and scholarly inter-ests. Th is is the record of books borrowed from the University of Edinburgh Library. Since Ferguson’s sources are not always cited and run the gamut from ancient history to contemporary ‘anthropological’ references,16 any light shed on the origins of his ideas would be valuable to scholars.

Ferguson’s Use of the University Library

Ferguson had been teaching at the University of Edinburgh for three years when William Robertson became the principal in 1762, an event that C. P. Finlayson and S. M. Simpson describe as the most important single event in the history of the library.17 Robertson supervised the rigorous collection of the matriculation fees used to fund the library, recruited the effi cient Duke Gordon as under-librarian and promoted the work of professor of Hebrew James Robertson as honorary librarian, assisted by a committee of faculty curators. Ferguson served as a curator in 1765, 1767, 1768, 1773 and 1783.18

Instituted in 1764, the system used to regulate circulation involved a receipt book for the students – refundable upon the book’s return – to cover the replace-ment cost of the book. Each professor had his own pages to list the date, mark the volumes being borrowed and, beginning in 1773, sign his name. He did not have to make a deposit. Students, family members and friends frequently signed


out books on the professors’ pages. Aft er Ferguson retired in 1785, books were sometimes listed but not signed for. When the books were returned the transac-tions were scored out:19 for example, ‘Bord Gesneri Th esaurus 4 Vols in 2 Tom folio & Philosophical Transactions abridged by Lowthrop 3Vs4to’. With a great deal of eff ort and patience, it has been possible to reconstruct most of Ferguson’s entries.20

On 16 May 1764 the town council of Edinburgh appointed Adam Fergu-son professor of moral philosophy, a position he much preferred to the one he had held in natural philosophy.21 In October, while preparing for his class and working on An Essay on the History of Civil Society, he borrowed all fi ve volumes of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in both English and Latin, an early indication of his interest in Roman history. Th e next month, he took George Berkeley’s Treatise [concerning] the Principles of Human Knowledge, [wherein the chief Causes of Error and Diffi culty in the Sciences with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into], Part I (1710). In December, he chose the second volume of John Locke’s Works, which is Book II (‘Of Ideas’) of An Essay Con-cerning Human Understanding.

Th e professor borrowed only two books in 1765, the year he bought his farm and took up scientifi c agriculture, using the modern techniques of farm-ing developed in East Lothian. Th e fi rst of these, taken in May, was a work by a Church of Scotland minister, Robert Wallace, a mathematician and leader in the establishment of the Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund. Its full title gives an idea of its scope: Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind [in Antient and Modern Times in which the superior populousness of antiquity is maintained: with an appendix, containing additional observations on the same subject, and some remarks on Mr. Hume’s political discourse, of the Populousness of antient nations] (1753). Th e other, in October, was a two-folio edition of Dio Cassius, probably the History of Rome. In January 1766, he borrowed Th e History of Philosophy: [containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions, and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect], a seventeenth-century classic by Th omas Stanley. Th is selection was followed in March by Conyers Middleton’s [History of the] Life of Cicero (1741). In the autumn, Ferguson published a textbook, Analysis of Pneumat-ics and Moral Philosophy. For the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh. In November, he checked out four philosophical works, two by fellow Scots: Archibald Campbell’s [An Enquiry into the] Original of Moral Virtue [wherein it is shewn (against the author [Bernard Mandeville] of the Fable of the Bees, etc.) that Virtue is Founded in the Nature of Th ings, is unalterable, and eternal, and the great Means of private and publick Happiness[,] With Some Refl ections on a late Book [by Francis Hutcheson], intitled An Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue], published in Edinburgh in 1733. At the same time Fergu-son also borrowed An Enquiry, Hutcheson’s fi rst work, originally published in


1725. In addition to [Th e True] Intellectual System [of the Universe: the fi rst part; wherein all the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is confuted] (1678) by Ralph Cudworth, a Cambridge Platonist, Ferguson chose the fi rst volume of Th omas Hobbes’s Opera, which included Humane Nature and De Corpore Politico or the Elements of Law. In mid-December, he took out the fi rst volume of the Works of Sir Francis Bacon, probably On the Profi cience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane.

Th e year 1767 saw the publication of Ferguson’s most famous work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Th e only volumes borrowed from the library and cited in this edition were Dio Cassius and Plutarch. His library use that year was limited to Johann Georg Graevius’s 1684 edition of Cicero’s [Orationes ex recensione] [Revised Speeches]. Th e following year, while preparing his Institutes of Moral Philosophy for the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh, based on his lectures, he borrowed only two books. In mid-November he took Johann Matthias Gesner’s 1749 [Novus linguae et eruditionis Romanae] thesaurus [New Repository of Roman language and learning], four volumes in two folios, and John Lowthrop’s abridgement of Philosophical Transactions and Collections [fr om 1665] to the End of the Year 1700, part of the history of the Royal Society, published while Isaac Newton was its president.

Ferguson published his Institutes in 1769, citing only Lowthrop and Wallace from his library selections. He then began a period of heavy library use in prepa-ration for his Roman history. As he wrote to Edward Gibbon in 1776, ‘I have … been employed at any intervals of Leisure or rest I have had for some years, in taking notes or collecting Materials for a History of the … Roman Repub-lic’. He added ‘as my trade is the Study of human Nature I coud not fi x on a more interesting Corner of it …’.22 In January he borrowed two folios of Strabo’s [Geographia] [Geography] and [Obadiah Walker’s] 1692 Th e Greek and Roman History Illustrated by Coins [& medals: representing their religions, rites, man-ners, customs, games, feasts, arts and sciences: together with a succinct account of their emperors, consuls, cities …]. Along with these, he took Guillaume Budé’s De Asse et Partibus [On the As [a Roman coin] and its Parts] (1522), which also described ancient measures. In March he selected the recently-published Com-mentaries [on the Laws of England], fi rst and second volumes – ‘Of the Rights of Persons’ (1765) and ‘Of the Rights of Th ings’ (1766) – by William Blackstone, which he cited in his Principles many years later.

In April, by a separate receipt, Ferguson borrowed [An Abridgement of Mr.] Locke[’s An Essay Concerning humane [sic] understanding] by John Wynne (1700). Th e abridgement was supported by Locke and served as an introduction to his thought. Along with Wynne’s work Ferguson took [Th e Procedure, Extent, and] Limits of Human Understanding, a critique of Locke, published anony-mously by Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork and Ross (1728). Robert Sheringham’s


De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio [Treatise on the Origin of the English Peo-ple] (1670) was another choice, as was [Roman History] by Dio Cassius, edited by N. C. Falconius (1747–9).

A week later the professor checked out six more books. Two are sources for social history: [ Johann August] Ernesti’s edition of Noctes Atticae [Attic Nights] by A[ulus] Gellius from the fi rst century ad, and Isaac Casaubon’s 1612 edition of Deipnosophistae [Table Talk of the Learned] by Athenaeus [of Naucratis] from the second century. Along the same line was [Ambrosius Th eodosius] Macrobi-us’s Opera, edited in 1670 by [ Jakob Gronovi[us], which included the Saturnalia [Th e Festival of Saturn]. Another was Dio Cassius, [Roman History], edited by Johannes Leunclavius in Frankfurt in 1592. Th is selection was accompanied by Epitome do[i]nis, an abridgement of the same work, prepared by [ John] Xiphili-nus of Constantinople (1750–2). Th e sixth was Pliny the Younger, Natural History, edited by J. Harduinus in 1685.

Only ten days later the Professor returned for six more books. He selected Glossarium Mediae [et Infi mae] Graecitatis [Glossary of Medieval and Late Greek] by Charles du Fresne, seigneur DuCange (1688), in two folio volumes, and De jure [jurando] veterum, [imprimis] Rom[anorum] [On the Oath-Taking of the Ancients, particularly the Romans] by Th eodorus Regnerus de Bassenn (1728). Another was most likely Ovid’s Signii Fasti Romani [Roman Holidays], though Ferguson did not list the author’s name. In a return to an earlier inter-est he borrowed Arbuthnot’s On Coins. He also checked out Diodorus Siculus’s [Historical Library] in two folio volumes and Strabo’s [Geography], also in two folio volumes.

Pressing on with his work on the Roman history, on 16 May Ferguson took the Opera of Sextus Julius Frontinus, which included De aquaeductibus urbis Romae [On the Aqueducts of the City of Rome] and De strategematibus [On Military Strategy]. Continuing with military history, Ferguson borrowed Aeli-anus [Tacticus], De Militaribus Ordinibus Instituendis [Tactics of Aelian or Art of Embattailing an Army aft er the Grecian Manner] (1552), a famous military treatise. Th e last book that day was Julius Obsequens, Prodigies, which describes unnatural occurrences.

It was near the end of October when Ferguson returned to the library. He selected two of Cicero’s works, Somnium Scipionis [Scipio’s Dream] from Book VI of On the Republic and his Epist[olae] ad familiares [Letters to Friends] in usum Delphini, published in an expurgated version by order of Louis XIV for the Dauphin, as one of the Delphin classics.

In January 1770 the professor chose [ Jean] Barbault, Les Plus Beaux Monu-ments de Rome Ancienne [Th e Most Beautiful Monuments of Ancient Rome] (1761); Giacomo Lauro, Splendore dell’ Antica e Moderna Roma [Th e Splendor of Ancient and Modern Rome] (1641); and Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda


Romanarum [Antiquitatum] Vestigia [Admirable Traces of Roman Antiquity] (1693), each an art folio. Along with these, he took letters of Cicero translated by Nicholas Hubert Mongault in six volumes (1741) and by William Melmoth in three volumes (1753) and Antoine Terrasson, Histoire de la Jurisprudence Romaine [History of Roman Jurisprudence] (1750) in folio.

Th e emphasis on Cicero continued in February with his De Finibus [Bono-rum et Malorum] [On the Ends of Good and Evil], edited in 1728 by John Davies, and Cicero’s Opera, edited by Pierre-Joseph Th oulier, Abbé d’Oliveti (1745–7). In early March Ferguson took the fourteenth, fi ft eenth and sixteenth volumes of the Universal History, whose author is diffi cult to identify, along with Ammi-anus Marcellinus’s History and four volumes of Blackstone’s Commentaries. Th e following day, he returned for Cicero’s De offi ciis [Book of Duties] in Latin, as well as another copy in French and English. Almost a week later he took all twenty-four volumes of Th e Parliamentary [or Constitutional] History [of England … fr om the Earliest Times to the Restoration of Charles II] (1751–62).

In April, he borrowed four books by Onofrio Panvinio, Comment. Hist. Roman [De Reipublicae Romanae commentariorum] [Commentary on the Roman State] (1558); De comitys imperatorys [comitiis imperatoriis liber] [Book on Impe-rial Elections] (1558); De praecipuis Urbis Romae [sanctioribusque] basilicis [On the Special and most Hallowed Basilicas of the City of Rome] (1570) and Imper-ium Romanum [Imperial Rome] (1588). Along with these Ferguson took Peghy [Stephen Vinandus Pighius], Annal Romani [Annales Romanorum] [Chronicles of Rome] (1615) and [Lucius Annaeus] Florus, [Epitome of Roman History], edited by Claudius Salmasius (1683). Ten days later he checked out three more books Scriptores Romanae Historiae [veteres Latini] [Ancient Latin Writers on Roman History], edited by Benno Caspar Haurisius (1743–8); Scriptores rei rus-ticae [veteres Latini] [Ancient Latin Writers on Agriculture], edited by Johann Matthias Gesner (1735); and Tacitus, Opera in usum Delphini.

It was not until six months later that Ferguson resumed his borrowing, selecting [Variétés Littéraires] [Literary Miscellany] (1768–9) in four volumes, edited by François Arnaud and Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard; Samuel Clarke’s 1712 edition of Caesar[’s Commentaries] and the tenth volume of Graevius’s [Th esaurus]. In December he checked out Jean-Charles, chevalier de Folard’s [Commentaries on] Polybius [ou un corps de science militaire] [or Matters of Mili-tary Science] (1727).

In 1771, research on the Roman Republic continued. In January the professor chose the third volume of Graevius’s [Th esaurus], followed in February by Appi-eni [Appian’s] Hisstoria [sic] [Roman History] in two volumes, Goltzy [Hubert Goltz] Th esaurus (1579), which featured inscriptions from marble and coins, and Th oulier’s Cicero. In March Ferguson borrowed Xenophon’s Opera; Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s History [Roman Antiquities] in English and in Greek; [Gaius


Julius] Solinus’s Polyhistoria [Polyhistor], a multidescriptive natural history, bor-rowed partly from Pliny and [Marcus Terentius] Varro’s Opera (1581), which includes studies of the Latin language and agriculture. Th e next month his selec-tions were the second volume of Byzantine Historians (1729–33); [Raff aele] Fabretti’s Dissertatio [de aquis et] aquaeductibus [veteris Romae] [Dissertation on the Water and Aqueducts of Ancient Rome] (1680); and the grammarian [Sextus Pompeius] Festus’s De verborum signifi cat[u] [On the Meaning of Words]. In May Memoirs des Inscriptions [anciennes] [Memoirs of Ancient Inscriptions] rounded out the spring selections.

It was not until November and December that other books were checked out. Th e three works were more varied than usual. One was Samuel Pitiscus’s edition of Suetonius’s Opera (1714). Th e other two were the eighth volume of Speeches or Arguments in the Court of the King’s Bench and fi ve volumes of Vol-taire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770–2).

By 1771, Ferguson, at forty-nine, had begun to feel some unhappiness with his situation. An opportunity for a change of scene came when the East India Company proposed to send a three-man commission to India to investigate its fi nancial diffi culties. Th at Ferguson actively fought for a chance to go to India, leaving his young family and his academic career, indicates his frustration and the reassertion of the restlessness that had marked his early adult years. He went to the library to prepare for the trip, borrowing James Fraser’s History of Nadir Shaw [Shah … the Present Emperor of Persia] (1742); [ Jean-Baptiste] Tavernier’s Travels [Six Voyages through Turkey into Persia and the East Indies] (1676–7); and [René Augustin Constantin de Renneville], Recueil [Collections] des Voyages [qui ont servi à l’etablissement et aux Progrès de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales formée dans les Provinces Unies des Païs Bas] (1725), a collection of Dutch voy-ages. Th e last books Ferguson took in 1772 were the third and fourth volumes of Daines Barrington’s [Observations upon] the Statutes [chiefl y the more Ancient, fr om Magna Charta to 21st James I] (1766). He went to London to campaign for the chance to go, but returned before classes began in the autumn, disappointed because the commission was not sent.

Early in January 1773, Ferguson checked out the fi rst volume of Gabriel Bro-tier’s edition of Tacitus’s [Opera] (1771). In mid-March he returned for Bernard de Montfaucon, Antiquitys [L’Antiquitié Expliquée] [Antiquity Explained and Presented in Sculptures] (1719–57), containing over a thousand plates includ-ing the renowned Portland vase and at the end of the month for the second and third volumes of Brotier and thirteen volumes of [ John] Dryden’s Works.

As usual, since there were no classes from mid-March to autumn and he was actively engaged in farming, he did not use the library again until August, when on the ninth George McLean signed out [Samuel] Johnson’s Dictionary [of the English Language] (1755) for him. On 31 August, Ferguson borrowed thirteen


works. Th e fi rst was [Antoine Galland (ed.)], Arrabian [sic] Nights Entertain-ment [Les mille et une Nuits], four volumes in French (1753–4). Th en it was back to work on the Roman history with Livius [Livy] in usum Delphini, the fi rst volume of [Libri Historiarum ab Urbe Condita] [Books of History fr om the Foundation of Rome Forward]; [Arnold] Drakenborch’s edition of Silius Itali-cus on the Punic wars (1717) and [M. Annaeus] Lucanus, Pharsalia [Th e Civil War], edited by [Frans van] Oudendorp (1728). Along with these, the professor took Ovid, Fasti in usum Delphini; Propertu [Sextus Propertius], Opera; Dacurs [André Dacier] translator, Horace’s Opera, volumes 1–5, 8 and 10 (1691); and [Sigebertus] Havercampus (ed.), Lucretius’s Works (1725). Th e other four selec-tions were Ovidu [Ovid], Opera in three volumes; Plautus, Plays in ten volumes; Terence, Com[edies]; Tibulli [Albius Tibullus], Opera and [Gaius Valerius] Cat-ullus the poet’s Opera, edited by Isaac Voss.

In 1773 Ferguson published the second edition of the Institutes, adding Cae-sar and Cicero to his citations from his library selections, along with his own work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. He also issued the third edition of Civil Society, with the collection of Dutch voyages and Tacitus the only addi-tions borrowed from the library.

On 12 October, his cousin James Russel, professor of natural philosophy, signed out [Willem Jacob] s’Gravesande’s System of Nat:[ural] Philosophy for Ferguson. Unfortunately, Russel died soon aft erwards, and on 27 October the Lord Provost announced to the town council that the faculty had prevailed on Ferguson to teach both classes during the vacancy.23 On 11 November Ferguson checked out s’Gravesande’s Physics [Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confi rmata] [Th e Mathematical Elements of Physics Confi rmed by Experiments, or Introduction to Newtonian Philosophy] (1720–1), translated into English by J. T. Desagulier; and [ Joseph] Priestley, On Electricity [Th e History and Present State of Electricity with Original Experiments] (1767). Along with these books for the natural philosophy class, which was taught with experiments, Ferguson borrowed [ John and William] Langhorne’s translation of Plutarch[’s Lives], vol-umes 2 through 5 (1770).

In January 1774 he took Polybius [History], edited by Caesobono [Isaac Casaubon], as well as [ Jakob] Gronovius’s edition of the same. He borrowed two more books which were a departure from the Romans – [Edward Hyde, Earl of ] Clarendon, History [of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England begun in the year 1641] (1702–4) and [Bulstrode] Whitlocke, Memorials [of the English aff airs … fr om the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second] (1682). Since August the professor had been under consideration for a position as tutor to Philip Stanhope, fi ft h Earl of Chester-fi eld, on the grand tour. By January his mind was made up and he was prepared to leave behind the moral and natural philosophy classes and his pregnant wife


and three small children. Ferguson spent almost a year on the continent and returned to England in April 1775 so that the Earl could conduct some business. He planned to be abroad with his pupil for eighteen more months. In the mean-time, the town council of Edinburgh fi red him for absence without permission and left his position vacant.24 Th rough the eff orts of his friends and the work of Ilay Campbell in the Court of Session, Ferguson was reinstated, which was just as well because in June he was discharged as tutor to Lord Chesterfi eld.

It was back to the Roman history when, on 17 July 1775, Ferguson bor-rowed [Panvinio] Imperium Romanorum [Romanum]; Dio Cassius [History of Rome] and P[ighius] Annales. In addition, he took Pl[iny] Historia Naturalis in fi ve volumes, and the fi rst and second volumes of Plutarch [Parallel Lives]. In November, he checked out Th oulier’s Cicero’s [Opera], volumes 4 through 9; Arbuthnot, On Coins; and what must have been a work by Marcus Antonius Natta, although it is diffi cult to decipher which one.

On 19 February 1776, Ferguson borrowed [Diogenes] L[aer]tius’s [Lives of the Philosophers], edited by [Marcus] M[ei]bomi[us] (1692). Th en he turned his attention to writing his anonymously-published pamphlet Remarks on a Pam-phlet Lately Published by Dr. Price, intitled Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Justice and Policy of the War with America, etc. In a Let-ter fr om a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament. Ferguson’s only citation from his borrowed books was Polybius although he also cited Montes-quieu, L’Esprit des Loix, which he probably owned.

On 9 April 1776, the professor borrowed [Scriptores] Historiae Augustae [Writers of Imperial History]; Scriptores Historiae Romanae [Writers of Roman History] and another book on ancient coins, Antiques by Ezechiel Spanheim (1671). He returned to the library on 30 April for nine books. Th ese were [ Johann Albert Fabricius] De Bibliotheca Latina and Bibliotheca Graec[a] [Latin Library and Greek Library]; [ Johann Matthias Gesner], Rei rusticae Scriptores [veteres Latini] (1735); [Pierre] Bayle’s Dictionary [Dictionaire historique et critique]; Cornelius Nepos’s [Vitae Excellentium Imperatorum] [Lives of Out-standing Emperors]; [Quintus] Enn[is]’s poetic Fragmenta; Jul[ius] Obsequens’s Prodigies; Strabo’s Geography; and [Flavius] Vegetius [Renatus], [Epitome Rei Militaris] [Summary of Military Science].

Returning in August, Ferguson borrowed [Pierre] Gassendi’s Opera [Omnia][Complete Works] (1727); the second and third volumes of Brotier’s Tacitus; [Flavius] Joseph[us]’s History; [Ambrosius Aurelius Th eodosius] Mac-robius’s [Opera]; and the second and third volumes of Th oulier’s Cicero.

His work continued in October with [Henri Estienne] Stephano’s 1572 Bibliotheca Graeca [Lingua] [Library of the Greek Language]; two editions of Diodorus Siculus’s [Historical Library], one by Sebastiano Castalione (1641) and the other by Stephano (1559); and [Charles] Rollin’s Antient History [fr om


the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium] (1739–50). [ Justus] Lips[ius]’s Opera [Omnia postremum ab ipso aucta et recensita] [Complete Works Augmented and Revised for the Last Time by the Author Himself] (1675) was marked ‘to be returned on demand’.

On 2 December 1776, the professor varied his diet with [ John] Knox, His-tory of [the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of] Scotland (1761); [ James] Oswald, Appeal to Common Sense [in Behalf of Religion] (1766–72); [Samuel] Pufendorf ’s Law of Nature and Nations; and the fi ft h volume of Clarendon’s History. He also borrowed Mongault’s Cicero.

Th e professor did not return to the library until 8 August 1777, this time for more books on Roman history. He selected [Nathaniel] Hook’s Roman His-tory [fr om the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth] (1738–71) in four volumes; Livy’s [Ab Urbe Condita] [From the Foundation of the City] in the Delphin series; [Th omas] Blackwell’s [Memoirs of the Court] of Augustus in two volumes (1753–63); and Rollin’s Roman History, volumes 3, 5 and 8, with a note indicating that volumes 1 through 7 were now borrowed. Th e last book was René Aubert, Abbé de Vertot, Revolutions of Rome [History of the Revolutions that Happened in the Roman Republic] (1719).

December found Ferguson making more varied choices. He took [Alex-ander] Wight, On Elections [A Treatise on the Laws Concerning the Election of Diff erent Representatives Sent fr om Scotland to the Parliament of Great Britain] (1773); Sir David Dalrymple, [Annals of Scot]land [fr om the Accession of Mal-colm III to the Accession of Robert I] (1776–9); [Robert] Orme, History of the [Military] Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763–78); Works of Julian [the Apostate]; and Th e History of Caesar by [Raimundus] Marl[ianus] (1601). At the end of March 1778, the professor borrowed History of the Roman Emperors by [ Jean Baptiste Louis] Cre[vier] (1755–61).

At this point Ferguson began to experience major changes in his life. On 21 April, he set sail for New York, accompanying the Carlisle Commission that was to off er terms to the rebelling American colonies short of independence. He became commission secretary and stayed with the commissioners in Amer-ica until they returned, landing in Plymouth on 19 December 1778. Ferguson remained in London carrying out commission work until late May 1779. It was probably while he was in London that he created his ‘Historical Chart, Repre-senting at one View the rise and progress of the Principal States & Empires of the known World’, which was published in colour as Plate CLI of the fi ft h volume of the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1780).

Ferguson did not return to the library until 10 December 1779, when he borrowed Montfaucon, volumes 1, 2, 8 and 19; Livy [with variorum notes and supplement by Arnold Drakenborch] (1738–46); and History [romaine depuis


la fondation de Rome] [Roman History since the Foundation] by [François] C[atrou] and [ Julien] R[oui]llé in twenty volumes (1725–7).

Many months later, on 1 May 1780, he returned to check out Diodorus Siculus; Petronius Arbiter, [Satyricon] [Satirical Romance], edited by [Pieter Burmann, the Elder] (1709); and Eusebius [Historical Chronology]. He spent the remainder of the summer campaigning in John Fletcher Campbell’s unsuccessful bid for a parliamentary seat. On 1 December he borrowed Rome Ancienne; [A Collection of] Voyages [and Travels now fi rst Printed fr om Original Manuscripts, and to which is prefi xed, an introductory discourse (supposed to be written by the celebrated Mr. Locke, intitled Th e Whole History of Navigation fr om its original to this time)], published by Awnsham [and John] Churchill (1744–6); and [Sam-uel] Johnson’s Dictionary.

It was around Christmas when the fi ft y-seven-year-old father of six children ranging in age from about twelve to three was stricken with a paralytic ailment. His family and friends thought he might die but he slowly began to recover. By March 1781 he was able to travel to Bath with his wife and eldest daughter to take the water cure for three months. He hoped to spend his time recovering and correcting the Roman history that he had just completed when he became ill. By the time Ferguson returned to Edinburgh in July he was somewhat improved but still unable to teach. His manuscript was in such a marred condition that it had to be sent to a copyist before it could be submitted. Th e only book he borrowed in 1781 was [Roman] Antiqu[ities] by Dionysis Halicarn[assus], on 7 July.

It was not until 11 June 1782 that he returned to the library. He took Arri-ani [Arrianus Flavius], Expeditione Alexr: [History of Alexander’s Expeditions], edited by Jakob Gronovius (1704); and Memoirs des Inscriptions. His library use was much curtailed and his only selection in 1783 was History of Viscount de Tur[enne] [Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne], edited by Andrew Michael Ramsay (1735). Th at year he published Th e History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic in three volumes. In this edi-tion Ferguson almost exclusively cited editions of original sources rather than later historians. Of the books he borrowed from the library and referred to in his footnotes, only Arbuthnot, On Ancient Coins and Pighius, Annal Romani [Annales Romanorum] were not Roman authors. Th e ancients were Appian, Aulus Gellius, Caesar, Cicero, Dio Cassius, Dionysus Halicarnassus, Eusebius, Florus, Frontinus, Horace, Julian Obsequens, Livy, Lucan, Macrobius, Pliny, Plutarch, Polybius, Strabo, Tacitus and Varro.

In October 1783 Sheringham’s De Origine Anglorum was taken ‘by private receipt’. William Center signed out several books for Ferguson on 11 April 1785. Th ey were the fourth, fi ft h and thirteenth volumes of Jakob Gronovius’s Th esaurus [of Grecian] Antiquities; Antiquities [of Greece], by [ John] Potter; and the seventh volume of [Th esaurus] Antiquitica [sic] [Antiquitatum] Romanorum,


edited by [ Johann George] Graevius. On 14 May 1785 Ferguson, citing the state of his health, resigned as professor of moral philosophy. One week later he was appointed joint professor of mathematics with John Playfair.25

At this point books began to be borrowed without a signature. In August someone took out William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy without signing for it.26 On 14 September, Ferguson checked out the third volume of Voyages [Voyage to the Pacifi c Ocean], recently published by [ James] Cook. He also selected View of Society [in Europe in its Progress fr om Rudeness to Refi nement] by [Gilbert] Stuart (1778). In January 1786, Ferguson borrowed [Vicesimus] Knox’s Essays [Moral and Literary] (1778).

Between March and November 1786 someone – almost certainly Ferguson, given his scholarly fascination with foreign customs and his thwarted passion for roaming – took out fi ve travel books, without signing for them: Frederick Hasselquist’s Voyages; William Marsden’s Sumatra; Anders Sparrman’s Travels; Claude Etienne Savary’s Letters on Egypt; and [ John] Evelyn’s Sylva. Ferguson returned in May 1787 to get Th e Bhăgvăt-Gēēta [Song of the Blessed One], trans-lated by C. Wilkins (1785); Memoirs [of Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars] (1785); and [Th e Elevation, Sections, Plans and Views of a] Triple Vessel by [Patrick] Miller [of Dalwinton] (1787).

In June the retired professor borrowed Plates of Cook’s Voyages and [A Voy-age to the Cape of Good Hope, toward the Antarctic Polar Circle, and round the World: but chiefl y into the Country of the Hottentots and Caff res] by [Anders] Sparrm[an] (1785). Th e Monthly Review for 1786 and Volney’s Travels in Egypt and Syria were checked out in November 1787 but they were not signed for, nor were a new French edition of Caesar’s Commentaries by Turpin and Seneca’s Opera in March and April 1788.

On 23 January 1789, Tavernier’s Travels was listed as ‘borrowed & sent to Prof. Ferguson’. In April Chaufepié’s New Historical Dictionary and L’Enfant’s History of the Hussite Wars were taken from the library with no signature, as was Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece (and its atlas) in June.

Th e professor returned for fi ve Roman history books on 25 May 1790. Aft er he listed Ammianus Marcellinus [History of the Roman Emperors], one of the staff noted ‘All before this clear’. Ferguson then checked out Brotier’s edition of Tacitus’s Opera; Crevier’s Histoire des Empereurs [History of the Emperors]; Dio Cassius, edited by [Hermann Samuel] Reimar[us] (1737); and Xiphilinus’s Epit-ome. In October someone checked out the twelft h volume of Gibbon’s history. At this point one of the staff wrote ‘N.B. all transcribed into the New Receipt Book p. 183’.

Now listed under professor of mathematics, Ferguson’s fi rst transactions in the new receipt book were Voyages and Travels [to Discover the Source of the Nile] by [ James] Bruce (1790) on 17 December 1790. In early February of the follow-


ing year someone borrowed Spon’s Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant; Sir George Wheeler’s A Journey into Greece; and Hawkesworth’s Voyages into the Southern Hemisphere without signing for them, and about a week later someone took Cook’s Second Voyage around the World. In May, Tindal’s Con-tinuation of Rapin-Th oyras’s History of England; Upton’s Epictetus; and Plato’s Opera were removed without a signature. On 23 December someone checked out Athenaeus’s Deisoposophista; Caesar’s Opera; and the fi rst volume of Des-agulier’s System of Experimental Philosophy.

On 1 May 1792, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chenier’s History of the Moors were checked out with no signature, followed on 21 August by Sullivan’s Philo-sophical Rhapsodies and Mariti’s Travels [through Cyprus, Syria and Palestine]. In September Bruce’s Travels to fi nd the Source of the Nile was taken without a signature. In the following year (1793), none of the borrowed books were signed for, including Reiske’s edition of Dionysius Halicarnassus; Smollett’s History of England; Townsend’s A Journey through Spain; and Vossius’s History of Greece.

In fact, it had been in 1792 that Ferguson published Th e Principles of Moral and Political Science: being chiefl y a Retrospect of Lectures delivered in the College of Edinburgh. He wrote that this collection contained no ‘leading thought, or principle of moment, that may not be found in the writings of others; and if the author knew where …’ he would have pointed them out. He promised not to ‘neglect citing those who have gone before him, as oft en as he is sensible of having borrowed his thoughts, or as oft en as he recollects at the moment …’.27 He did cite Arrian, George Berkeley, William Blackstone, Caesar, Cicero, David Dalrymple, Th omas Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, John Locke, Giovanni Mariti, William Marsden, Tacitus, Terence and Turenne, all authors whose works he had borrowed from the library.

Th e following year the seventy-year-old professor made a long-anticipated trip to Europe to check the scenes of his Roman history, but was back in Lon-don by 14 May 1794. Ferguson returned to the library on 13 June 1794 for Graec[ian] Antiquities by [ Jakob] Gr[onovius], [Ludovico Antonio] Murat[ori]’s Opera and S. V. Pig[hius]’s [Annales Romanorum]. Six days later, he borrowed Scriptores Romanae Historiae [Scriptores Historiae Romanae] [Writers of Roman History]; Asconius Pedianus [Commentaries on Cicero’s Speeches]; [ John] Blair’s Ch[ronology and History of the World fr om the Creation to 1753] (1754); [Peter] Wesseling’s edition of Diodorus Siculus [Historical Library] (1746); [Hermann] Re[imarus]’s edition of Dio Cassius (1750–2); [Friedrich] Sylburg’s edition of Dionysius Halica[rnassus]’s [History of the Roman Emperors] (1774–7); [Augustin Bryan]’s edition of Plutarch’s Vita [Parallel Lives] (1723–9); and Xiphilin[us]’s Epitome of Dio Cassius.

Since he was working on a revised and corrected edition of the Roman Republic, his library usage grew heavier. On 3 July 1794, he borrowed eleven


works, only one of which was not about the Romans. Th is was [Th omas] Phil-lips, Voyages [A Journal of a Voyage to Afr ica and Barbados] (1746), a description of the slave trade. Th e others were [Philippe Briet], [Para]llela geographica com-parée [Veteris & Novae] [Parallel Geographies Old and New] (1648) along with a separate set of its maps; Scriptores [Historiae Augustae], with its biographies of Roman emperors; A[ulus] Gellius, [Attic Nights]; [Lucius] Apu[leius], [Th e Golden Ass]; Cassiodorus, Opera; Frontinus, De Aquaeductibus and Opera; J[ulius] Obsequens, [Prodigies]; Maximus Tyrius, [Dissertation] (1740); and [Claude de Saumaise’s] commentary on Solini Plinianae Exercitationes (1629), a natural history in which Solinus borrowed heavily from Pliny.

In early November Ferguson borrowed both of Barbault’s books on the monuments of Rome – ancient and modern – as well as Sir William Hamilton’s C[ampi] P[hlegraei: On the Phlegraean Plain] [Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies] (1776). He also took [Henry] Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779, 1780 (1783–5); Histoire de Polybe [Poly-bius] by [Vincent] [T]hu[iller]; Polybius’s [Historiarum quidquid superset], the surviving fragmentary books of his universal history, edited by [ Johann] Sch-weighauser (1789–92); Memoires of [Maximilien de Béthune], duc de Sully; and Strabo’s [Geography].

Ferguson’s wife Katharine died on 23 March 1795 and he decided to leave Edinburgh and move to the country, taking his three daughters and young-est son, John, who was eleven. He rented Nydpath Castle from the Duke of Queensberry in early September. Since he was still working on a new edition of the Roman Republic, he returned to the library on 24 September. He borrowed Scriptores Byzanti[nae historiae] [Writers of Byzantine History]; Deipnosophista by Athenaeus; [Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists] by Eunapius; Joseph[us Flavius] Opera; Philo Judae[us] Scriptores eloquentis[simi] [Most Eloquent Writ-ers]; another volume by Philojuddes [Philo Judaeus] and [Sebastian le Nain de] Tillemont’s Hist[oire] des Empereurs [History of the Emperors], volumes 1, 2 and 4 (1700–38).

In June 1796, Ferguson gave up on the Duke and the castle and moved to Hallyards, a manor house near Peebles where he could resume farming. Two books were checked out for him on 5 October 1797. One was [Edward] Gib-bon’s History and the other was a new book: [ John Pinkerton], History of Scotland [fr om the Accession of the House of Stuart to that of Mary] (1797).

In July and August 1798, Gibbon’s History; Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland; Sketches by an unidentifi ed author; John Millar’s On Govern-ment and Sparmann’s Voyages were borrowed but not signed for. In October the famous explorer Mungo Park paid Ferguson a visit and, some months later, on 15 August 1799, Park’s Travels in Afr ica was checked out but not signed for. A note below the book commented ‘probably returned’. Ferguson published a


revised and corrected edition of the Roman Republic in 1799. In the new edition he cited Ammianus Marcellinus, Asconius Pedianus, Josephus and Seneca from his post-1783 library borrowing.

In 1800 three books were borrowed on 1 January but not signed for. Th ese were Bruce’s Travels; Gillies’s Aristotle; and Plato’s Opera. On 5 August Malcolm Laing’s new book History of Scotland was taken without a signature. In 1801, at seventy-eight, Ferguson returned to the library on 3 January to borrow [Her-man] Boerhaave’s Chemistry [A Dictionary of Chemistry, exhibiting the … state of the theory and practice of that science], translated by [Peter] Shaw (1785); and [William] Nicholson, Chemical Journal [A New Method of Chemistry, includ-ing the history, theory and practice of the art] (1741). He was preparing a paper, ‘Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black, MD’, which he read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 3 August 1801. (Black was Ferguson’s cousin and his wife’s uncle.) Neither of the volumes was cited and, in fact, Ferguson noted he ‘had little more than heard of chemistry as a branch of general sci-ence’.28 On 11 November 1801, Abbé René Vertot’s Hist[oire] des Chevaliers [de] Malta [Hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem … aujourd’hui les Chevaliers de Malte] [History of the Knights of Malta] (1726) was borrowed for Ferguson.

Th e last two books he checked out personally were [Robert] Percival Out of Ceylon [Account of the Island of Ceylon] (1804) and [Philip] Miller’s Garden-er’s Dictionary [containing the methods of cultivating and improving the kitchen, fr uit, and fl ower garden, as also, the physick garden, wilderness, conservatory, and vineyard] (1803), both on 15 May 1804. Th e fi nal book listed on his pages was Aristotle’s Opera, not signed for, on 20 January 1806. Although he no longer used the library, Ferguson continued to write essays and prepared a biography of Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ferguson (no relation), best known for the inven-tion of the breech loading rifl e and for his valiant death at the Battle of King’s Mountain, South Carolina. No books from the library were cited in this pam-phlet.29 In 1809 Ferguson moved with his daughters to St Andrews, where his sight and hearing increasingly failed him, although his mind remained alert. He died there on 22 February 1816.

Concluding Remarks

In the bibliography to Th e Passionate Society, Lisa Hill provides a list of ‘Sources Known or Likely to have been Consulted by Ferguson’.30 Using Ferguson’s cita-tions and taking into account the books he likely knew, she estimates that there were some seventy-nine authors whose works Ferguson read or considered. Yet of these authors only four are mentioned in Ferguson’s correspondence, and only twenty-three (30 per cent) had written books that he borrowed from the university library. What the present essay reveals is that the list of Ferguson’s


sources is, in fact, longer than we had reason to think. Ferguson borrowed 272 titles over a 42-year period and was a steady patron of the library. His usage was disrupted only by his illness, his trips abroad and his active pursuit of scientifi c agriculture.

As is obvious from his borrower’s record, he worked for many years on his Roman history, which required heavy library research constituting 68 per cent of his selections. Th e ideas of the ancients also fi gured large in his other works. As for his additional interests, he pursued his passion for learning about diff erent societies and – as he became too old and infi rm to do the real thing – vicariously exercised his wanderlust by reading travel books, 12 per cent of the choices he made. Surprisingly, natural and moral philosophy comprised only 9 per cent, probably indicating that the strength of his personal library lay in these areas. His friends Hugh Blair, James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), John Dalrym-ple, Henry Home (Lord Kames), John Home, David Hume, James Macpherson, Adam Smith and William Robertson may well have given him copies of their works. His selection of books on English history, 4 per cent, and Scottish his-tory, 1 per cent, may have been connected with his interest in politics and his pamphleteering. A revealingly human side may be indicated in the other 5 per cent of borrowings, which included such works as the Satyricon, Arabian Nights and the Decameron, serious literary works with a slightly racy (for the eighteenth century) edge. His continuing fascination with books on coins emphasizes his understanding of the necessity of knowing these minted objects ‘which played a peculiarly important part in the politics and economics of the Roman world.’31

In the conclusion of Th e Passionate Society, Hill acknowledges that ‘Fergu-son was a disorderly sometimes exasperating scholar’,32 not only because of the complexity of his reasoning but also due to his ‘bowerbird’ use of sources. Th e record of his borrowings from the University of Edinburgh Library certainly bears out the latter assertion. Nonetheless, it also opens a window on how Fer-guson harnessed his mercurial energies to shape what Hill – using a concept originally developed by John D. Brewer – regards as his unique contribution to Enlightenment thought, ‘his ability to give classical insights a “sociological twist” … bridging the gap between modern and antique traditions’.33

AcknowledgementsTh e author would like to thank Charles Kimball II for his generous editorial assistance with this paper.

– 57 –

APPENDIX: BOOKS BORROWED FROM THE EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Th e books are arranged in alphabetical order by author, followed by short title, year borrowed and the page in this essay in which the book is mentioned. Titles are listed in the language used by Ferguson in the receipt book. Many books were borrowed more than once. Full citations, including the names of editors, can be found on the indicated page of the essay.

Author TitleYear Borrowed Page

Aelianus Tacticus De Militaribus Ordinibus 1769 44Ammianus Marcellinus History 1770 45— History of the Roman Emperors 1790 51Appian Hisstoria [sic] 1771 45Arbuthnot, John On Coins 1769 44— On Coins 1775 48Aristotle Opera 1806 54Arnaud, François Variétés Littéraires 1770 45Arrian History of Alexander’s Expeditions 1782 50Asconius Pedianus Commentaries on Cicero’s Speeches 1794 52Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 1795 53— Deipnosophistae 1769 44— Deipnosophistae 1791 52Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 1794 53— Noctes Atticae 1769 44Bacon, Francis Works, vol. 1 1766 43Barbault, Jean Les Plus Beaux Monuments de Rome

Ancienne1770 44

— Monuments of Ancient Rome 1794 53— Monuments of Modern Rome 1794 53Barrington, Daines [Observations upon] the Statutes 1772 46Barthelemy, J.-J. Travels of Anacharsis the Younger 1789 51Bartoli, Pietro S. Admiranda Romanarum Vestigia 1770 44Bayle, Pierre Dictionary 1776 48



Berkeley, George Treatise [concerning] the Principles Of Human Knowledge

1764 42

Bethune, Maximilien Memoirs 1794 53Blackstone, William Commentaries 1770 45— Commentaries, vols 1, 2 1769 43Blackwell, Th omas Memoirs of the Court of Augustus 1777 49Blair, John Chronology and History of the World 1794 52Boccaccio Decameron 1792 52Boerhaave, Herman Chemistry 1801 54Briet, Philippe Parallela Geographica comparée 1794 53Brotier, Gabriel Tacitus 1773 46— Tacitus 1776 48Browne, Peter Limits of Human Understanding 1769 43Bruce, James Travels 1800 54— Travels to Find the Source of the Nile 1790 51— Travels to Find the Source of the Nile 1792 52Bryan, Augustin Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 1794 52Budé, Guillaume De Asse et Partibus 1769 43Caesar [Commentaries] 1770 45— Commentaries 1788 51— Opera 1791 52Campbell, Archibald [An Enquiry into the]Original of

Moral Virtue1766 42

Cassiodorus Opera 1794 53Catrou & Rouille History 1779 50Catallus Opera 1773 47Chaufepié, J. G. New Historical Dictionary 1789 51Chenier, Louis de History of the Moors 1792 52Churchill, A. and J. Rome Ancienne 1780 50Cicero De fi nibus 1770 45— De Offi ciis 1770 45— Epistolae ad familiares 1769 44— Letters 1770 45— Opera 1770 45— Opera 1775 48 — Opera 1776 48— Opera 1776 49— Somnium Scipionis 1769 44Clarendon, Edward

Hyde, Earl ofHistory 1776 49

— History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars

1774 47

Cook, James Plates of Cook’s Voyages 1787 51

Books Borrowed fr om the Edinburgh University Library 59


— Second Voyage around the World 1791 52— Voyages 1785 51Crevier, J. B. L. Histoire des Empereurs 1790 51 — History of the Roman Emperors 1777 49 Cudworth, Ralph Intellectual System 1766 43Dalrymple, David Annals of Scotland 1777 49De Bassenn, T.R. De jure veterum Rom[anorum] 1769 44de Folard, Jean-Charles [Commentaries on] Polybius 1770 45Desagulier, J. T. System of Experimental Philosophy 1791 52Dio Cassius [History of Rome] 1769 44— [History of Rome] 1769 44— [History of Rome] ? 1765 42— History of Rome 1775 48— Roman History 1790 51— Roman History 1794 52Diodorus Siculus [Historical Library] 1769 44— Historical Library 1776 48— Historical Library 1776 48— Historical Library 1794 52— 1780 50Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 1776 48 Dionysius Halicarnas-

sus History 1771 45

— History of the Roman Emperors 1794 52— Roman Antiquities 1781 50— 1793 52Dryden, John Works 1773 46Du Fresne, Charles Glossarium Mediae … Graecitatis 1769 44Eunapius Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists 1795 53Eusebius Historical Chronology 1780 50Evelyn, John Sylva 1786 51Fabretti, [Raff aele] Dissertatio aquaeductibus 1771 46Fabricius, J. A. Bibliotheca Graeca 1776 48— Bibliotheca Latina 1776 48Festus De verborum signifi cat[u] 1771 46Flavius Josephus History 1776 48— Opera 1795 53Florus [Epitome of Roman History] 1770 45Fraser, James History of Nadir Shaw 1772 46Frontinus De Aquaeductibus 1794 53— Opera 1769 44 — Opera 1794 53



Galland, Antoine, ed. Arrabian [sic] Nights Entertainment 1773 47Gassendi, Pierre Opera Omnia 1776 48Gesner, J. M. Rei rusticae Scriptores 1776 48— Scriptores rei rusticae 1770 45— Th esaurus 1768 42Gibbon, Edward History 1790 51— History 1797 53— History 1797 53Gillies, John Aristotle: Ethics and Politics 1800 54Goltz, Herbert Th esaurus 1771 45Graevius, Johann [Th esaurus] 1770 45— [Th esaurus] 1771 45— Cicero’s [Revised Speeches] 1767 43— Th esaurus Antiquitica 1785 50Gronovius, Jakob Antiquities 1794 52— Th esaurus of Grecian Antiquities 1785 50Hamilton, William Campi Phlegraei 1794 53Hasselquist, Frederick Voyages 1786 51Haurisius, B. C. Scriptores Romanae Historiae 1770 45Hawkesworth, John Voyages into the Southern Hemisphere 1791 52Hobbes, Th omas Opera, vol. 1 1766 43Hook, Nathaniel Roman History 1777 49Horace Opera 1773 47Hutcheson, Francis An Enquiry into the Original of our

Ideas Of Beauty and Virtue 1766 42

Johnson, Samuel Dictionary 1773 46— Dictionary 1780 50— Journey to the Western Isles of Scot-

land 1797 53

Julian the Apostate Works 1777 49Julius Obsequens Prodigies 1769 44— Prodigies 1776 48— Prodigies 1794 53Knox, John History of Scotland 1776 49Knox, Vicesimus Essays [Moral and Literary] 1786 51Laing, Malcolm History of Scotland 1800 54 Langhorne, J. and W. Plutarch’s Lives 1773 47Lauro, Giacomo Splendore dell’ Antica e Moderna

Roma 1770 44

L’Enfant, Jacques History of the Hussite Wars 1789 51Lipsius, Justus Opera 1776 49Livy Ab Urbe Condita 1777 47— Ab Urbe Condita 1779 49



— Libri Historiarum ab Urbe Condita 1773 47Locke, John Works, vol. 2 1764 42Lowthrop, John Philosophical Transactions and Col-

lections 1768 43

Lucanus Pharsalia 1773 47Lucius Apuleius Th e Golden Ass 1794 53Lucretius Works 1773 47Macrobius Opera 1769 44— Opera 1776 48Mariti, Giovanni Travels 1792 52Marlianus, Raimundus Th e History of Caesar 1777 49Marsden, William Sumatra 1786 51Maximus Tyrius Dissertation 1794 53Middleton, Conyers [History of the] Life of Cicero 1766 42Millar, John On Government 1797 53Miller, Patrick Triple Vessel 1787 51Miller, Philip Gardener’s Dictionary 1804 54Montfaucon, Bernard Antiquitys 1773 46— Antiquitys 1779 49Muratori, L. A. Opera 1794 52Natta, Marcus A. 1775 48Nepos, Cornelius Vitae Excellentium imperatorum 1776 48Nicholson, William Chemical Journal 1801 54Orme, Robert History of the Military Transactions of

the British Nation1777 49

Oswald, James Appeal to Common Sense 1776 49Ovid Fasti 1773 47— Opera 1773 47[Ovid] Signii Fasti Romani 1769 44 Paley, William Principles of Moral and Political

Philosophy1785 51

Panvinio, Onofrio Comment. Hist. Roman 1770 45— De comitys imperatorys 1770 45 — De praecipuis Urbis Romae 1770 45— Imperium Romanum 1770 45— Imperium Romanum 1775 48Park, Mungo Travels in Afr ica 1799 53Percival, Robert Out of Ceylon 1804 54Petronius Arbiter Satyricon 1780 50Phillips, Th omas Voyages 1794 53Philo Judaeus Scriptores eloquentissimi 1795 53— 1795 53Pighius, S. V. Annal[es] romani 1770 45



— Annales 1775 48— Annales Romanorum 1794 52Pinkerton, John History of Scotland 1797 53Plato Opera 1791 52— Opera 1800 54Plautus Plays 1773 47Pliny the Younger Historia Naturalis 1775 48— Natural History 1769 44Plutarch Parallel Lives 1764 48— Parallel Lives 1775 47— Parallel Lives 1794 52Polybius Historiarum quidquid superset 1794 53— History 1774 47Potter, John Antiquities 1785 50Priestley, Joseph On Electricity 1773 47Propertius Opera 1773 47Pufendorf, Samuel Law of Nature and Nations 1776 49Quintus Ennis Fragmenta 1776 48Renneville, R. Recueil des Voyages 1772 46Rollin, Charles Ancient History 1776 48— Roman History 1777 49Saumaise, Claude de Commentary on Solini Plinianae

Exercitationes 1794 53

Savary, C. E. Letters on Egypt 1786 51Seneca Opera 1788 51s’Gravesande, W. J. Physics 1773 47— System of Natural Philosophy 1773 47Sheringham, Robert De Anglorum gentis origine discep-

tatio 1769 43

— De Anglorum gentis origine discep-tatio

1783 50

Silius Italicus On the Punic Wars 1773 47Smollett, Tobias History of England 1793 52Solinus Polyhistoria 1771 46Spanheim, Ezechiel Antiques 1776 48Sparrman, Anders A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope 1787 51— Travels 1786 51— Voyages 1798 53Spon, Jacob Voyage to Italy 1791 52Stanley, Th omas History of Philosophy 1766 42Stephano, H. E. Bibliotheca Graeca 1776 48Strabo [Geography] 1769 43— Geography 1794 53



— Geography 1776 48Stuart, Gilbert View of Society 1785 51Suetonius Opera 1771 46Sullivan, Richard J. Philosophical Rhapsodies 1792 52Swinburne, Henry Travels in the Two Sicilies 1794 53Tacitus Opera 1770 45— Opera 1773 46— Opera 1790 51Tavernier, J. B. Travels 1772 46— Travels 1789 51Terence Comedies 1773 47Terasson, Antoine Histoire de la Jurisprudence Romaine 1770 45Th oulier, Pierre Joseph Cicero 1771 45Th ullier, Vincent Histoire de Polybe 1794 53Tibullus Opera 1773 47Tillemont, Sebastian Histoire des Empereurs 1795 53Tindal, Nicolas Continuation of Rapin-Th oyras’s His-

tory of England 1791 52

Tott, Baron de Memoirs 1787 51Townsend, Joseph A Journey through Spain 1793 52Turenne, Vicomte de A History of Viscount de Turenne 1783 50Upton, John Epictetus 1791 52Varro Opera 1771 46Vegetius Epitome Rei Militaris 1776 48Vertot, Abbé René

Aubert Histoire des Chevaliers 1801 54

— Revolutions of Rome 1777 49Volney, C.-F. Travels in Egypt and Syria 1787 51Voltaire, François-

Marie Questions sur l’Encyclopédie 1771 46

Vossius, G. J. History of Greece 1793 52Walker, Obadiah Greek and Roman History Illustrated

by Coins 1769 43

Wallace, Robert Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind

1765 42

Wheeler, George A Journey into Greece 1791 52Whitlocke, Bulstrode Memorials 1774 47Wight, Alexander On Elections 1777 49Wilkins, C., ed. Th e Bhăgvăt-Gēēta 1787 51Wynne, John [An Abridgement of Mr.] Locke’s

Essay on Human Understanding1769 43

Xenophon Opera 1771 45Xiphilinus Epitome 1790 51



— Epitome donis 1769 44— Epitome of Dio Cassius 1794 52

Byzantine Historians 1771 46Mémoires des Inscriptions 1771 46Mémoires des Inscriptions 1782 50Monthly Review for 1786 1787 51Scriptores Byzantinae Historiae 1795 53Scriptores Historiae Augustae 1776 48Scriptores Historiae Augustae 1794 48Scriptores historiae Romanae 1776 48Scriptores historiae Romanae 1794 52Sketches 1798 53Speeches or Arguments in the Court of

the King’s Bench1771 46

Th e Parliamentary History 1770 45Universal History 1770 45Voyages 1790 50

– 65 –

4 FERGUSON’S REFLECTIONS PREVIOUS TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A MILITIA

David Raynor

In the spring of 1755, aft er serving a decade as chaplain to the Black Watch Regiment, Ferguson took a leave of absence from his position and returned to Scotland.1 Th e regiment had seen action on the continent at Port l’Orient and Flanders, but for about six years had been reduced and quartered in Ireland. Hos-tilities between France and Great Britain had recommenced in North America in 1754, and two Irish regiments had been sent there in the spring of that year. Th e Seven Years War broke out with the French capture of the island of Minorca in May 1756, and within a year Ferguson’s regiment would depart for North America without him.

In the spring of 1756 there was a great alarm over the possibility of a French invasion of England. Since there were only 35,000 regular soldiers stationed in Great Britain, and there was no militia, the government took the unusual measure of bringing over 8,600 Hanoverian and 6,500 Hessian soldiers at a cost of over £300,000 if they were sent home by Christmas, but much more if they stayed longer. Th e employment of foreign mercenary troops was not only an expensive measure, but one which some worried might become permanent, while many feared that it would be repeated every time that France threatened to invade. Many Englishmen felt ashamed that they needed to depend upon foreign auxiliaries for their defence. Th e Speaker of the House of Commons caught the tone of the nation in his address to the King: ‘Subsides to foreign princes, when already burdened by a debt scarce to be borne, cannot but be severely felt; an army of foreign troops, a thing unprecedented, unheard of, unknown, brought into England, cannot but alarm’.2 Th e time was ripe for reviving the militia: not as an alternative to the regular army, but as a supplement to it.

‘A Bill for the better ordering of the Militia Forces in the several counties of that part of Great Britain, called England’ had been introduced in Parliament at the beginning of the year by George Townshend, MP for Norfolk, and was readily approved by the Commons. To ease the passage of money bills for foreign


mercenaries through the House of Commons, the ministry had acquiesced in approving this bill. Nobody dared oppose so popular a measure, though it seems that some MPs were not in favour of it. As Horace Walpole observed, the bill to revive the militia was ‘too popular to be withstood; and many gave into the scheme trusting to its defeating itself ’.3 Th e bill was passed in the Commons on 10 May, and Townshend was ordered to carry it to the House of Lords, where it was fi rst debated the very day that war was declared against France. As one political observer remarked: ‘On Monday war was proclaimed; the same day the aff air of the Militia was before the House of Lords. Th e debate was whimsical’; he added that the bill was the only thing keeping parliamentarians in hot Lon-don.4 But the debate on the third reading of the bill in the Lords on 24 May was anything but whimsical: with Lord Chancellor Hardwicke and others strenu-ously arguing against the measure, the bill was defeated by 59 against 23.

Th e views of both the opponents and supporters of this bill were reported in the press, giving rise to a spate of pamphlets and comments in the periodical press on the issue. Th is is the context in which Ferguson, in late November, published anonymously at London a 53-page pamphlet entitled Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia.5 Th is pamphlet records an interesting and distinctive stage in his intellectual development. Th ough Ferguson himself regarded it as ‘a tedious Performance’,6 it was a timely contribution to the metropolitan political debate about re-establishing the militia in England aft er decades of neglect, and needs to be interpreted in light of that debate. His thoughts on the defeated militia bill were probably relatively uninfl uenced by debates within the Select Society of Edinburgh, but reveal, instead, his perspective on a controversial project as fi ltered through his decade-long experience amidst a Highland regi-ment.

Ferguson’s Refl ections on the Militia Bill

Ferguson began by noting how the French had improved their military strength by imitating the British policy of a strong navy and the quest for colonies. Th e British had taught the French ‘to take commerce in aid of their military’, so it was now time for the British to emulate the French by reviving a strong English militia. Ferguson himself had witnessed how useful the French militia had been in defending the town of Port l’Orient against a small-scale incursion by British forces in 1746. Th e example of the French in maintaining an extensive militia, he now urged, ‘should teach us to mix the military spirit with our civil and commer-cial policy’.7 Without a militia Britain was at a competitive disadvantage with France militarily.

Ferguson had his own blueprint for an eff ective militia, but believed that others were debating the institutional structure of the future militia while forget-

Ferguson’s Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia 67

ting how crucial a change of manners would be to its success, whatever specifi c institutional structure might be adopted for it. Th e principal division of opinion amongst supporters of an English militia in 1756 was between those who advo-cated a compulsory universal militia and those who preferred a voluntary select one. And there were subsidiary disagreements about many other administrative, legal and disciplinary matters. Ferguson believed that participants in this debate ‘were in danger of hurrying on to this part of the institution, without attend-ing to considerations which were previously necessary’.8 He therefore wished to bring the debate back to the manners of the age, thinking that most participants in the debate were focusing overmuch on the forms of military discipline to be involved in the future force, as if they believed that military discipline alone were suffi cient to form good militiamen. Here Ferguson saw himself in the minority of those who realized ‘that the practice of such motions as form the military exercise is far from being suffi cient to train a soldier’.9 Indeed, he argued that the militia as an eff ective institution could fl ourish only if steps were taken to alter the country’s manners beforehand.

Not only did he maintain that discipline was not suffi cient to form a good militiaman, but he came close to maintaining that it was scarcely necessary either: ‘I consider every man as deriving military spirit more from the use of arms … than from the stated practice of any motions which we dignify with the name of military discipline’.10 Altogether Ferguson seems not to have believed that military discipline was as important as the need to reinstate a general use of arms in the country. Of course he was not alone in noting that ‘the state of civil policy, and of commerce, at which we are arrived, have greatly aff ected our man-ners’. But he was perhaps unusual in believing that this change of manners could be partially reversed by removing some of its causes. He was not so naive as to think that commerce alone was responsible for the great change in manners that had taken place since the seventeenth century. Accordingly, he placed the blame for the decline in martial spirit more on misguided government policies than on commerce itself: ‘Too scrupulous a caution with respect to the disturbances which might arise from faction, and even our attention to preserve the game [for hunting], have, with other considerations, made our government industrious to check and prohibit the use of arms’.11 In his view the fi rst step towards establish-ing an eff ective militia should be to alter the manners of the people by allowing them to own and use arms again.

In 1756 the people of Great Britain were virtually disarmed. Th ere was a militia act on the statute books since the Restoration, and though it placed the militia entirely in control of the Crown, monarchs from William to George II had not dared to arm their subjects, given that their title to the crown was dis-puted, and instead trusted entirely to a standing army. Th e Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 had led to legislation that disarmed all Scots indiscriminately,


and the memory of those rebellions was oft en invoked as justifi cation for main-taining a sizeable standing army and neglecting to muster the militia. Moreover, large landowners had sought to preserve the game for themselves by passing and enforcing the Game Laws, which were intended to disarm and discourage all poachers. Ferguson was not alone in pointing to the Game Laws as a cause of the change in manners. As the author of one squib observed: ‘you gentlemen gamekeepers have, in your great wisdom, been the means, that those who might be rendered the most useful to defend their country, are, for the sake of preserv-ing the game, entirely disarmed’.12 Ferguson insisted ‘that gentlemen who hold serious meetings for the preservation of the game, would have some regard to the preservation of their country’. He added that ‘the poachers of Great Britain, so much the aversion of our squires, if assembled in a body, might do excellent serv-ice against an enemy’. And he wryly observed that the best way to ‘compute the present strength of our country’ would be to determine the number of poachers that the squires had been unable to exterminate. Ferguson thus urged that ‘every restraint’ against owning and using arms be removed.13 He did not single out the disarming acts for Scotland, as his topic was restricted to the English militia. But he did suggest that the number of Jacobites in Great Britain was probably much smaller than imagined, and that the best protection against another Jacobite insurrection would be to arm men loyal to the Crown: ‘whilst the body of our people is disarmed, and pacifi c to a degree which tempts an invasion, we have reason to apprehend danger even from a few [disaff ected]’.14

King George II was fi rmly against reviving the militia, so it is no surprise that two of his closest advisors, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke and the Duke of Newcastle, were the principal opponents of Townshend’s militia bill. Accord-ing to one report15 of the debate in the Lords on 24 May, Hardwicke ‘spoke an hour; though no friend to foreigners, a friend to a militia, though an enemy to this Bill; it was a violation of prerogative, inconsistent with a commercial coun-try; these were his two points’. Hardwicke clearly scored with his fi rst point: the militia ought to be controlled entirely by the Crown. Th is point would later be adopted by Ferguson and incorporated in the revised Militia Act of 1757. But far less convincing, and far more controversial, was Hardwicke’s ‘second point: this country consists of merchants, artifi cers, and country gentlemen, all to be defended by an army; warlike ideas incompatible with trade; in twelve years, three hundred thousand men would be disciplined, &c’.

Th e plan under consideration would train about 61,500 men annually, who would be selected by ballot and rotated every three years. Over twelve years about 250,000 men would be trained for the militia, with another 50,000 recruited into the regular army during the same period. Hardwicke calculated that every twelve years there would be at least 300,000 men trained to arms, and he regarded them as siphoned off from economic production. ‘Is it prob-


able’, he asked, ‘that the same persons, aft er having been accustomed to arms and idleness, will ever settle to trades, agriculture, and industry?’ To drive this point home he asked his auditors to look to the Highlands of Scotland: ‘Th e practice and habit of arms made that people idle; averse to agriculture and labour; fol-lowers of sports, next of thieving, and at last of rebellion, a more extensive scene of plunder’. Only recently had legislation been passed to disarm them and force them to be industrious. Would it be wise to create a compulsory universal Eng-lish militia and ‘endeavour to introduce the same disposition and habit into the common people of England’? Hardwicke concluded this part of his speech by emphasizing

… that it is to this progressive change in your people, from arms to industry, that your commerce, your colonies, and consequently your riches are owing. What is the object of the present war? Th e preservation of that commerce, and of those colonies. If you turn the bulk of your common people into soldiers, what will become of all these? You may indeed stand upon your guard, with arms in your hands; but, in a course of years, I fear you will have nothing left worth guarding; an untrading, unmanufactur-ing, unimproved, impoverished, country.16

Hardwicke’s point is that commerce and the military spirit are essentially incom-patible in a modern nation, and they can be made to be compatible only if they are kept independent of one another. Any attempt to combine them will inevitably lead to the ruin of commerce. His argument appears to have been accepted only by die-hard opponents of any kind of militia, and could not have been accepted by anybody who genuinely wanted an English militia to be revived. It is indeed a weak slippery-slope argument, and a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, fearing that some might mistakenly regard it as the strongest argument against a citizen militia, singled it out for attack. It is one thing to create an English militia as a ‘formidable body for defence’ against a French invasion, he argued, and quite another to make the country into ‘a war-like nation so as to ruin our trades and manufactures. Th e benefi t of commerce is well-known, but in order for Eng-lishmen to reap that benefi t, is it necessary that they make themselves like their mercantile neighbours the Dutch, a rich defenceless people; amassing wealth and losing all power to keep what they have got’?17

Ferguson himself seems not to have thought much of Hardwicke’s argument, and the following eloquent passage was no doubt intended as a rebuke to anyone who might be taken in by it:

But self-defence is the business of all: and we have already gone too far, in the opin-ion that trade and manufacture are the only requisites in our country. In pursuit of such an idea, we labour to acquire wealth; but neglect the means of defending it. We would turn this nation into a company of manufacturers, where each is confi ned to a particular branch, and sunk into the habits and peculiarities of his trade. In this we consult the success of manufacture; but slight the honours of human nature: we fur-


nish good work; but educate men, gross, sordid, void of sentiment and manners, who may be pillaged, insulted, and trod upon by the enemies of their country.18

But Ferguson did not really believe that ‘self-defence is the business of all’, and excluded from his ideal militia many of the able-bodied men between 18 and 50 years of age that Townshend’s bill would have conscripted. In this respect Fergu-son’s idea of a citizen militia was closer to that of the opponents of Townshend’s bill than to that of its supporters.

Having a reformed militia was an extremely popular measure in the face of continual threats of a French invasion. Th at explains why Townshend’s bill went through the Commons so easily, and was stopped by the administration only in the Lords. As one political observer remarked at the time, the Court ‘endeavor by all ways to quash this Bill and to give as many sly and indirect slaps as pos-sible’.19 To be sure, Townshend’s bill in its original version would have reduced the royal prerogative by giving Parliament a greater role in controlling the mili-tia than existed in the Restoration Militia Act of Charles II, and Hardwicke’s objection to it on this score was widely accepted and incorporated into next year’s revised bill. But his other objections to the bill certainly were not of this high calibre. Besides his alarmist prediction that re-establishing a militia would ‘addict’ workers to arms and thereby completely ruin the country’s manufac-tures, Hardwicke made heavy weather of the bill’s proposal to exercise the militia on Sundays – something that Ferguson, though a clergyman, did not deign to address. But Hardwicke’s eff ective speech did not entirely discourage supporters of a reformed militia, who quickly discerned from it some concessions that they might make in order to get the measure accepted in the next session.20 As one observer noted, ‘the Chancellor hinted that if the number taken from manufac-tures had been only 30 Th ousand, had not Sunday been appointed for exercises, and had the Preamble of 13 Ch[arles]:2nd been preserved in which the Preroga-tive was asserted, he might have supported the Bill’.21 But such apparent ‘hints’ of support for the re-establishment of a militia were in fact merely a ruse that did not disguise Hardwicke’s real sentiments from shrewd political observers with long memories. Th e following year Hardwicke and Newcastle ostensibly supported a bill that would raise a volunteer militia of about 30,000 men, less than half what the country Whigs wished to train annually. But they were really not interested in England having an eff ective militia at all, and continued to do everything in their power to scupper the project.22

Ferguson’s Militia ModelFerguson for his part genuinely believed that a smaller voluntary militia would be both morally and militarily superior to the larger compulsory one that Town-shend and his followers preferred. He argued that a compulsory militia would be


‘inconsistent with every degree of civil liberty’ and, while it might serve to train militiamen, it could not be depended upon to motivate them to fi ght. Quite the contrary. Fear and avarice are not the right motives to form a courageous militia-man; only honour and shame are. Hence Ferguson advocated that the militia should be restricted to ‘men of high mettle’ or ‘the most respectable part of the nation’ who are capable of acting from honour and who thereby deserve ‘marks of respect’. Unless the militia were restricted to them the country would have to depend upon militiamen motivated solely by fear and avarice. But, in that case, the militia ‘would render men brave from a principle of fear, or magnanimous from a mercenary motive’ – both of which he regarded as self-evidently absurd. Moreover, he argued that with a smaller voluntary force ‘more than half the pur-pose of a compulsatory law is provided for’: ‘inferior numbers governed by [a principle of honour] would form a greater strength and security to this nation, than any promiscuous multitude trained to other views’. Since ‘all our aim’ is to have an ‘invincible’ national defence, ‘a select band’ of men motivated solely by honour is the best citizen militia possible, even though he acknowledged that such a scheme might appear to most people to be ‘too refi ned and fanciful’.23

I have been interpreting Ferguson’s Refl ections as concerned with creating the most eff ective militia possible. In this view it is not so much an argument for a militia as an argument for a particular model of a militia and the condi-tions of bringing it into existence. For Ferguson the ‘proper basis’ of a militia is twofold: ‘a general use of arms, and the love of honour’.24 Yet other interpreta-tions of this pamphlet have been put forward, and it has been suggested that ‘improved national defense was only part, and the less important part, of Fer-guson’s argument for a militia’: ‘the militia was fi rst and foremost a school for virtue’.25 However, I can fi nd no basis in Refl ections for such an interpretation, and believe that it would be more accurate to say that for Ferguson the militia was fi rst and foremost a formidable and potentially invincible system of national defence, but to be so it had to be restricted to those who were already virtuous. Th e lower orders of society are not virtuous, and can never become virtuous, so must be excluded from the militia. Here Ferguson may have been infl uenced by those opponents of the bill in the Lords who, like Lord Sandys, argued that men picked for a three-year period of service would likely hire substitutes: ‘every man of property who happens to be chosen by lot will pick up some loose, abandoned fellow to serve as his substitute: and of such only all the common men of our militia will always consist’.26 Th e Duke of Bedford in the debate had attempted to counter this line of reasoning by arguing that it would be too expensive for most people to pay for substitutes to serve in their places, ‘so that it will be every man’s interest to serve himself ’.27 But Ferguson seems to have implicitly rejected Bedford’s argument and to have believed that, unless the lower orders of society were explicitly excluded from serving, ‘our arms must come by substitution into


the hands of the least respectable class of the people’; which explains his clear preference for a militia which ‘excludes all cottagers, day-labourers and serv-ants’.28 To appreciate just how many able-bodied men this would exclude from the militia we need to recall that around this time the ‘lower orders’ of society constituted close to 80 per cent of the population of England.29

We have seen that Ferguson’s recipe as to how England should ‘mix’ the mili-tary spirit with commerce was out of step with that of the Country Whigs and more in line with the position of the Court Whigs who ostensibly supported only a select volunteer militia. It has been observed that Ferguson’s ‘restriction of militia service to freeholders and exclusion of the meanest, labouring classes point to a clear division of functions within society, with one class permanently engaged in economic activity while the other remains free to cultivate its mili-tary spirit’. In other words, for Ferguson ‘commerce and the military spirit can subsist together – if only they remain independent of each other’.30 It is ironic how close this appears to come to Hardwicke’s belief that the bulk of the popula-tion of England, most of whom were involved in economic activity of some sort, must be defended by a professional army, and that there must remain a clear divi-sion of labour between these two orders of society. But the diff erence between the two outlooks is not negligible, for Hardwicke’s England was to be defended entirely by a professional army, while Ferguson would supplement this force by a select volunteer militia drawn primarily from the propertied classes of society. Ferguson’s ideal militia was backward-looking, socially conservative and, as he perhaps recognized, probably ‘too refi ned and fanciful’ for a modern commer-cial society. But there was another militia model on off er that appreciated the economic and military fl exibility of an extensive and compulsory militia that integrated military training with commercial activity for almost all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50. It was this more forward-looking manner of ‘mixing’ the military spirit with commerce that Townshend and his support-ers sought to establish. In this essay I have tried to show how Ferguson’s militia model appears to have developed as a reaction to this latter model. Th ere seems to be no evidence that he was ever converted to it, and away from a select volun-tary militia.31

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5 FERGUSON’S VIEWS ON THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

Yasuo Amoh

On 9 March 1776, Th e Wealth of Nations was published in London. Its author, Adam Smith, outlined the framework of a rising new economic world, and con-cluded his voluminous book with these words:

If any of the provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accom-modate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.1

Several months later, on 4 July, across the Atlantic, the American colonists pro-claimed in the Declaration of Independence, ‘that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown’. Although Smith proposed to ‘the rul-ers of Great Britain’ that ‘If the project [for possessing a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic] cannot be compleated, it ought to be given up’,2 he does not appear to have defended passionately the cause of American independence, or to have supported the rebel Americans. David Hume, who wrote to Baron Mure of Caldwell that ‘I am an American in my Principles, and wish we woud let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper’,3 welcomed the proposal of some ministers in council that ‘both Fleet and Army be withdrawn from America’.4 Hume, however, died on 25 August 1776, shortly aft er the sign-ing of the Declaration of Independence.

One of the signatories to that Declaration was John Witherspoon, an emi-grant Scot born in 1723 (the same year as Smith), and one of the representatives of New Jersey to the Continental Congress. Having endeavoured to justify the independence of America in his writings and sermons, Witherspoon took ‘an active part in the debate leading to the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in the late 1770s’.5 Furthermore, Witherspoon taught a moral philosophy class at


Nassau Hall, part of the College of New Jersey, where one of his students was the young James Madison, who would later also attend the Continental Congress.6 While Witherspoon involved himself with utmost commitment in the revolu-tionary project, arguments against the independence of America were becoming predominant among the leading fi gures of the Scottish Enlightenment.7

As Richard B. Sher describes so vividly,8 the moderate literati of Edinburgh – William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, John Home, Hugh Blair and Alexander Carlyle – were strongly opposed to the American rebels. Th ey loudly applauded Douglas, John Home’s patriotic tragedy performed at the Canongate Th eatre in Edinburgh in December 1756, even as Witherspoon bitterly criticized its pre-sentation.9 ‘Following the outbreak of war with the colonies’, Sher says, ‘William Robertson had postponed completion of the portion of his proposed history of America dealing with British colonization’, and ‘His original plan for a compre-hensive study of early America had died with the British cause there …’.10 In their sermons and pamphlets, Home, Blair and Carlyle attacked the American rebels and called for forceful measures against them. Blair’s fast-day sermon has been unfortunately lost, but there remains his letter to James Boswell, dated 26 Febru-ary 1777, in which he writes that ‘their [the Americans’] resistance is in my view rebellion in most criminal extent’.11

On the question of the American Revolution, Ferguson was opposed to Witherspoon, even though Witherspoon made use of Ferguson’s writings in his moral philosophy class.12 Born in 1723, the same year as Smith and Wither-spoon,13 Ferguson studied fi rst at St Andrews, subsequently taking up theology at Edinburgh, the same university as Witherspoon.14 Ferguson’s views on America were very diff erent from Smith’s.15 However, his critical views on the American colonists were similar to those of Robertson, Blair and Carlyle, even though Fer-guson did not immediately call for the use of force against the colonists. Yet he was unique among the moderate literati, for not only did he publish, anony-mously, a pro-government pamphlet in opposition to Richard Price’s defence of the American cause, he was also invited two years later, in 1778, to accompany the British peace delegates, the Carlisle Commission, dispatched by Lord North to journey to America to quell the Revolution.

As a means of elucidating Ferguson’s attitudes and actions regarding the American Revolution, I fi rst examine Ferguson’s pro-government pamphlet, and in the next section I discuss his activities as the Commission’s secretary. In the case of American Independence Ferguson moved from advocate to agent, but shortly thereaft er he also became an observer of events in France. In the third section of the essay, I consider how Ferguson, ‘the last survivor of a galaxy of great contemporaries’,16 understood the revolution in France. In the concluding section, I observe the diff erences between Ferguson’s views on the American and the French revolutions.17

Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions 75

Ferguson’s Remarks on Price’s Civil LibertyIn a letter addressed to Sir John Macpherson, his younger lifelong friend, Fergu-son wrote: ‘I think Greenvilles Stamp Act a very unlucky aff air for this Countrey. It has brought on a disspute in which this Mother Countrey … has made a very shabby fi gure’.18 Ferguson, however, could not fi nd a means to achieve settlement of the dispute. He continued: ‘We are at once Tradesmen & Soldiers to America. When we bully them as Soldiers they threaten not to employ us as Tradesmen’. In those days he wished ‘that Some way coud now be devised of leaving us just where we were in Possession of all Monopolys with America’. Furthermore, Fer-guson did not think that ‘there is a dignity in keeping aloof from present aff airs & writing only for Posterity’. On the contrary, he believed that ‘what is done for today has more Eff ect than books that look big on the Shelve’.

With the American crisis approaching, Ferguson would confess to Macpher-son (in the letter just cited) that ‘I have oft en wished to be on the Spot that I might shoot at the fl ying follys of the times’. Th e opportunity to ‘shoot’ arose in February 1776 when Richard Price published his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America.19 Immediately aft er its publication Ferguson wrote a coun-ter-argument and sent it to the government. It was published anonymously with the following title: Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, Intitled, ‘Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, &c.’ In a Letter fr om a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament.20 It was printed in London about one month aft er the publication of Price’s Observations.21

At the beginning of Remarks Ferguson critically reviews Price’s opinions on liberty. ‘Th e Doctor … puts Liberty in contradistinction to Restraint, and makes Restraint, in every case, the essence of Slavery.’22 In fact, however, Price considers liberty to be ‘Self-direction’ or ‘Self-government’, and reasons that,

In every free state every man is his own Legislator. All taxes are free-gift for public services. All laws are particular provisions or regulations established by common con-sent for gaining protection and safety. And all Magistrates are Trustees or Deputies for carrying these regulations into execution.23

In criticizing Price’s views, Ferguson asserts that ‘Civil Liberty is not precisely a power to do what we please, but the security of our rights’,24 and he also appeals to Montesquieu: ‘Liberty does not consist in doing what we please. It consists in being free to do what we ought to incline, and in not being obliged to do what we ought not to incline.’25

In his masterpiece, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, written nine years before his Remarks, Ferguson emphasizes the importance of the citizens’ active


participation in the political world. He argues that it is not ‘in mere laws’ but ‘in the powers by which those laws have been obtained . . . that we are to look for the securities to justice’. Statutes are only a record of the rights of a people expressed in the law, and ‘without the vigour to maintain what is acknowledged as a right, the mere records [are] of little avail’.26 However, such arguments as these are not found in the Remarks, where, on the contrary, he expresses grave doubts and anxieties about the benefi ts of extending to wider numbers of people the responsibilities of political participation.

It is of great moment to extend the participation of power and government, as far as the circumstances and character of a people will permit; but extremely dangerous to confound this advantage with Civil or Political Liberty; for it may oft en happen, that to extend the participation of power, is to destroy Liberty.27

In the American crisis, Ferguson came to consider an increasing public participa-tion in the political world as dangerous to the British polity. In Ferguson’s view, ‘under all the defects of the British Legislation, the subject enjoys more security than was ever before enjoyed by any people’.28

On the contrary, Price criticizes the British legislature, and states ‘that no one community can have any power over the property or legislation of another community, which is not incorporated with it by a just and adequate representa-tion’.29 According to Ferguson, however, ‘the Colonies arrived at this happy state under the infl uence of British policy, and under the undisputed right of the Brit-ish Legislature to bind them in all cases whatsoever’.30 He justifi es Britain’s right to tax her colonies on the basis of her constitution. It was his deep conviction ‘that the Americans ought to contribute to the supplies of the empire’.31

Behind the opposing viewpoints of Price and Ferguson, we perceive their diff ering outlooks on the future of America. Price optimistically writes: ‘Our American Colonies, particularly the Northern ones, have been for some time in the happiest state of society; or, in the middle state of civilization, between its fi rst rude and its last refi ned and corrupt state’.32 Furthermore, Price predicts that in boundless colonies, such as America, consisting ‘only of a body of Yeo-manry supported by agriculture, and all independent, and nearly upon a level’, the means of subsistence would be easily procured and temptations to wicked-ness would be inconsequential. Th erefore, ‘they must live at their ease; and be free from those cares, oppressions, and diseases which depopulate and ravage luxurious states’.33 Ferguson criticizes such an optimistic view:

It is the fashion … to give high expectations of the great perfection to which human nature is tending, especially in America … But a republic extending 1200 miles in one direction, and without any known bounds in the other, is still an experiment to be made in the history of mankind.34


What Ferguson most feared was the fate of ‘Democracies attempted on too large a scale; that of plunging at once into military government’.35

Towards the end of the Remarks, Ferguson denounces the Americans for encroaching on the rights of Great Britain, arguing, ‘the dismemberment of this empire will bring us back only to what we were about a century ago … But nations that have been high can seldom bear a fall’.36 Smith, as seen above, had asserted that Britain should free herself from the burden of maintaining and defending the Americans, who did not contribute to the support of the whole empire. By contrast, Ferguson considers the separation of America from Britain not as a necessary step in progress but as an avoidable regression of the mother country. Th us, Ferguson justifi es the British hostility towards the American reb-els, stating that ‘when the cause of our country is at stake, impartiality is but a doubtful virtue’.37

Here we may recognize a diff erence between Ferguson’s justifi cation of Brit-ish hostility against the American rebels and the antipathies of Blair and Carlyle. As Sher has pointed out, it was ‘the traditional format of Presbyterian political preaching, the jeremiad’,38 that reinforced the harsh attitude of Blair and Carlyle towards the American rebels. Earlier in his career, as chaplain to the Highland Black Watch Regiment, Ferguson employed the style of the jeremiad just as Blair and Carlyle did in their sermons during the Revolutionary War.39 Yet even if he was well acquainted with this manner of presentation, it was not the fervour of the jeremiad that motivated Ferguson’s stance towards America. As seen in the quotations above, he had a fi rm conviction that the British Empire must be maintained, including its American colonies.

Nonetheless, Ferguson’s opinion on the American problem was ‘more fl exible’40 than that of Blair or Carlyle. He welcomed ‘a motion for peace, suggested by a noble Lord [the Earl of Shelburne]’,41 an overture that Price men-tioned with some approbation in the conclusion of his pamphlet. But Ferguson claimed that the mother country should not propose peace fi rst to America. Th at is, the fi rst step in forging a peace plan should be not ‘a concession on the part of the state’, but an ‘overture of submission on the part of its subjects’.42 Ironically enough, Ferguson himself later sailed for America with the Carlisle Commission, which would propose great concessions to America in order to forestall her independence.

Ferguson and the Carlisle Commission

When the British army was badly defeated at Saratoga on 17 October 1777, the tide of war shift ed in the Americans’ favour. On 27 October, when no informa-tion about Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga could have possibly reached Britain, Ferguson wrote to Macpherson that ‘we are certainly under a necessi[ty] at least


for our own Credit, of giving that people … a sound drubbing’.43 But Ferguson appears to have become afraid that Britain would not be able to control the American colonists by means of ‘a sound drubbing’: ‘it looks as if no Calam-ity woud force them to Submission’. Furthermore, Ferguson opined in the same manner as Smith: ‘their Submission is not worth haveing. Th eir whole resource for any Visi[ble] time to Come will not pay the Army that keep[s] them in Submission.’ Th en, he wished that, aft er giving America a single decisive blow, Britain could leave the arena with contempt: ‘I am partial enough to Great Brit-ain to wish them in the bottom of the Sea’. In these opinions, we perceive not only Ferguson’s pro-British Empire stance but also his illiberal attitude towards the American colonists.44

Although he had written to his friend Macpherson the words just cited, Fer-guson did not abandon his hope of maintaining a British Empire that included America. On 12 February 1778, aft er news about the disaster of Saratoga had echoed around Britain,45 he wrote to the same correspondent that he earnestly wished the present government would hoist sail to America in order to make a signal to the rebels ‘of an Intention not to Invade their Libertys but of a Resolu-tion to support the Authority of the State by their destruction and at any hazard of our own’.46 To support the authority of Britain by any means was Ferguson’s consistent stance during the Revolutionary War.

Th e defeat at Saratoga shocked the British government. Furthermore, France was about to enter the war on the American side. Under these circumstances, the British government was compelled to consider means for reconciliation with America. Lord North decided to send a peace commission to America in order to treat with the rebels and agree upon the means of quieting the disorders in the colonies. Frederick, Earl of Carlisle, William Eden (later Lord Auckland), George Johnston (the former governor of West Florida) and the Howe brothers, Richard and William, were chosen as its members. It was Johnston who invited Ferguson, then professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University, to go with the Commission to America. On 21 April 1778, the commissioners sailed for New York.47 On arriving in Philadelphia, they appointed Ferguson as secre-tary to the Commission.

According to the ‘Orders and Instructions’ in the ‘Proceedings of the Brit-ish Commissioners at Philadelphia, 1778–9. Partly in Ferguson’s hand’,48 the mission of the Carlisle Commission was to quiet the disorders in the American colonies by repeal of the oppressive acts enacted since 1763 and the grant of a full pardon to all those who had been in rebellion. Aft er a reconciliation between America and Britain, ‘a General Assembly in nature of the present Congress or similar thereto, consisting of Delegates from the said several Colonies, should be constituted or established by Authority to meet in Congress for the better Management of the general Concerns and Interests to the said Colonies’.49


Th e authority of the mother country would seem to have been greatly diminished under these terms. But the ‘Orders and Instructions’ continues: ‘the Sovereignty of the Mother Country should not be infringed, nor any Powers given or ascribed to it that should be capable of being construed into an Impeach-ment of the Sovereign Rights of His Majesty and the Constitutional Controll of this Country’.50 Furthermore, ‘upon the subject of Commercial Regulations’, the ‘Orders and Instructions’ asserts that ‘the prevailing Principle has always been to secure a Monopoly of American Commerce’.51 As for the Declaration of Independence dated 4 July 1776, the commissioners were instructed that it was not necessary to insist on its formal revocation because the British government had considered the Declaration illegal from its moment of promulgation.52 Th e American colonies were considered a part of the British Empire as before, and trade regulation was absolutely insisted on from the mercantilist point of view.

Ferguson played an important role in the early stages of the Commission’s work in America. It was he who fi rst tried to meet the members of the Con-gress in person, and to inform them of the Commission’s proposal for peace. But General Washington wrote to him explaining that, ‘I cannot grant the Passport … without the previous instructions of Congress upon the subject’.53 Congress, however, resolved not to enter into negotiations with the commissioners with-out ‘an explicit acknowledgement of the [i]ndependence of these States or the withdrawing his [the King’s] Fleets and Armies’,54 and therefore Ferguson was not granted access. As Commission secretary, Ferguson worked diligently. We can ascertain from the text of the ‘Proceedings’ that he wrote many of the Com-mission papers and certifi ed most of the others as true copies.

In the later stages of the Commission’s work, Ferguson was busy preparing the ‘Manifesto and Proclamation’,55 an ultimatum to the American rebels issued by the Commission before its members returned to England. Th e proposals in the ‘Manifesto’ were much the same as those propounded in the ‘Orders and Instructions’: ‘the benevolent overtures of Great Britain towards a Reunion and Coalition with her Colonies’. But the ‘Manifesto’ was addressed not only to the members of the Congress but also directly to the various colonial assemblies. In addition, it was addressed to ‘all others, free Inhabitants of the said Colonies, of every Rank and Denomination’.56 Th e ‘Manifesto’ off ered not only a general peace to the American colonies at large but also a separate peace directly to each colony, plantation and province. Th e Commission, in eff ect, adopted a strat-egy of dividing the Americans into separate camps by off ering a separate peace directly to each area. Furthermore, having pointed out that the alliance of the rebel colonists with France, ‘our late mutual and natural Enemies’,57 changed the nature of the confl ict, the ‘Manifesto’ threatened that ‘Great Britain may by every Means in her Power destroy or render useless a Connexion contrived for her Ruin, and for the Aggrandizement of France’.58


Th e strategy and threat were in vain, and on 19 December 1778 the commis-sioners returned to England without any results. In a letter of 9 February 1779 to Alexander Carlyle, Ferguson confessed frankly both his hopes and anxieties:

I am in great hopes nothing will be lost not even the Continent of North America. We have 1200 Miles of Territory in Length occupied by about 3.000.000 People of which there are about 1.500.000 with Johny Witherspoons59 at their head against us And the rest for us. I am not sure that if proper measures were taken but we shoud reduce Johny Witherspoons to the small Support of Franklin Adams & two or three more of the most Abandoned Villains in the world but I tremble at the thoughts of their Cunning & determination opposed to us.60

Th e failure of the Carlisle Commission was denounced bitterly by Edmund Burke: ‘Th ey enter the capital of America only to abandon it; and these asser-tors and representatives of the dignity of England, at the tail of a fl ying army, let fl y their Parthian shaft s of memorials and remonstrances at random behind them’.61 Th omas Paine also scorned the ‘Manifesto’ as ‘only a repetition of your former follies, with here and there an off ensive aggravation’,62 and he stated more vociferously, ‘I consider you in this declaration, like madmen biting in the hour of death. It contains likewise a fraudulent meanness; for, in order to justify a barbarous conclusion, you have advanced a false position.’63

It seems hasty to regard all of the opinions and proposals of the Carlisle Commission as Ferguson’s. For example, the strategy (in the ‘Manifesto’) of dividing the Americans into separate camps had been stated in the ‘Orders and Instructions’ to the Commission. Th erefore, we may suppose that it was not Fer-guson’s own idea but a proposal that he, as secretary of the Commission, issued in accordance with the ‘Orders and Instructions’. Yet Ferguson did agree with the Commission on some matters. Th ere remains a brief essay, ‘Memorial respecting the measures to be pursued on the present immediate prospect of a fi nal separa-tion of the American colonys from Great Britain’,64 in which Ferguson examined the disadvantages caused by American independence:

[T]he fi nal separation of North America from Great Britain and the consequent opposition of their interests, will render the navigation of the Atlantic, the fi sherys of Newfoundland, the possession of the West India Island[s] and even the commerce of India at fi rst precarious and in the end untenable to Great Britain without an enor-mous expence which even these objects cannot repay.65

We can easily see from these statements that Ferguson considered the indepen-dence of America as a detriment to the British Empire from the mercantilist point of view.66 Here the ‘Memorial’ and the Carlisle Commission shared the same stance.

Furthermore, the ‘Memorial’ and the Commission shared similar attitudes towards an American government. Ferguson writes in the ‘Memorial’ that ‘the


people of America in their several states or colonies be invited to chuse represen-tatives, form their assemblys and meet in congress for their common safety, to restore the freedom of trade and in every other respect devise for themselves …’.67 Th is assembly, however, should be under the authority of the mother country just as stated in the ‘Orders and Instructions’ to the Carlisle Commission. Th e American people, Ferguson argues, ‘enjoy the advantages of civil government excercised in name of and under the authority of the King’.68

From these statements, we can conclude that Ferguson and the Carlisle Commission had almost the same views on the American problem. Ferguson, however, appears to have taken the state of aff airs in America more seriously at this time69 than when he was in America as a secretary of the Commission. He writes at the beginning of the ‘Memorial’ that ‘Th e danger and the consequences of this separation are so great as to justify every tryal that can be made to prevent it’,70 and in the margin of the closing paragraphs he adds:

It is however highly probable in the present situation of aff airs that Great Britain, cannot relax her operations, give way to any claim of her ennemys nor abandon a single possession in America …

If she is to withstand the dangers that now press her, she must stand on her present ground, or fall, she will grow weaker in her step. She retracts and weakest of all in her last retreat and within her own Isle.71

Around the time that Ferguson came back to Edinburgh in July 1779, fearing the unavailing protraction of the American war and the expansion of the war expen-diture, Christopher Wyvill and others were organizing the Yorkshire Association, which is said to have ‘marked the fi rst eff ective extension of modern political radicalism in Great Britain from the metropolitan region into the provinces’.72 Just before the great Yorkshire Petition (8 February 1780) was presented to Par-liament, Ferguson wrote to Macpherson: ‘Th at county seems to be forming itself into a Republic … Th e Bulk of the Countrey Gentlemen throughout England I hope are on the Side of Government & Monarchy’.73 But, contrary to Ferguson’s expectations, the campaign spread in an ever-widening circle of counties and towns throughout England. On 14 November 1782, Wyvill, in consideration of the general spirit of Ferguson’s writings, describes him as ‘a Sincere and Zealous friend to the Constitution of our Country’,74 and sends him the proposal of the Yorkshire Committee for a ‘General Reformation’ of Parliament. In his reply to Wyvill,75 Ferguson states, aft er ostensibly encouraging the Yorkshire cause, ‘My own earnest wish has long been, that we had the same Law of Parliament with you as far as relates to County Elections’, but he then adds, ‘I confess that I do not hope ever to obtain it’. As these words suggest, Ferguson did not espouse the full range of proposed reforms. According to him, the beauty of the British


Constitution is that, in spite of its many defects, it can withstand many evils without being overthrown.

Ferguson’s Observations on the French Revolution

On 3 September 1783, with the signing of the Peace Treaty in Paris, the American Revolutionary War formally ended. Th e American colonists won their inde-pendence and Britain lost vast colonies. Although she was on the winning side, France did not gain corresponding advantages from her victory. Th e immense war expenditure plunged France into fi nancial diffi culties and fomented social and political unrest. By 1789 the French Revolution had begun. Ferguson was the only person among the leading fi gures of the Scottish enlightenment who lived long enough to see the French Revolution from the beginning to the fall of Napoleon. Aff ected with severe paralysis at the end of the year aft er his return to Edinburgh from America, Ferguson recovered his health and lived to be ninety-three years of age.76 Although he would not be an active partisan during the French Revolution, we fi nd his observations on the progress of the great revolu-tion in Europe in his letters to his friends (mainly to John Macpherson),77 and in two of his manuscript essays.

On 19 January 1790, amidst many other developments in Europe, the retired Ferguson took notice of ‘a new Republick of France’ and wrote to Macpherson:

People ventured to tell the Court of France that in abeting the Revolt of America they were setting a dangerous example to their own people … Th e Noblesse of France have had a greater fall than the King. It is resolved that for the future there Shall be no distinction of Persons in that Country … I think that what they are engaged in will make them better neighbours both in Europe & Asia than they have been heretofore.78

As noted in the previous section of this essay, Ferguson was, indeed, afraid of the appearance of a republic not only in America but also within Britain itself, namely, Yorkshire. Yet by 1790 he was inclined to expect that with ‘a new Republick’ the French would become ‘better neighbours both in Europe & Asia’. Nonetheless, Ferguson doubted whether the French people would be able to maintain the resolution of ‘no distinction of Persons’ in their country. Six months later, on 31 July 1790, he wrote to the same correspondent: ‘Th e French are too bussy trans-lating their Monarchy into a Democracy to mind the translation of Books’.79 Here, Ferguson felt some apprehension that Jean Nicholas Démeunier, a deputy in the Estates General who was translating Ferguson’s History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) into French, was too busy at work on the political translation of the monarchy into a democracy to spare time for the translation of his book.80


In his Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), the manuscript he was probably writing at the height of the French Revolution, Ferguson observed:

In the fi rst attempts of the French Revolution to equalize the rights of men, a certain though a very small census was required, to entitle the citizen to a vote at elections. In a subsequent appointment this census was dropped; but still those who are to be governed by the law exercise their discretion, and menial servants are excluded.81

Although he did not approve of the Ancien Régime, in this descriptive passage Ferguson refrains from any criticism of the exclusion of menial servants from suf-frage. But he contends that ‘surely the indiscriminate right of every one, whether capable and worthy, or incapable and unworthy, cannot by any means be admit-ted’,82 and he also approves of distinctions of rank based on birth or property. ‘It is even fortunate for mankind that a foundation of subordination is laid, too obvious to be overlooked by the dullest of men, or by those who stand most in need of being governed.’83 In Great Britain, notwithstanding considerable exclu-sion of the people from politics and elections, ‘the liberty of the subject is more secure perhaps than it ever has been under any other human establishment’.84 Th ese statements clearly show that Ferguson, content with the status quo in Great Britain, nonetheless feared some of the social consequences of the revolu-tion in France. Faced with these events, he stated defi nitely:

Where people indeed act by representation, their liberty depends more upon the character of the representative, than upon the form of proceeding, or the number of persons who are admitted to vote at elections; and when this matter is settled upon any footing that is safe, stability is of more consequence than any advantage to be gained by change.85

In the essay ‘Of Statesmen and Warriors’, presumably written about ten years aft er the publication of his Principles,86 Ferguson contends that ‘genuine patrio-tism’ is more important than ‘discipline of army’, at least when it is inspired under ‘free constitutions of government, where no rank is depressed so low as not to feel its participation in the general wellfare’.87 Furthermore, he takes notice of the honour system for promotion in the army, in which anyone will be promoted to a higher rank, if his deeds and abilities are highly valued. In this context, and in admiration of ancient Sparta and Rome, he observes:

Th e French Revolution has enabled the warrior to procure all these advantages in the form of his army … He can promote the private soldier if he deserve it through every rank to the highest. He has devised a gradation of honours … Th at his army conducted by himself should prevail in the contest with that of other nations in the continent of Europe is not to be wondered at.88

Here, Ferguson seems to gauge accurately the strength of the French army and to value positively the participation of the people in ‘free constitutions of gov-


ernment’. However, in the Principles, he had approved not only distinctions of rank based on birth or property but also the exclusion of considerable numbers of people from politics and elections. Fascinated by ‘a fl ash of Democratical lightening, striking the Armies of France’,89 did Ferguson metamorphose into a democrat? Before answering the question, we must examine a second essay.

In ‘Of the French Revolution with its Actual and Still Impending Conse-quences in Europe’, written presumably in or aft er 1806,90 Ferguson investigates the background of the revolution and describes its progress. Th e distinction between noble and commoner had been extremely rigid in pre-revolutionary France. ‘Renown or rank of service, even the crown itself, might give luster but not noblesse.’91 Birth, without character or personal achievement, raised the possessor above the mass of the people, however accomplished. Here Ferguson notes the fact that the French army excluded any commoner from promotion above sergeant in order to keep the army on the side of the nobility.

Such precautions against the promotion of the low-born to higher ranks, Ferguson observes, had a counter-productive eff ect. Distinctions based only on birth had a tendency to corrupt the nobility and to animate the low-born with ambition to surmount their disadvantages. In addition, the ‘atheism and anarchy’ of the day accelerated the decline of the French nobility, and ‘an admiration of wit and literature’ gave the people in general openings to pre-ferment. Ferguson, moreover, points out that ‘Th e court as usual intent upon pleasure only was become weak and profl igate beyond any other part of the community’.92

Aft er observing the decline of nobles and court, Ferguson remarks, in the same way as in ‘Of Statesmen and Warriors’, on the formidable energies of ‘a people that is roused to any great act of revolution in the prospect of some glo-rious change in favour of the people’.93 Here, however, he considers the French people’s formidable energies as a threat to her neighbours, especially Britain.94 ‘France is become dangerous. Th is was true. But the inference that followed, (let us make war upon her,) was inconsiderate and false.’95 Neighbouring nations could not understand a strategy against ‘such paroxysms’, namely, ‘left to themselves they generally break into divisions and waste their strength against one another’.96 Th e invasion by Prussia in 179297 united the ‘jarring spirits of revolutionary France’, but the subsequent retreat let France know its strength. It was the neighbouring nation’s invasion of France and France’s expeditions abroad that strengthened the French army and brought Napoleon to the political forefront.

Ferguson regarded these developments, occurring aft er the revolution, as a menace not only to Europe but also to the world: ‘[I]f the ruler of France were as powerful at sea as he is by land, no state or province could be safe from Cali-fornia to Japan’.98 Ferguson thought of the appearance of Napoleon in the same


light as that of Caesar,99 and he bitterly attacked ‘the partisans’ of Napoleon: Th ey say, ‘he has given peace to the continent of Europe. What peace? Subjuga-tion!’100 Moreover, Ferguson argued:

[U]nder awe of this [French] power they [the continental nations] now cooperate with him [Napoleon] in the reduction of this island, although they must know that whatever indulgence they now enjoy is owing merely to the limit which this island [Britain] yet setts to his empire …101

As seen above, at the beginning of the French Revolution, Ferguson expected that ‘a new Republic of France’ would become ‘better neighbours both in Europe & Asia’. Furthermore he knew the vigour of mind inspired in free states. However, having observed both the social consequences of the Revolution and its potential threat to Britain, he could not, ultimately, welcome the develop-ment of a new republic in France. The growing strength of the French army was a menace not only to Britain but also to the world, including California and Japan, and, in light of these perils, Ferguson thought it important to strengthen Britain’s naval defences.

Concluding Remarks

Ferguson’s view on the French Revolution diff ered from his judgement on the American Revolution. Behind his opposition to American independence we glimpse his mercantilist point of view. Although he shared the moralistic per-spective of Blair and Carlyle, Ferguson did not appeal immediately to force. He wrote a pro-government pamphlet and welcomed Shelburne’s proposal for peace. Furthermore, Ferguson sailed for America, and he endeavoured, as secretary to the Carlisle Commission, to achieve conciliation between Britain and the American colonists. But the American colonists would not sit down at the negotiating table without recognition in advance of their independence from Britain. Moreover, they allied with France, ‘our late mutual and natural enemies’. Th e Carlisle Commission ended in failure. In so far as the American colonists fought for their independence, Ferguson regarded them as rebels, and thought it necessary to prevent American independence and to maintain the British Empire by all possible means. However, in part because Britain’s standing forces had trained and strengthened the American militia,102 America won her independence. Th e independence of this new nation was contrary to Ferguson’s wishes, but it proved the validity of his statement in his Essay:

Th e sense of a common danger, and the assaults of an enemy, have been frequently useful to nations, by uniting their members more fi rmly together, and by prevent-ing the secessions and actual separations in which their civil discord might otherwise terminate.103


By contrast, Ferguson at fi rst welcomed the appearance of a new republic in France, and expected that it would become a better neighbour. Ferguson was unique among the moderate literati in that he perceived the causes of the French Revolution, described its progress and understood the genuine patriotism and strength that a republican government inspired.104 But he was afraid of radical popular democracy, and it was his biggest fear that the British Empire would be defeated by France. However, he did not argue that Britain should make war against Napoleon, but that it should abstain from intervening. On the other hand, he stressed reinforcement of the British naval force against the French invasion.

It was Ferguson’s conviction that the British Empire should neither be dis-solved by the American colonists nor defeated by France. Ferguson’s strategies, however, were diff erent. Th e British army had to defeat the American rebels. By contrast, he thought Britain should not make war against the French army in the throes of revolution.

AcknowledgementsTh e author would like to thank the editors for their helpful comments and assist-ance in preparing the essay for publication.

– 87 –

6 POLITICAL EDUCATION FOR EMPIRE AND REVOLUTION

David Kettler

Adam Ferguson is a disappointment to many of his commentators because he fails to develop the intriguing promise of An Essay on the History of Civil Society, as a dissent from the brilliant complacency about commercial society in the writ-ings of David Hume and Adam Smith. His subsequent publications appear in contrast to be mere textbooks of conventional wisdom and aimed above all, to take up a theme from George Davie,1 at mending rift s in the formerly prevailing, unrefl ected philosophy of civilization which were caused by various audacious explorations of its grounds, notably by David Hume. On such an interpretation, Ferguson appears as a mere pedagogical pendant to Th omas Reid.

Th is has never been my view. My own intermittent encounters with Fergu-son’s writings, although they originated in a long-forgotten hope of clarifying a theoretical moment in the prehistory of Marxism, have featured a series of proposals for fi nding an interpretative frame of reference able to comprehend the entire composite ‘document’ presented by the records of Ferguson’s career. If philosophy is taken seriously as a distinctive kind of structure of knowledge, it follows that we have to fi nd ways of characterizing diff erent kinds as well. Michael Freeden’s concept of ‘political ideology’ is an infl uential current exam-ple.2 Th e way stations on the route of my travels with Ferguson are marked by concepts such as Karl Mannheim’s ‘style of thought of intellectuals’,3 Sigurd Burckhardt’s ‘complementarity’4 and Kenneth Burke’s ‘constitution’.5 In each of these settings, or so I argued, the conjunction of Ferguson’s forcefully stated res-ervations about commercial society and the cautious explication of his eclectic constructive model of moral theory could be explored and understood, thereby securing an appropriate assessment of Ferguson’s work.

Th e present fragmentary exercise is less ambitious. Th e idea is simply to interrogate some illustrative texts derived from the lecture notes of Ferguson’s moral philosophy class, with attention to his revisions in the period 1775–85.6 Th e frame of reference now is ‘political education’7 as a distinct strand in the


lectures, corresponding to the expressly under-theorized ‘history of the species’ with which he begins his course, as well as to the section on the ‘political sci-ence’ with which he ends, aft er an interval of some sixty lectures. In relation to the conjunction of a science of human nature (pneumatics) and moral science, which is covered in the interim, Ferguson treats the fi rst of these sections as heu-ristic propaedeutic, and the latter as matter for the ‘professional’ education of ‘the statesman or warrior’. Together, they constitute the practical interdepend-ence of history and judgement, manifestly reminiscent of the civic humanist method and distinct from his systemically linked pneumatics and moral science. Th e dualism corresponds precisely to Francis Bacon’s own distinction between studies grounded in civil and natural history;8 and the introductory and con-cluding segments, taken together, correspond to the contents of An Essay on the History of Civil Society.

Since these portions of the course take up almost 50 per cent of the total lec-tures, the sample for analysis must be further limited. I have chosen two concepts for attention, ‘empire’ and ‘revolution’. Th ese are strategic concepts in the read-ing of Ferguson because they provide a link between the books written before and aft er his employment as professor, and because they also play a decisive role in the discourse constitutive of Ferguson’s most signifi cant excursion into prac-tical political life, his service as secretary to the Carlisle Commission of 1778. Briefl y stated, the signifi cance of ‘empire’ is the intimate relationship to despot-ism, expansion and the character of military organization, as well as to the design of international trade. ‘Revolution’, in its political usage, covers fundamental constitutional change, gradual or abrupt. In An Essay on the History of Civil Soci-ety, the cluster of concepts around empire serve to articulate the warnings about the dangerous trends within the burgeoning commercial civilization, while in the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, empire and revolution are the keywords of the regretful conclusion that the revolution that culminated in the reign of Augustus was an irresistible but far from disastrous or culpable consequence of imperial expansion.

My suggestion is simply that Ferguson’s involvement in American aff airs con-tributed to a political education that envisioned the possibility of encapsulating or hiving off the despotic elements inherent in imperial ventures and that taught the necessity of bargaining with even the most disorienting eff ects of revolu-tion. I think that Ferguson fi rst learned that lesson himself, notwithstanding the almost farcical failure of the Carlisle mission to the Continental Congress and Washington and his own subordinate and unclear role in it,9 and that he sought to impart that lesson to a student body, many of whom he thought destined for the emerging imperial civil service or professional army.

Th is contextualization is not off ered as an exposé of ideology, although it can clearly be viewed as revealing another ‘dark’ aspect of liberalism, especially

Political Education for Empire and Revolution 89

when viewed retrospectively from the not unrelated standpoint of John Stuart Mill. Th e expansion of the scope of bargaining that I think is underway in these texts, the soft ening of the absolute confl ict between empire and constitutional rule, has a curious resonance at the present time, when pluralistic political con-ceptions are learning to make do without benign premises about manageable common denominators – such as the notably fungible idea of ‘interest’ – in political deal-making.

Th e text below is excerpted from my reading notes on Ferguson’s lectures, interspersed with annotations, in curly brackets, along with occasional nota-tions, in square brackets, recording some feature of a phrase, such as its location in the margin of a page, or making minor editorial interventions.10 Th e headings, in their inconsistencies, are Ferguson’s own, although I re-sorted some pages in 1976, when I fi rst worked in the archives. Th e sequence is based on the 1775–6 lectures, with revisions and replacements inserted aft er the original versions, except for some instances where a number of closely interconnected lectures are replaced and the revisions are similarly bundled. Ferguson’s own language is enclosed within quotation marks; the rest is selective and summary paraphrase. Th e whole is presented in an outline form absent in the original. Some explana-tion is required for the decision to publish materials in this uncertain, mixed format. As for the obvious conventional alternative of writing an extensive sum-mary exposition, it would be impossible to transmit nearly as much information as at present, and the account would be pointless in any case without a simul-taneous comparison with Ferguson’s own accounts of the lectures in several editions of his Institutes of Moral Philosophy and in the Principles of Moral and Political Science. Th e present author and the present occasion are both poorly suited for such a worthwhile, long-winded exercise. My aim is simply to expand effi ciently on my earlier occasional illustrations and suggestions about the lec-tures, especially with regard to Ferguson’s politics. Th is aim also explains why the materials are off ered in partially-digested form. Th e outline organization (eluci-dating my conception of Ferguson’s structure), the detailed notes and excerpts are intended to convey quite a lot of information, by no means limited to the points selected for annotation, and they are above all also designed to facilitate decisions by scholars new to the fi eld whether to invest time and eff ort in the lectures. To avoid excessive fragmentation, the contextual boundaries have been broadly construed, at the risk of some duplication and inclusion of matter only indirectly related to the main themes.

However unconventional the format, and however contestable the academic utilities I cite in its defence, my presentation as a whole is about Ferguson, empire and revolution – and notably about the recasting of his political thought from the Essay to the Roman Republic, as evident especially from the standpoint of political education.


Ferguson’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy: Lecture 14, 1779

1. Th ere are two alternate approaches, Epicurean or Stoic, to the question of whether man is social or solitary: all agree that men are in fact in society, but one group says this results from choice, the other, from necessity.

{Note that the question of sociability is not translated into a ‘scientifi c’ one. Although the ‘history of the species’ is a heuristic inquiry, essential to moral and political judgement, the science of human nature, in the rigorous sense, builds on the ‘history of the individual’, which is systematically introduced in lecture 36. Ferguson anticipates the distinction in John Stuart Mill’s Logic between the richly suggestive historical method exemplifi ed by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte and the rigorous and methodologically individualistic methods of a science of mind. Th e great study of diverse ways of balancing these contrast-ing modes of social thought remains the neglected work of R. D. Cummings.11}

2. Ferguson’s explanation of society. a. Human life is fi lled with diverse connections – family, friendship, compa-

nies, etc.; the fact that man is both associating and political is clear.b. But what is the principle which accounts for this? Some acknowledge the

fact of society, but deny the ‘principle of society’.c. [Handwritten insertion in later revision] ‘Societies may be conceived as

formed on three separate principles.1st Th e Society or intercourse of Rivals, Gamesters formed on competition

and opposite interests.2nd Th e Society of Traders formed on the principle of common or compat-

ible interests.3rd Th e Society of Friends formed on the principle of common or insepa-

rable good.d. It may be a question which principle predominates but if they are all real,

the Moralist can fi nd little diffi culty in making his choice.’3. Philosophical speculators build on the fact that there are societies founded on

love, fear, interest or necessity.a. Families – love and natural aff ection;b. ‘Companys’– esteem or friendship;c. Nations – common interest and public spirit;d. Empires – force and dominion.

{Ferguson’s pluralism encompasses qualitatively diverse types of association; he off ers no commanding paradigm for ‘civil society’, as such. Social order is fi rst of all a function of the ‘casual’ structure of subordination constituted by the con-testable preponderance of power and authority resulting from these variously


structured social relations, and it is institutionalized by political establishment. Th is is the fi rst of several grounds for questioning the centrality of what has been conceptualized as ‘spontaneous order’ in Ferguson’s work.12}

4. Men become engaged to societies however formed, including those that are smaller than the whole: in this sense, antagonism to other groups is a con-comitant of sociality.

5. ‘Hence it is that Man is by nature in a state of war as well as of amity.’6. Th ese are the facts: Ferguson states that they will study the question of whether

friendship or enmity is best in a later part of the course, where the subject turns to principles of choice.

Lecture 15, 17791. Is man born in society, tied to it by inclination and instinct, or is society adven-

titious, the result of force and convention? Th e proponents of the latter point to how force and hostility still play a part in society.

2. Ferguson states that war and amity are both parts of society; society is an object of ‘attachment and confi dence’ as well as an ‘object of estrangement and distrust’.a. Society must protect itself against those ‘disposed to annoy’;b. Only small societies gratify our social disposition;c. ‘Great nations are formed on maxims of expediency or prudence & for

the securing of their members. Empires are formed by Force to gratify the ambition of rulers or to suppress a dangerous rival.’

{Th ere are two important points here. Th e fi rst sentence epitomizes the argu-ment in Ferguson’s 1776 pamphlet against Richard Price’s principled defence of the American rebels. Ferguson insists that the actual issues are practical questions of state policy, subject to negotiations and adjustment, although he recognizes that the rise of a new class of political actors creates grave obstacles in the way of bargaining. His own experience as secretary of the Carlisle Commission, author-ized in 1778 to grant all the tax-related demands of the colonists, confi rmed that the legal boundaries within which such negotiations could proceed were fatally vulnerable to the eff ects of distance, especially when these provided opportuni-ties for a rival nation such as France.

Second, accordingly, the question arises whether in his view even a ‘mixed’ government such as the British one can altogether avoid acting like a ‘despot’ if it has a far-fl ung empire. His characterization of empire remains moralistic, but the reference to rivals appears to bring the conduct within the range of ‘expedi-ency and prudence’. Th is suggestion is made more likely by Ferguson’s reluctant but unambiguous political criticism, in his Roman Republic, of Brutus, Cicero


and the other stalwart republicans. He characterizes the subject matter of the book as a history of the ‘revolution’ completed by Augustus, which he deems unavoidable under the conditions of empire. Ferguson has more than common familiarity not only with imperial problems relating to North America but also, through his prize pupil John Macpherson, with the transmutation of India into an imperial domain.}

d. Th e term ‘society’ is ambiguous, sometimes referring to ‘plurality of indi-viduals’ and sometimes to ‘political establishments’.

e. In any case, hostility and force are no more remnants of some initial social condition than are amity and benevolence.

f. Men tend to locate themselves within ‘separate groups’ and ‘partial societies’ and not with some ‘universal confederacy’; such groups experience confl ict with each other.

{Ferguson is referring to confl icts internal to nations as well as to international war. Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson,13 who have written well on Ferguson’s pluralism, may overstate the case for similarities to Carl Schmitt’s friend-foe sim-plifi cation.14 Bruce Buchan’s recent work gets the balance right by emphasizing the distinct importance of the state’s capacity to make war, while recognizing that other capacities are no less important.15 In his Roman Republic, Ferguson balances his assessment of the brilliant Roman imperial programme of conquest by detailing its crippling defects in the development of economic policies and institutions.}

g. Th e discussion of the fact of war and amity is confused by the determina-tion to base society on either principle exclusively.

h. If we settle the state of the facts, we must beware of the moral problem cre-ated by the prevalence of malice as well as benevolence, even as we prefer the latter for cultivation and choice.

i. Th e facts show that men are not in one society but in many, and that men are rivals as well as friends.

j. Yet one may anticipate the priority to be accorded friendship in ‘morality’ and sociality in ‘politics’.

3. Th e number, or population, of the species, which in the case of the other animals is a source of weakness or distress, is in the case of man a source of strength.

4. Th ree general laws defi ne the circumstances on which the comparative increase of population depends:a. Law of propagation;b. State of subsistence;c. Security.


Lecture 15, 17831. [Prefi x to lecture 15] A more systematic view distinguishes societies of com-

petitors, traders and friends, and these exhibit principles, respectively, of emulation, interest and love.

{Note that competition is linked to emulation, not interest: in this sense, com-petition relates to status. Ferguson is closer to Th omas Hobbes than to Adam Smith on this point.}

2. Th e controversy about the origin and the animating principle of society is generally thought to be about principle, not fact. Ferguson challenges the very distinction: ‘But the question relating to the principle of society and the origin of society is the same. And the controversy takes its form from a sup-position that there was a time when men were not in society. If by society we mean any congregation or plurality of men this supposition is false. For man is born in society & there he has universally remained.’a. Th ere is no evidence for a state of nature.b. ‘Question is not what made him enter into society? But what makes him

remain in it?’ c. To meet the evidence off ered by those who emphasize fear and interest,

one need note the varieties of society and see that political establishments (nations and empires) contain smaller aff ection-bound societies.

{Note that empires – and thus despotisms – are expressly included among politi-cal establishments consistent with aff ection-bound societies, thus marking a distance from the principle of ‘fear’ in Montesquieu, whom Ferguson generally follows.}

3. Beginning with rules to adjust disputes among separate interests, a casual superiority is transformed into government: ‘Th e abuses of casual subordina-tion have led men to think of political institutions. Positive institutions have confi rmed, altered or restrained the powers which arise from casual subordi-nation.’a. ‘Invention of forms in society’ is a main art: ‘inventions are successive and

progress slow’.b. [Note change from:] ‘He is led and determined in every case by particular

circumstances.’ [To:] ‘Th ere are circumstances in every case that aid and that limit his choice and impede or facilitate his attainments.’

{Th e relationship between political establishment and patterns of social subor-dination, as well as the conception of political forms as inventions craft ed by art, eff ectively precludes a conception of ‘spontaneous order’, given the centrality


that Ferguson ascribes to political ordering. Th at Ferguson sees the work of poli-tics as slow, resistant to speculative schemes and guided by circumstantial trial and error does not make it any less an organizational eff ort. A recurrent feature in the notes, as at this point, is the struggle between recognizing limiting condi-tions and accepting some form of historical or social determinism. Agency and collective responsibility are upheld, notwithstanding the recognition of unan-ticipated consequences of purposive action in several of the diverse senses of that protean formula, as analysed years ago in Richard Vernon’s critique of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis of unintended social order.16}

4. Th ere are two classes of government: simple and mixed. Th e forms of govern-ment are four: democracy, aristocracy, monarchy and despotism.a. Democracy:

i. Must be limited to societies of small extent because of the requirements for universal assembly.

ii. Conditions and external circumstances of men must be ‘nearly equal’ to provide ‘perfect equality of political consequence’.

iii. Both conditions, that of size and equality, are qualifi ed because there is no perfect democracy.1. [Written into margin:] ‘Th at state is nearest democracy from whose

sovereignty fewest citizens are excluded.’2. [Written into margin:] ‘And we should admit under this denomi-

nation states in which the people act by deputies without ever assembling.’

b. Aristocracy:i. Th is form of government is defi ned in terms of the ‘Sovereignty of a

select class or order of men’.ii. Aristocracy fi nds its setting, ‘Where the conditions of men are unequal

& where they are easily divided into two classes as Patrician & Plebeian, Noble & Roturier, Lords and Commons’.

iii. Within aristocracy, the divisions between classes may be extreme, though there may be equality within each class.

c. Monarchy:i. A form of government manifest by rightful establishment with the sup-

port of a ‘continual gradation of subordinate ranks’.ii. ‘Where the society is extensive & the separation of ranks is extreme but

gradual in the intermediate ranks, monarchy is the natural form of gov-ernment.’ Th ere is a ‘natural tendency’ towards monarchy.

{Ferguson comes closest to deterministic language whenever he comes to speak of monarchy, which refers especially to Montesquieu’s France. Th e argument


that monarchy is somehow the ‘natural’ outcome of development is reminiscent of David Hume’s views.17}

d. Despotism:i. Th is form of government exhibits a master-slave relationship and

embraces the rule of force, with the latter characteristic also attribut-able to collective bodies more generally.

ii. Despotism is approximated in those empires of great extent and formed by conquest.

{As with democracy, the morally supercharged characterization of the pure form of despotism is almost immediately qualifi ed by an ‘approximation’ that brings it closer to ordinary political options.}

e. Mixed republics: ‘societies that hang in suspense between democracy and aristocracy become mixed republics’.

f. Mixed monarchies may be understood in terms of the following combina-tions:i. Monarchy + aristocracy = feudal state;ii. Monarchy + aristocracy + democracy = British constitution.

5. [Deleted passage]: ‘Th e Formation of Political Establishments has been progressive and slow. Each form appears to have its source in particular cir-cumstances of extent, manners, and casual subordination.’

{It is not clear why this passage was deleted, unless it somehow sounded too naturalistic.}

6. ‘A few particulars relating to the origin and progress of diff erent establish-ments.’

{Ferguson announces but does not fulfi ll his plan to compare the Roman, feudal and British constitutions.}

a. It is an ‘Evident fact’ that societies start small. b. ‘Enlargement is a matter of progress.’

i. A small society (e.g. principality) ordinarily ‘needs no government’ and its people follow those with high personal qualities on ‘great occasions’.

ii. ‘If the society does not greatly extend every change is to a republick.’ (Th is holds for a democracy, an aristocracy or a mixed constitution – e.g. Athens and Rome.)

iii. If the society is extensive, with large property, then there is also much inequality. If there is a continued gradation of inequality with one race fairly paramount, then ‘Monarchy is scarcely avoidable’.


iv. Despotism is ‘scarcely avoidable’ if many nations are conquered.

{Ferguson uses the same, almost deterministic, formula for despotic constitu-tions of expansive empires as for monarchic, at least where there are continuous gradations, implying the possibility of variations in the degree of oppressive ine-qualities in both categories of government.}

7. ‘Mankind operate in detail and do not look forward to the whole result.’

{Th is is another of Ferguson’s frequently-cited references to the social mecha-nisms of unanticipated consequences of purposive actions, which are no less operative in the case of revolution than in the case of stable legal or social insti-tutions.}

Substitute for Lecture 25, 1783

1. Inequality arises through ‘power & dependence, esteem & contempt, praise & censure’. To support the claim that social distinctions are ‘very generally if not universally known’, Ferguson cites terms for distinctions in several languages.

{Subordination is a concomitant of inequality. In a sense of the term broad enough to encompass Ferguson’s concept of authority, all social relations have a power dimension. Such relations are qualitatively diff erent, yet the preponder-ance of one or the other is historically contingent and not a matter of lawful progression or decline. Th is is another indication of the distance between Fer-guson’s ‘political’ theory of civil society and more recent ideas of evolutionary spontaneous order, which are sometimes fathered on him. In line with the short-hand comments made on earlier points, Ferguson can be said to be closer to Max Weber’s focus on transactions of power than to Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on evolutionary selection.}

2. ‘Men of speculation’ diff er as to ‘origins of inequality and subordination’ and the ‘right to superiority in some particular instances’.a. Th is discussion is concerned with facts, not rights.b. ‘Th e original state of man is supposed to be of great consequence.’

3. Th ree steps are required if one is to ‘state and conceive the facts clearly’:a. Discern the causes of distinction;b. State the eff ects separately, ‘whether power & dependence or authority &

deference.c. Origin of causes: original & coeval with human nature or adventitious’; d. Note the variation in eff ects: progressive, stationary or retrograde.


{Ferguson’s organization is not altogether clear. Th e three ‘steps’ relate to the distinction among diff erent origins or causes of subordination (a and c), as well as to two levels of eff ects (b and d).}

4. Th ere are three causes of subordination:a. Physical advantage (physical or intellectual qualities), arising from:

i. Strength of body or mind: strong-weak, majority-minority;ii. Persuasion from men of parts, overawing by men of courage;iii. Voluntary act: ‘Th ey receive a willing submission from those who expe-

rience the benefi t of their direction or their protection’.iv. In all instances, physical advantage yields power and dependence.

b. Merit and demerit: ‘Unequal measures of good will or of malice’.i. Its eff ects are, for example, esteem and trust.ii. ‘Th ere is a species of power constituted by the [superiority of the] one &

of submission and deference by the other. But the power is not assumed & the submission reluctant.’

c. Circumstance or situation: riches and poverty, magistrate and subject.5. Origin of causes of inequality:

a. Physical distinctions original: ‘Th e attempts of Rousseau to evince the equality of the animal man in a supposed state of brutality altogether vain.’

{Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality is much on Ferguson’s mind throughout. Th is work clearly disturbed the Edinburgh intellectual set, as wit-ness Smith’s review in the second issue of the short-lived original Edinburgh Review of 1755–6.18}

b. Yet physical distinctions are nevertheless variable and may be progressive or retrograde:i. Bodily strength despised;ii. Majority strength prevails still;iii. Personal qualities and courage may not have the same eff ects where

advantages of situation and hereditary distinctions progress.c. Merit or demerit: ‘Dispositions’ diff er in infancy and must therefore be

coeval with the species.

Sequel of Substitute for Lecture 25, 1783

1. A summary recapitulates the eff ects of the causes of inequality.a. Power and submission: whether reluctant or willing;b. Authority is unassumed and deference is voluntary;c. Infl uence and compliance;


{Note this distinct dimension of infl uence, which corresponds presumably to the diff erences in ‘situation’. It is applied later to the position of the king vis à vis a parliament that is ever less likely to defer to the king as authority or to accept him as superior in power. Th e evident weakening of the other principles of sub-ordination may enter into Ferguson’s uncertainty as to whether the mixed form can sustain itself.}

d. Ferguson reintroduces the ‘servile’ who give to the fortunate what is, in fact, due only to merit: ‘with such men it is not safe for any person who would keep his rank to neglect his equipage or dress’.

{Every version of the lectures includes some such advice on dress code, which stands out by its amusing specifi city and appears to be aimed at the sloppy appearance of Ferguson’s pupils.}

2. Summarizing the origin of eff ects, Ferguson now remarks that the fl uctuations in the importance of unequal strength vary ‘not by any fi xed rule of progres-sion’.

3. A discussion of merit and demerit launches a digression on virtue and vice.a. Virtue and vice are coeval with human nature.b. Th ey fl uctuate according to qualities ‘most necessary in their condition of

life’.c. ‘But as there is a condition many respects common to mankind, so the

requisites are also common.’ Th ese include benevolence.d. Some fl uctuations are due to interest, licentiousness or mistaken objects.

i. Savage nations are praised by travellers, and there is a strong infl uence of virtue ‘in small communities among men who have a common cause’.

ii. Virtue has the least infl uence among men who are rivals and competi-tors.

iii. ‘Th e history of virtue and vice ably stated would make a curious sub-ject.’

iv. It is important that one does not in any case so confuse the fact of the fl uctuation of virtue (or its mixture) that it aff ects one’s judgement of what is good.

e. To be virtuous, men must be qualifi ed for an active part.i. Qualifi cation requires a mind or temper independent of events.ii. Some have it without eff ort: ‘If such men were always happy in the

choice of conduct, their virtue would be compleat. It is most common in men of dissipation and amusement.’

iii. ‘Men of business’ are too committed to their objectives.iv. ‘In reason’ it is the quality that may be properly said to belong only to

those ‘who make it their object to act properly on all occasions’.


v. Ferguson slightly revises the text which originally speaks of the corrupt times when virtue has little authority. [Revision:] When license and the oppression of power founded on external advantage and force ‘advance in their eff ects the empire of virtue declines. It is nevertheless real and is one of the sources from which government forever springs up in human society.’

{Note the conjunction between authority in the best sense and government. It is important that Ferguson makes this association in the context of elevating the political vocation, not of enjoining passive obedience. Whatever its vulnerabil-ity and faults, government is a manifestation of virtue. Th is supports the view that Ferguson sees himself as an educator of the offi cials who are streaming into the British civil and military services out of the Scottish universities.}

4. Th e sort of inequality based on external circumstances increases with the progress of arts, from near equality, and it impairs the eff ects of other causes.a. One may distinguish the ways in which principles of diff erentiation change

among men.b. Th e fl uctuation in the ‘empire’ of virtue and personal qualities occurs ‘not

by any fi xed rule of progression’.c. Distinction based on wealth or birth ‘progresses with the progress of the

arts’.d. Distinction based on offi ce ‘has an origin, Progress, and termination regu-

lated by the formation, advances, and revolutions of government’.

{If there is no law of progress or decline for the ‘empire’ of authority grounded in virtue, and if the power and inequality generated by wealth and birth increases with the progress of the arts, then the role of government in counteracting social power must rise in importance. Th e political sphere is ever more important as a corrective to the changes attending commercial progress.}

5. Personal distinctions, physical and moral, are ‘coeval with the Species’: ‘Th e subordination and government which results from thence is original. Th is is suffi cient to give some order and form to society prior to any other causes of distinction. Th e subordination of weakness to strength of mind is spon-taneous and unobserved. Deference to the authority of virtue is voluntary or matter of choice. Th e superior has no interest in carrying his ascendant further than it will naturally go. Th e inferior has no interest in disputing it. Th is principle of government is suffi cient in families and in simple companies of men and is that which leads in many republicks.’

6. Ferguson disputes the common pattern of beginning the history of govern-ment with the establishment of something new and for the fi rst time, rather


than as the correction of something already existing: ‘Th is is a pardonable way of considering and stating the ends & advantages of government in general & the comparative advantage of particular models, but false and unsupported by evidence when stated as an historical fact’.

{Note the comparatively sophisticated concession to a hypothetical model as a heuristic device.}

7. Men are always ‘found in society acting in some form’ which they change in particulars but not in everything.

8. He stresses again that though man ‘is qualifi ed by degrees to mend his condi-tion’ by his destination for invention and progress in the arts, he can always subsist.

Lecture 30, 23 December 1779

1. Th ere exist discrepancies in voter qualifi cations between England and Scot-land: ‘So that the List of Commoners or Freeholders bears a less proportion to the whole numbers of the people in Scotland than in England. Th is list is increased in number by the splitting of great estates. Th is tends to give politi-cal consequence proportional to property. Th e lower qualifi cation has the same eff ect in England’.

{Although Christopher Wyvill, the leader of the Yorkshire Association, assumed that Ferguson would be responsive to his eff ort to expand his reform agitation to Scotland, Ferguson is quite cool about the diff erences in franchise that would be the focus of the county and borough reform groups there.19 Since Ferguson nevertheless repeatedly raised the matter in his lectures over a number of years, it is reasonable to suppose that it was an issue among his students. At least one of Ferguson’s students evidently challenged him on the point. In the notes for lecture 53 (as given on 7 February 1780), Ferguson takes time to comment on essays submitted by his students. Th e only paper he criticizes as ‘still defective’ is an essay called ‘Ancient and Present State of the British Constitution’. Ferguson’s fi rst point has to do with the student’s objections to the state of the borough franchise and to the failure of representatives to act as agents for their constitu-ents. Ferguson objects that the changes intended by the student would bring on the evils – presumably of democratic attacks on property – that representation is supposed to avert. Even more pertinent to our present interest is Ferguson’s second point, his rejoinder to the complaint against the ‘supreme infl uence of the Crown’: ‘Th is is no doubt very great. But there are certain limits to the force of infl uence in determining those who have property and political rights at stake. And even if we supposed the will of the King to prevail in England as it does


in France, yet still it is of much consequence by what means the compliance is obtained whether by Force or by Persuasion and Infl uence.’}

2. Ferguson off ers some general refl ections on constitutions and conquest: ‘Th ere is a constitution of which no particular man or particular set of men was the Founder raised upon a casual foundation and gradually perfected by the attention of all parties to enforce what was necessary or expedient in respect to their several conditions and functions. Particularly of the commons to enforce the pretensions of their own. Men even judging impartially in ques-tions of political expedience or choice must be determined by circumstances. Amidst Parties contending partially for their respective advantages the choice will be determined by the interest character and will of those who are condi-tion to make it. {Ferguson resists a reductionist rendering of political aims, notwithstanding his realistic understanding of the circumstantial constraints on political collectivities. Despite the indicated deletion, he does not exclude ‘interest’ as a possible purpose.}

Where the people prevail, Democracy. Where the Nobles, Aristocracy. Where the Prince, Monarchy. Where any two or more of these Powers oper-ate in any constitution, the transition from mixed to a simple or from the ascendant of one power to the prevalence of another may be gradual. But the introduction of any new power is generally violent. Hence the Transi-tion from Republic to Monarchy or the converse is violent. But upon great changes of Circumstances nevertheless frequent and unavoidable. {Lecturing ten years before the French Revolution, Ferguson anticipates his curious and calm reaction aft er 1789. War is regrettably normal, and not even domestic violence is necessarily an opening to chaos and confusion.} Th e Progress of States in extension and wealth are fraught with political change and vicissi-tude. Conquests made by military force are preserved by military government and lead to despotism. Th e weak are subject to this calamity because they are conquered and the strong because they are conquering. Here then all prosper-ous nations would land involving both the conquering and the conquered. If various accidental diffi culties did not suspend and impede their progress. {Th e logic of empire is interrupted by accident, just as the British constitu-tion was kept from following the course of European feudal monarchies by the accidental separation of Lords and Commons. Notwithstanding valuable generalizations, political analysis remains inseparable from the particulars of narrative history. Ferguson can be said to anticipate what Charles Tilly calls the method of ‘superior stories’ for answering the ‘Why?’ of his inquiries.20} And here all nations who arrive at this extreme would remain forever if the vice of the establishment were not suffi cient to destroy it. Military force from extreme confi dence in its own strength becomes corrupted and weak. And


under its keeping the greatest fabric moulders into dust. Mighty empires dis-solve into their original elements of small and disconnected parts.’

3. ‘In one sense the career of fortune is independent of human power. For no single man or number of men plan & execute it or are in no condition to stop or execute its course. And yet the whole is the result of human nature and the actions of men. What is the individual to do afl oat upon this torrent? To commit himself to its direction without any eff ort! No. For if every individual were to do so there would be no torrent. And if men were to do so in every single instance there would be no action. Th e torrent is formed by united impulses of such eff orts as his own. And the direction is taken from the pre-vailing dispositions of men, not from any external or fatal necessity. And every individual is to consider himself as a constituent part of the moving power, not merely as a matter to be moved or disposed of by another. It would be absurd to acquiesce in any defect because defects are real. Or to decline any advantage because those that we choose may not be obtained. Human aff airs are mixed and it is the object of man to hasten and increase the good, to retard and diminish the evil. It is not even in the power of man to refrain from act-ing this part to the amount of his conception. He pleads fate sometimes to excuse his not doing what he is otherwise averse to attempt. Th e object of this place however is to state facts, not to point out objects of choice. Th ese however intrude themselves whenever the materials from which they arise are presented. And it is of moment to remember that facts are enumerated and particulars brought under review for the purpose making us acquainted with the fi eld on which judgment and choice are to be exercised hereaft er.’

{Note the metaphor of the fl owing stream; it recurs in Ferguson’s discussion of revolution in his fi nal lecture. Th at application distances the metaphor from ‘spontaneous order’. Once again, it is important to distinguish between ‘unan-ticipated consequences’ and ‘spontaneous order’, which is merely one among a number of types of unintended outcomes. Th e choices of greatest interest to Ferguson are political choices and the outcomes of greatest importance are prac-tical constitutions.}

4. ‘End of History’ [in margin]: ‘To be well versed in the manner and genius of human conduct in what relates to commerce, war, and politics is to know mankind and possess the principal elements of the Statesman or the Warriors Profession’.

{Note that this professional training, the objective of the segment dealing with history of the species, does not in itself require the ‘science’ that derives from the history of the individual. Th e more generic pedagogical goals, for students with diff erent aims, are laid out under the succeeding point.}


5. ‘Manner of proceeding in this place’:a. To prompt and to assist those who are fi rst forming ‘habits of inquiry and

disquisition’ and to identify the ‘preferable object’ and the right road to those who have such habits.

b. At the outset, one must learn some things by rote, but what counts are ‘habits of thinking’.

c. Th e exertion of mind is necessary to acquire force of mind.

{Ferguson here off ers a rare refl ection on his objectives in teaching, implicitly distinguishing the ‘manner of proceeding’ in the classroom from the conduct that would be (more) appropriate in some other place.21 Since force of mind is one of the physical sources of power, Ferguson’s threefold programme can stand as a curious enactment of the Baconian motto that knowledge is power. In fact, Ferguson elsewhere nods in the direction of the more usual construction of that formula, where he speaks of science as a way to improve art, which enhances command. Th at Ferguson most oft en does not think of the statesman’s or war-rior’s professional qualifi cations in this instrumental way does not distinguish him from Bacon himself, whose essays and civil histories are similarly linked to judgement of a diff erent kind.}

d. One must commit one’s thoughts to writing and write essays for submis-sion.

Lecture 92, 12 April 1776

1. ‘Th e profi t of commerce to the state is the accumulation of commodities resulting from the encouragement of industry.’a. We distinguish foreign from internal trade. b. [Margin, in later handwriting:] ‘If every trade could be carried on between

the subjects of the same state, it would be the most advantageous.’ [Mar-ginal notes press the point] Th e importance of trade between ‘contiguous’ husbandman and tradesman, over against the ‘false idea of profi t, which is supposed to arise from foreign trade alone’.

c. Th e larger the state the less the external trade: e.g. the Roman Empire and China.

{Th is curious preference for autarchy, one of several indications of Ferguson’s dif-fi culties with Adam Smith’s priorities, has an unexpected sequel in the citation of the Roman Empire and China as examples of states that meet this desidera-tum. Th e latter remark is especially striking since Ferguson criticizes the Roman Empire for its failure to develop a productive economy and he takes China, in the Essay, as the model of the worst fate for a purely commercial society.}


d. Th e profi ts of foreign trade are mutual. [Later qualifi cation: ‘but not always’.]

e. Th ere is a diff erence between the balance of trade measured by price and that measured by value. Th e balance is properly to be taken from the latter, as well as the balance of price.

2. On the uses of money in domestic and international trade. [Section crossed out in later ink.]a. Bills of credit instituted to lessen the need to import money for domestic

transactions and to save wear and tear. Money enables the extension of credit and is useful ‘to an industrious and thriving people’ but it is ‘perni-cious to [the] spendthrift ’.

b. In international trade, the balance must be righted by money, which is val-ued by international standards of metallic purity. Bills of exchange may also serve.

c. A devaluation of currency occurs when a nation has an unfavourable bal-ance of price, because of cost to creditor of securing payment where there is no bill of exchange.

Substitute for Lecture 97, 21 April 1783

1. Political establishments as a ‘fortress’ under which there is political and civil liberty. Th ey need entail no sacrifi ce of ‘liberty’. [In margin: ‘Consent’.]

2. Happiness resides in character and it is ‘not the eff ect of external circumstances or the gift of one man to another. Nevertheless as men are variously formed in the school of society. Th is happiness or misery may sometimes be traced to the establishments of their country.’a. [Margin:] ‘Th e state of society whether happy or wretched is external to

every individual. At the same time the character of the individual is the element of which the happiness of society is formed.’

b. To the citizen, the love of mankind is the love of country: ‘Every virtue may spring from this, and an ardour in the cause of our country whet the understanding, give application to serious aff airs. Courage and elevation of mind.’

c. Aff ectionate regard for parental provision of justice. d. ‘Men are gained by confi dence & derive elevation of mind from engage-

ment in the pursuit of noble objects.’e. ‘Th ey love situations where they are properly occupied.’f. In summing up the relations between these constituents of happiness and

‘the establishments of the country’, Ferguson observes that the former are ‘Tendencies of the greatest moment in the opposite extremes of political freedom and servitude’.


3. With this understanding of safety and happiness we can distinguish ‘prefer-able establishments and form principles of political conduct’.

4. ‘Men have their sects in Politics as well as religion. Th ey are sometimes par-tial, sometimes adverse to the forms of their own country. Th ey espouse as the cause of mankind what they wish for themselves consider fi tting for their own country. {Th e deletion represents a small change, consistent with earlier resistance to conventional interest-charged expressions. ‘Civic virtue’ is never wholly abandoned.} Our choice in every instance must be directed by the character and circumstance of the people. Th e character of the people in this view of it results from the degree of virtue or other principle on which they may be governed. Th eir circumstances are determined by their casual subor-dination & the extent of empire.’

{Th e extent of empire remains a key variable even in the most compressed state-ment of the overall thesis on the need to qualify optimal political preferences in the light of circumstances. Th e other variables, listed below, are a mix of social and cultural factors.}

a. Degree of equality.b. Degree of admiration for equality.

{Note this interesting new ‘ideological’ criterion, a subjective element to go with his more usual objective circumstances.}

c. ‘Governed’ by consciousness of virtue, honour or fear.d. A small population or a larger one that is either collected in towns or vil-

lages or spread over extensive territories.5. Four ‘cases’ of contrasting confi gurations: ‘But every supposed variation in the

case requires or recommends a diff erent choice’:a. A small population, ‘nearly equal’, collected and ‘perfectly virtuous’, points

to democracy;b. A distinction of classes, and ‘concessions of inequality that accompany it’,

points to aristocracy or mixed government;c. A larger extent of territory, a diff erentiated gradation of ranks and the prin-

ciple of honour point to monarchy;d. ‘Still greater territorial extent, vice and profl igacy require the government

of force and serve as an apology for despotism. But it is probable that men are nowhere so bad as to render absolute servitude the only state of which they are susceptible.’


{In this case, extent of empire is not expressly included, yet, as in earlier dis-cussions, the condemnation of despotism is made subject to being a matter of degree.}


1. ‘Th at political institutions procure the safety of the people in proportion as they are adapted to the circumstances and character of the people.’a. ‘Th ere are zealots for every form’, but the variety of governments remains

to be recognized.b. Th ese are to be related, most importantly, to the specifi c character of the

‘casual distinction of ranks’ and to the extent of the domain.2. ‘As the propriety of political establishments is to be decided hypothetically we

may refer the whole subject to four cases.’a. Th e form of democracy requires equality, small extent and perfection of

virtue. i. ‘Th ey who wish for the form ought likewise to wish for the condition &

both together make a noble object of choice … but to contend for the form … in any case to which it is not accommodated would be highly dangerous. Great Britain in particular is far removed from this case.’ {Th is deletion is interesting both because Ferguson considered making the point explicit and because he then decided against raising the ques-tion.}

ii. ‘Th is case nevertheless must be admitted as the ideal point of perfection from which every deviation is defect in human aff airs.’

iii. Th is ideal is ‘Nowhere realized’, for there is a ‘mixed condition of men, &c’.

iv. Given these diversities, ‘Choice must vary’.b. In general, given a mixed character, various degrees of adventitious distinc-

tions, and diverse extents, we must choose best among aristocracy, mixed republic or monarchy.

c. Monarchy: ‘Where the principle of honour or the love of distinction comes in place of virtue or the love of equality, a continued gradation of ranks, territory of considerable extent. Such circumstances lead to monarchy and render it not only expedient but necessary’ [Ferguson’s original empha-sis].i. ‘Occasional struggles for an aristocratic or republican mixture or for des-

potism constitute a state of violence or short duration.ii. Th e state ever settles in an acknowledgment of supreme monarchical

authority and the King ever obliged to reign according to fi xed and determinate laws.’


d. Th e case of a perfectly vicious people without any distinctions:i. Th is is imaginary, like the fi rst case.ii. Th e vicious must be restrained and since they can be restrained only by

fear, force must be used.iii. ‘To govern territories of great extent tho’ inhabitated by ordinary men

discretionary powers are necessary. In extensive empires secrecy and promptitude are so necessary as to require discretionary and irresist-ible power. Empires are formed and preserved only by military force’ [Ferguson’s emphases].

iv. Th e question of discretionary power and force raises the question of whether there are any checks: religion and manners are the only ones possible.

v. ‘Occasional applications of discretionary power and force may be neces-sary but continued despotism is never to be considered as an object of choice but the last stage of corruption incident to mankind and contin-ued discretion may be necessary in some instances, but it is certainly not an object of choice where it is not so.’

{Notwithstanding the highly moralistic setting of this fourth ‘case’, Ferguson surprisingly turns it into a discussion of functional requisites of large empires and the problem of emergency powers, coming to a conclusion that can almost be labelled wistful.}


1. Two extreme cases represent situations towards which aff airs may tend but never fully arrive: one shows what to aim for, the other, what to shun.a. Under conditions of virtue and a concentrated small population, democ-

racy is best.b. Where there is vice, ‘coalitions’ may serve as ‘antidote’ because they extend

‘that peace which is the eff ect of political establishments’.

{Th is tends to confi rm the emphasis on pluralist bargaining in some recent scholarship.22}

i. ‘But when carried too far, they may introduce worse evil and continual state of war between the governing and the governed.’

ii. Th is would be a war between the injurious and the injured, ‘even when the latter does not resist’.

c. A master of despotism becomes a prisoner of the very army he uses for oppression.


d. Force is a constituent of all governments, but ‘it is extremely absurd to con-tend for despotism as the preferable model’.

2. We should turn to the maxim that the distribution of offi ces should be adapted to the constitution.

3. ‘Revolution consists in transferring legislation’, but it may be gradual nonethe-less.

4. Sovereign power comprises legislation, jurisdiction and execution: these func-tions should be separate.a. A judge should (1) know law and (2) ‘be interested in the justice of his

decree’.i. In the administration of justice, it is best to combine members of the

people with offi cials, who may instruct them. ii. ‘Revolutions prepared by transferring the judicature’ [in margin].

{Two unexpected remarks on revolution, although the former would follow from a Lockeian analysis. Th e second remark corresponds to an observation in Ferguson’s Roman Republic, where he emphasizes the shift in jurisdictions as an element in the ‘revolution’ terminating the republic.23}

b. Th e executive wields the force of the state, for the preservation of society, by giving eff ect to laws and against foreign enemies.i. Distinguish monarchical and republican organizations.ii. Power most subject to abuse in executive.

5. ‘Th e safety of the people depends greatly on the choice & constitution of the military force.’

{Th is passage requires amplifi cation by reference to an earlier lecture, below, in which Ferguson’s advocacy of the militia is relativized.}

Lecture 89, 9 April 1776 [Th is lecture is also expressly dated 1780 and 1784. Th ere are corrections in another hand, which could be that of Dugald Stewart, who was Ferguson’s suc-cessor, although resemblance to other Stewart samples is not clear.]

{1. Ferguson returns to the theme of defence.a. ‘When the abilities of the statesman and those of the warrior are separated,

the statesman becomes a clerk and a babbler and the soldier a mere gladi-ator or executioner.’

b. Th ere is some necessity that requires professionals: ‘In the advanced state of arts, commerce and national enlargement there arises a species of military service for which the labourer & the trader wants leisure and in which the persons of rank have not suffi cient inducements of honour. Th ere is an


ordinary garrison duty. Distant settlements to be maintained and distant wars to be supported.’

c. Yet there is a ‘Public loss’ if a tradesman is taken from his workshop or a statesman from his department and ‘no honour to be won for the man of rank’.

d. A professional army ‘must be formed’, with appeal to highest possible ranks because the service performed by this profession is very honourable.

e. People and gentlemen to be trained for self-defence: they will overcome inferiority to professionals in case of necessity: discipline can be acquired and strong motivation will be present.

f. A defence policy must not ‘suff er the great body of the people to become less warlike or more corrupted than necessary’.

g. ‘Th is is a corruption to which nations in the advanced ages of commerce & separate professions are extremely exposed. Th e proper cautions against it are therefore a principal object in the policy of refl ection if ever such a policy makes any progress with mankind.’}

Lecture 100, 20 April 1776

1. All cases under this category [states of (i) no small extent or (ii) large common virtue] suppose enough virtue that some at least among people are ‘worthy of a share in the government’.a. ‘Under the term virtue, in this case, we understand such a sense of pub-

lic consideration as lead men to the necessary sacrifi ces of private interest. Even of vanity and ambition.’

b. If this supposition does not apply, then ‘we must suppose them to be gov-erned by the sense of personal honour or by mere motives of fear’.

2. Th ird case [(iii) monarchical]. a. ‘Th ey consider every action as it raises or degrades, never merely as it is just

human or due to the public.’b. ‘Place of every person is marked out by a distinction from those above and

those below.’c. ‘Gradations … naturally terminate in monarchy.’d. Th e King is the ‘center of honour’.e. Contrast conduct under these conditions with republican virtue.f. ‘Th e character of the people … disqualify [some] … and fi t [others]’ for

military or other political function. g. ‘Extent … makes [monarchy] … still more necessary.’ h. ‘Even select numbers brought from a distance can have no common max-

ims of conduct.’


i. But a king ‘is confi ned by insurmountable bounds to what is honourable for himself and his subjects’.

3. Fourth case [(iv) despotical].a. ‘Government appears to require councils more arbitrary, prompt and secret

than those of a monarchy.’b. ‘Prompt and terrifying punishment’ are its principal engines.c. ‘We must lament the growth of empire that appears to render despotic gov-

ernments in some cases necessary.’d. Otherwise, there is no perfect vice and no justifi cation for despotism.e. Despotism opens the possibility of providing for the ‘safety of people’ even

in great empires: ‘Th e interests of men properly connected with their duty have been made preservative of order and public justice’.

f. One must distinguish ‘times of occasional distractions and tumults’ from periods of ‘ordinary calm’; the former requires arbitrariness everywhere, but the latter allows safeguards even in great empires.

g. ‘Continual despotism is an accident and an usurpation not necessarily con-nected with the fortunes of mankind in such a manner that it is not always to be guarded against and avoided.’

{Th is is the strongest statement of what might be called the relativized judge-ment of despotic rule. Note that the lecture takes place in April of 1776, which is a year aft er Lexington and Concord, and a month aft er the evacuation of Bos-ton.}

Substitute Lecture 100, 24 April 1783

1. Executive power is delegated in republics. Monarchical power has advantages in emergency, and for dispatch and secrecy.a. Th e king performs the ‘respectable and amiable’ tasks and delegates the

remainder.b. It is important that the sovereign retain command over military force.

[Margin:] ‘Revolutions prepared and eff ected by transferring the military power.’

{Here Ferguson suggests a third condition of revolution, to go with earlier cri-teria of shift s in legislative and judicial functions. Note that the revolutionary outcomes are all examples of unintended consequences of actions taken for reasons remote from revolutionary objectives. Arguably, the passages in Fergu-son that are oft en cited as anticipations of the theory of spontaneous order are expressions of this political truism.24}


c. A fatality of error in command of force: ‘Power and privilege are always ultimately forfeited’ if the sovereign is not in charge.

2. Ferguson disputes Alexander Pope’s maxim [‘For forms of government let fools contest; / Whate’er is best administered is best’25].a. Forms of government are unequally administered.b. ‘Th e constitution of government defi nes the rights of men and determines

their degree of security. Determines their relations in all their variety from the relation of equals to that of master and slave. Other external circum-stances aff ect mankind in relation to safety or danger. Th is aff ects their character and is the principal source of that variety which has been exhib-ited by mankind.’

c. ‘Nations are the schools in which men of diff erent ages and countries are so diff erently formed.’ One may compare Greeks under Aegilaus or Epomi-nades with those under the Turkish basha.

d. Th e greatest benefi cence is ‘to procure or preserve political establishments of a happy tendency’.

e. Ferguson equates the conduct of ‘Politics’ with ‘the cause of mankind in their general tendencies’.

3. Conclusion of lecture:a. ‘My object has been to fi x a standard of estimation in human aff airs.’

i. ‘Tradesmen are formed by the contraction and limitation of thought and application to single points and parts of subjects; but intellectual ability is acquired by wide and comprehensive views of what interest mankind or of what human nature has to off er as matter of information, discern-ment or choice.’

ii. ‘Happy and valuable qualities’ are the ‘peculiar beauty and excellence of human nature’ ‘which everyman may possess’ ‘of which men are une-qually possessed’.

{Th e two formulations are not strictly speaking contradictory but they certainly aim at opposite rhetorical eff ects.}

iii. In the fi rst part of moral inquiry, one should follow the ‘march of reason from particulars to generals which is common to all sciences’. Ferguson adds that he is concerned with ‘realities’ not ‘suppositions’.

iv. Th en one should proceed to the ‘principal fruit of it with respect to us’, the primacy of personal qualities.

b. ‘Objects of literary study’ in ‘improving powers of discourse & reason’.

{It is not wholly without interest that Ferguson’s fi rst thought was in a humanist direction – or that he deleted the point.}


b. ‘Th e end of science is the acquisition of power or the formation of art.’i. In ‘Matters within reach of our infl uence’, knowing the laws of nature lets

us ‘direct her operations to our powers’.ii. ‘In mechanical matters art is constituted by the knowledge of means

chiefl y.’iii. ‘In what relates to the attainment of beauty and excellence art consists

chiefl y in the knowledge of ends.’

{Ferguson’s adaptation of the Baconian formula reinforces my earlier observa-tion (lecture 30, point 5) that the recourse to Bacon was not identical with a categorical acceptance of instrumental rationality.}

c. ‘Th ere is a habit and exterior manner required to accomplished Man but the principal requisite is that idea of perfection of which the author of the Persian Letters says that in following he should think himself the happiest of men.’

{Ferguson doubtless means Usbek, the prime protagonist in the epistolary novel, not Montesquieu, the author of the book. Usbek is not an unambiguous fi gure, especially in relation to the women in his harem, where he is exposed as a sub-orner of despotism.26}

i. Perseverance and repeated exertion, if there is will to excellence, will pro-duce habits.

ii. Men think about their appearances, but ‘reality is the genuine principle of every noble appearance’.

d. ‘Great principle of what is excellent in all the appearances and perform-ances of men:i. who can reason wisely and ablyii. who gains the confi dence of other meniii. who gains the ascendant of a superior character.’

4. Ferguson cites Shaft esbury as general authority for the conclusion that the studies initiated in Ferguson’s course are to be valued for their capacity to explain, for their theories, for elocution, but (above all) for ‘excellence of a just and accomplished mind’. Th e important thing is what we become, not what we know.

5. Ferguson hopes that his introduction to these subjects will facilitate access to a life of ‘useful observation’ and ‘worthy and able conduct’. Ferguson conjoins the observation of past and present scenes, the acceptance of instruction and the choice of models.


6. ‘In literature and philosophy, too, the best guides are writers who have stood the test of ages and for whose sake we continue to study languages of the dead.’a. Among the ancients: Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus,

Epictetus and Antonius.b. Among the moderns: Lord Shaft esbury, Francis Hutcheson and Mon-

tesquieu.

Substitute Lecture 100, 21 April 1785

1. ‘Th ere is a disposition in free nations to separate the conditions of civil & military. Th e civil ranks consider this separation as devolving a burden. Th e military receive it as an exclusive title to important preferments. In the meantime, civil rights part with their security in parting with the powers of defense.’

2. Aft er reviewing the relations between monarchy and despotism, Ferguson states: ‘Th ere is no branch in which the transitions of men are more insensi-ble or more fatal’.

{Th is epitomizes the new realization about the conjunction between empire and revolution. In the light of Ferguson’s grudging acceptance elsewhere of imperial expansion and its consequences, this statement is not merely a warning to avoid even the fi rst wrong step. See below on expansion.}

3. ‘Th e preferable establishment for every society of men is that which is best suited to their circumstance and character: In following the tract into which they are led by their character and circumstances they arrive at suitable estab-lishments &c.&c. So that if the fi rst were permanent the second would be also. And where the fi rst cannot be improved the other ought not to be changed. But to remedy incidental evils.’a. We may take as a rule: ‘where the condition of the state is above mediocrity

the rule of political wisdom is to resist unnecessary change’. b. ‘Human nature however is progressive and the state of society subject to

fl uctuation and change. Th e prosperous extend, the declining contract their resources and limits. Successive generations succeed to new objects and views.’

{Extension is the crux. Ferguson recognizes it as a sign and source of the human activity that makes for happiness, but he also sees physical expansion of political entities as a function of imperialism, which implies in turn at least some measure of despotism. Th e paradox is a matter for optimal management for Ferguson, not pessimistic despair at human decline.}


c. ‘Revolutions come like the fall of a cataract. Or are sensible only in the result of a slow and insensible current.’

{Note the two modes of revolution, both cast in the metaphor of the moving stream used earlier (lecture 30, point 3) to evoke the human fi eld of action as a whole. If Ferguson’s passages on unexpected consequences were to be taken as equivalent to a conception of ‘spontaneous order’, it would have to be recognized that in his view revolution could furnish such an example as well as the society of merchants.}

4. ‘Such is the scene in which the wise and virtuous are to act. It is seldom advisa-ble to make innovations upon speculative principles. Th e occasions on which remedies are wanted to urgent evils are suffi ciently frequent. But still where the wise would make no change, changes are made. And it is the object of wis-dom to retard, accelerate or direct the course, so as to counteract the tendency to evil and favour the tendency to good.’a. Here extensive knowledge and foresight may be supremely useful even

where their eff ects escape the vulgar eye. Th e prize for which they contend is of supreme importance to mankind.

b. Consider what the generations of fortunate men derive from their ances-tors: Rights are ascertained, confi rmed and secured. Human nature is enabled to attain its highest honours: art, science and virtue.

c. ‘But let them beware of the idea that they have obtained their object and may remit their eff ort. Th e stone of Sisyphus must not be left to itself at any point in the declivity of human aff airs. Consider what the unfortunate generations incur from the remissness or folly of ancestors.’

d. ‘Th e partial interest that is diligent prevails and oversets the balance of jus-tice.’

– 115 –

7 FERGUSON, ROMAN HISTORY AND THE THREAT OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT IN

MODERN EUROPE

Iain McDaniel

In all of his works, Adam Ferguson looked to history as a source of insight into the moral and political problems of his own age. His History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) is no exception. Th rough a classi-cally-inspired narrative of Rome’s rise, progress and decline, Ferguson attempted to answer a set of questions regarding the future prospects of European states and the dangers facing their governments. Given his earlier philosophical expo-sition of the causes of the rise and decline of nations and empires in the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), it is unsurprising that Ferguson should have subsequently turned to Roman history. Th e history of the republican con-stitution had long been regarded, particularly in Britain, as shedding light upon the strengths and weaknesses of ‘mixed government’, that fusion of democratic, aristocratic and monarchical powers that Polybius described in the sixth book of his Histories. Furthermore, Rome’s history exhibited a progression from ‘very rude beginnings’ to ‘very high degrees of refi nement’, a process that broadly fore-shadowed Europe’s modern (i.e. post-Roman) history and provided an elaborate counterpoint to the great Scottish Enlightenment inquiries into the ‘progress of society in Europe’.1 Rome’s history constituted antiquity’s clearest example of the ‘corruption’ of a free government and its replacement by a despotic regime, a process which aff orded Ferguson ample scope to refi ne and amplify the mes-sage of the Essay. As he wrote to William Strahan in 1782, his purpose was to give a complete account of the ‘revolution’ by which the republic’s free system of government collapsed in a ‘confessed and hereditary Monarchy’.2 But the work also furnished him with opportunities to impart moral and didactic lessons that would encourage the dissemination of those patriotic virtues that Ferguson con-sidered necessary to the formation of the ‘political character’ of modern citizens. He claimed that his work would ‘furnish those who are engaged in transactions any way similar, with models by which they may profi t, and from which they


may form sound principles of conduct, derived from experience, and confi rmed by examples of the highest authority’.3

Rome’s fate had immense resonance for Ferguson. In the opening pages of the Roman Republic, he summarized the underlying causes of Rome’s ‘termina-tion’ and strongly implied that the predicament of the ancient republic had by no means become irrelevant under modern conditions:

Th e Romans … became the conquerors of many kingdoms in Asia and Africa, as well as in Europe; and formed an empire, if not the most extensive, at least the most splendid of any that is known in the history of mankind. In possession of this seem-ing advantage, however, they were unable to preserve their own institutions; they became, together with the conquests they made, a prey to military government, and a signal example of the vicissitudes to which prosperous nations are exposed.4

Later in the work, citing Tacitus’s observation that the Augustan principate was the ‘only possible cure for the distracted country’, Ferguson wrote that military government was ‘almost a necessary result of the abuse of liberty’, and that ‘in order to know with how much care the evil itself ought to be avoided, we must attend likewise to the full eff ects of the cure’.5 Th e Roman Republic was thus decisively shaped by Ferguson’s anxiety that the civil governments of modern Europe might come to be superseded by military regimes similar to the despotic government of the Roman Empire. Th e purpose of this essay is to identify more precisely the causes that gave substance to his fears.

Ferguson’s insistence upon the relevance of classical history for a proper understanding of modern Europe’s political trajectory sets him at some distance from other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith, both of whom generally (but never unambiguously) emphasized the superiority of modern commercial societies over their ancient and more ‘barbarous’ predecessors.6 In this respect, Ferguson’s Roman Republic sheds additional light upon the complex story of the reception of classical history in eighteenth-century Britain, indicating signifi cant lines of disagreement between the major thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scholars have long empha-sized important divergences between Ferguson’s and Smith’s thinking on issues pertaining to national defence, and have related their diff ering assessments of the problems facing modern societies to their interventions in the Scottish debates on the respective merits of militias and standing armies. As both John Rob-ertson and Richard Sher have suggested, Ferguson’s deep commitment to the programme for the establishment of a Scottish militia aft er 1756 can be regarded both as a refl ection of his concerns regarding the potential ‘corruption’ of mod-ern citizens in the light of the growth of professional armies, and as an expression of his unease at the military vulnerability of Britain vis-à-vis France.7 Ferguson’s principal contribution to the debates at the beginning of the Seven Years War, his

Ferguson, Roman History and the Th reat of Military Government 117

Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1756), went beyond earlier Scottish critiques of standing armies (such as Andrew Fletcher’s 1698 Discourse of Militias) in questioning the capacity of the British state to combine commer-cial growth with a robust system of military defence.8 Unlike Fletcher, whose principal criticism of standing armies related to their potential to become instru-ments of royal tyranny, Ferguson stressed the danger that military power would fall ‘into the Hands of the least reputable Class of the People’, thus threatening the order of property and authority established in the British state.9 Adam Smith himself later discussed some of these problems in relation to republican states in the jurisprudence lectures he delivered at Glasgow in 1762–3, and hinted at parallels between the ‘military governments’ of Caesar and Cromwell.10 Unlike Smith, however, who would later claim that a properly-organized standing army guaranteed British liberties far more robustly than a militia ever could, Ferguson advocated the militia both as a crucial component of Britain’s system of national defence and as a necessary institutional guarantee against the emergence of a modern Pompey or Caesar.11

Th e prospect of a French military onslaught at the beginning of the Seven Years War, coupled with the threats to liberty posed by the establishment of professional armies at home, constituted the immediate political context for Fer-guson’s discussion of the problem of military government. However, as his later published writings and private correspondence attest, the issue remained abso-lutely central to Ferguson’s political concerns long aft er the immediate alarm of the late 1750s had passed. Th ese concerns led him into increasingly sophisti-cated historical inquiries into the prospects facing not only the British state, but also European governments more generally. In several letters dating from the late 1760s, Ferguson warned that the increasingly factious and turbulent popular politics associated with the London ‘Mob’ might encourage the British army to impose an emergency military dictatorship.12 In the Essay, he had analysed this possibility in greater historical depth and with greater philosophical precision, arguing that the separation between civil and military departments of modern European states had engendered large, highly disciplined, but unpatriotic and corrupt armies, whose loyalties to established governments were questionable, to say the very least. A decade later, in his pamphlet dealing with the American War of 1776 (a critical response to Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty), Ferguson expressed the fear that the establishment of a large-scale democratic republic in America would lead, ineluctably, to the imposition of military government, which he believed to be ‘the fate that has ever attended Democracies attempted on too large a scale’.13 Finally, when he refl ected upon the French Revolution and its aft ermath (in several unpublished essays written towards the end of his life), Ferguson unhesitatingly described the Napoleonic Empire as a modern variant of ancient Rome’s military empire, characterizing


Napoleon as a living embodiment of the corrupt despotic politics he associated with the regimes of Tiberius and Nero.14 In short, Ferguson viewed the threat of military government as one of the central political predicaments of modernity.

Th e Intellectual Background

In utilizing the history of Rome in order to demonstrate the severity of the threat he diagnosed, Ferguson rehearsed several well-established traditions in the his-tory of European political thought. Th roughout the eighteenth century, Rome’s transition from republic to empire had been used to make two distinct claims regarding the threats that armies (and militarism more generally) posed to the liberty of modern states. First, Rome’s case demonstrated the dangers of territorial conquest, since it was claimed that large empires engendered the centralization of military and political power to a degree incompatible with the institutional arrangements and moral dispositions that guaranteed the liberty of republics. As Samuel Pufendorf, for example, argued as early as 1682, conquering states ran a high risk of collapsing into the ‘worst sort’ of monarchy, where the ‘Army exercis’d Sovereign Authority’.15 Such assessments oft en formed the backdrop to opposition to ‘universal monarchy’ in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century, particularly among those who feared that France’s territorial ambitions would undermine the precarious balance of power established among European states at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.16 Second, the destruction of the Roman repub-lic surfaced in arguments regarding the alleged ‘corruption’ of domestic politics, especially in Britain. Th e shift ing distribution of political powers between the various assemblies and magistracies that made up the Roman constitution pro-vided a framework for comprehensive analyses of supposed distortions visited upon Britain’s mixed constitution by the executive’s manipulation of parliament, the rising public debt and the growth of standing armies. For writers within the early eighteenth-century ‘commonwealthman’ tradition, such as the authors of Cato’s Letters, the principal practical issue was Britain’s dangerous reliance on standing armies, which threatened a recurrence of the ‘Military Government’ of the Roman Empire. Military government, they argued, was already quite advanced among the monarchies of continental Europe, and would be the fate of any state ‘where the Army is the strongest power in the Country’.17

Ferguson’s Roman Republic was built upon conceptual foundations estab-lished in these early eighteenth-century debates. It was, however, even more decisively infl uenced by the writings of Montesquieu, who provided Ferguson not only with the theoretical resources for understanding military government, but also with a unique interpretation of the history of Rome.18 In his Considera-tions on the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1733), Montesquieu had mounted a devastating attack on Rome’s ‘spirit of conquest’, which formed part


of a broader critique of the military ambitions he associated with Louis XIV.19 Rome, he declared, was a republic whose ‘purpose’ was expansion, founded upon the principle of continual war. Th is initially gave rise to an extraordinary sequence of military successes, but also fuelled the empire’s territorial expan-sion to an extent that ultimately destroyed it. Montesquieu identifi ed two main causes of the republic’s ruin: the immense power granted to generals in the prov-inces (which paved the way for the destruction of liberty by Pompey, Caesar and Augustus), and the corruption of Rome’s civic spirit that resulted from the attempts of the conquered peoples to share in the rights of sovereignty.20 Th e consequence was the ‘ambiguous government’ of Augustus, a military despotism founded upon an underlying division between civil and military forces within the state.21 In Montesquieu’s analysis, military governments faced an insuperable contradiction between the demands of external security and internal liberty: an ‘empire founded on arms needs to be sustained by arms’, but the empire was ‘in a situation where it could not endure without soldiers and could not endure with them’.22

In the Considerations, Montesquieu sought to expose a deep incompatibility between the politics of ancient republicanism and the institutions of the eight-eenth-century monarchy. He emphasized that Rome’s military government bore little resemblance to the monarchies of modern Europe and was better under-stood in the light of the militaristic political culture of the republic. It was a ‘general rule that military government is, in certain respects, republican rather than monarchical’.23 In the Spirit of the Laws, he provided a more elaborate anal-ysis of the relations between civil authority and military force that characterized each of the two ‘moderate’ forms of government he identifi ed (republics and monarchies). In republics, civil and military powers and occupations had to be combined, since – as the example of Rome had shown – it was ‘very dangerous’ to create a distinct military body within the state. Th is explained why, further-more, in the quasi-republican English polity, a ‘particular estate for fi ghting men is feared’.24 In monarchies, on the other hand, military occupations were incom-patible with the exercise of civil authority, since magistrates must ‘not have at the same time both the people’s trust and the force to abuse it’.25 As Montesquieu noted elsewhere, this permitted the use of ‘regular troops’ in monarchical states, although such standing forces had to be small so as not to destabilize the pre-carious balance of powers within the monarchy.26 But the republican ideal of a national militia could only be dangerous to the modern monarchy. For this reason, he viewed as dangerously anachronistic the attempts of contemporary rulers (such as Frederick William I of Prussia) to emulate the Roman republic by embarking upon large-scale projects of militarization of their nations.27 In a crucial passage of the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu described this ‘increase of troops’ as the ‘new disease’ affl icting European states. Such militarism – a


pathological symptom of acute hostilities within the European states-system – threatened a return of the sort of centralized, military-despotic state he associ-ated with both the Roman Empire and the empires of Asia. Soon, he wrote, ‘as a result of these soldiers, we shall have nothing but soldiers, and we shall be like the Tartars’ – subject to the government of force.28

Montesquieu’s ideas provided crucial theoretical coordinates for numerous subsequent writers who sought to understand the possible implications of the reconfi guration of Europe’s patterns of military provision in the second half of the century. Although his largely optimistic assessment of Europe’s pacifi c tendencies was frequently viewed with some scepticism, his prognosis of mili-tary government was repeated and oft en amplifi ed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, argued that the aggrandizing ambitions of European monarchs had caused an exponential expansion of ‘armies and garrisons’, which would renew the cycle of oppression, impoverishment and depopulation that had destroyed the Roman Empire.29 In one of his many contributions to the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Deux Indes, Denis Diderot identifi ed this multipli-cation of soldiers and the improvement of military discipline as manifestations of the ongoing rivalry between European nations that was inexorably leading them to a condition of military government.30 At the same time, Montesquieu’s advo-cacy of a more diff erentiated set of civil and military institutions for the modern monarchy – particularly his argument for a small body of ‘regular troops’ – was subject to critical appraisal and scrutiny. Th ere were those, like the Chevalier de Chastellux, who followed Montesquieu in rejecting the ‘barbarous’ heritage of the Roman military republic, and who recommended a clear separation between civil and military functions as the basis of a modern, economically-productive state.31 But there were also those who viewed Montesquieu’s distinction between civil and military occupations as a potential source of irreversible decline, and claimed that the specialization of defensive functions implied a dangerous loss of patriotic ‘zeal’ among an increasingly complacent and pacifi c citizenry. For these writers, Montesquieu’s conception of ‘honour’ as the ‘principle’ of monarchical government seemed an insuffi cient basis upon which to rest the moral and polit-ical health of the modern state, and they insisted upon the need for a modicum of the ‘political virtue’ that Montesquieu had confi ned to the ancient republics if modern states were not to collapse into military government. Th is was roughly the point of view that Ferguson elaborated when he joined this debate in 1767 with the publication of An Essay on the History of Civil Society.


Military Government in An Essay on the History of Civil SocietyFerguson’s own thinking on the issues raised in Montesquieu’s work was fi rst laid out in detail in An Essay on the History of Civil Society. In the work’s fi nal sections, which dealt with ‘Corruption and Political Slavery’, he described the ‘refi ned’ or ‘polished’ nations of modern Europe as threatened by a ‘fatal revolution’ that would result in the establishment of military government.32 Ferguson’s predic-tion rested upon a far-reaching historical analysis of the threats to the survival of the civil governments of Europe that drew heavily upon conceptual resources contained in the Spirit of the Laws. He explicitly borrowed Montesquieu’s famed typology of governments and their associated ‘principles’, distinguish-ing between republican, monarchical and despotic states and the ‘sentiments or maxims’ (virtue, honour and fear respectively) that characterized each type.33 He also reconstructed Montesquieu’s thesis that despotic monarchy (a highly-centralized regime dominated by the principle of fear) would be the result of the destruction of all subordinate and intermediate powers within a state.34 Like Montesquieu, furthermore, Ferguson associated military government with ‘max-ims of conquest’, and referred to the history of Roman imperialism as evidence that ‘enlargement of territory’ and the ‘progress of empire’ had been principal causes of the establishment of the military regimes of the past.35 He therefore warned that any revival of the ancient spirit of conquest would be disastrous under modern conditions, given the global reach of European states and the fra-gility of the ‘balance of power’ in Europe itself.

However, Ferguson’s diagnosis diff ered from Montesquieu’s in several crucial respects. As a discourse on the moral dispositions necessary to preserve liberty, the Essay demanded the revival and strengthening of a vigorous ‘national spirit’, which Ferguson believed to be threatened by the progress of ‘refi nement’ in advanced or ‘polished’ societies. In the Essay’s fi nal chapters, he attacked a danger-ous tendency towards ‘tranquillity’, ‘moderation’ and ‘lethargy’ among modern citizens, which led him partially to revise Montesquieu’s account of ‘honour’ as a suffi cient condition of liberty in a large modern monarchy. Like the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, who had developed a similar argument against Montesquieu’s characterization of honour in his articles ‘Honneur’ and ‘Législateur’ (included in the Encyclopédie), Ferguson emphasized the possibility that Montesquieu’s ‘false honour’ might easily degenerate into private ‘retirement’ and a narrow con-cern with merely external codes of politeness.36 For this reason, he insisted on the ongoing need for the public virtues of ‘courage’, ‘fortitude’ and ‘elevation of mind’ that Montesquieu himself had confi ned to republics.37 Furthermore, there was a marked ambiguity in Ferguson’s response to Montesquieu’s description of the British polity as a mixture of republican and monarchical elements.38 Although Ferguson associated this peculiarly British hybrid with the authority of law and


with wholly benefi cial restraints upon the prerogative powers of the Crown, he also noted the dangerous tendency of the mixed constitution to breed misplaced sentiments of ‘equality’ that weakened the civil distinctions upon which the gov-ernment of all large states fi nally rested.39 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ferguson severely criticized Montesquieu’s recommendation that military and political functions be strictly demarcated, and off ered an alternative theory of the union of civil and military departments as the basis of the nation’s security against any potential foreign invasion or internal military coup d’état.

Th e diagnosis off ered in the Essay grew out of a conjectural history of ‘refi ne-ment’, in which Ferguson traced the gradual emergence of civil government in modern Europe and recapitulated Montesquieu’s thesis of the decisive advan-tages that monarchical government conferred upon the large states of modern Europe. According to Ferguson, the Germanic peoples that settled upon the territories of the Roman Empire had laid the foundations of monarchical gov-ernment in western Europe. Forged by conquest, these primitive monarchies were structured on a model of military hierarchy, although the immense power of the feudal vassals vis-à-vis the sovereign prevented the emergence of ‘general despotism’ within the state.40 Th e threat of military government had surfaced periodically (Ferguson quoted Hume’s History of England on the dangers posed by the Elizabethan monarchy), but a fortuitous combination of geographical and political causes had rescued Europe from the fate of the military empires of Asia.41 Europe’s subsequent history was marked by the emergence of elaborate distinctions of rank, the progress of commercial arts and the gradual separation of political functions, all of which contributed to the development of systems of civil liberty. In Britain, where an ‘extensive territory’ was now governed without military force at the disposal of the executive, these processes had resulted in a ‘spectacle new in the history of mankind’, but even the more absolutist conti-nental states had come to guarantee the security of property and the protection of the person.42 Internationally, Europe was characterized by equilibrium in the balance of power between the major states, which had displayed considerable prudence and moderation in their eff orts to maintain it. Ferguson noted that ‘if our rule in measuring degrees of politeness and civilization is to be taken from hence, or from the advancement of commercial arts, we shall be found to have greatly excelled any of the celebrated nations of antiquity’.43

Th e progress of refi nement in Europe, however, had a hugely ambivalent legacy. Notwithstanding the remarkable achievements of the eighteenth-cen-tury state in developing institutions favourable to civil liberty and in securing the regular administration of justice, Ferguson pointed to an underlying division between the ‘departments of war and state’ that, he insisted, prefi gured a crisis of the modern monarchy every bit as lethal and irreversible as that which had destroyed the Roman republic.44 In the ancient republics of Sparta and Rome,


and even among the barbarous nations of North America, all citizens were equally soldiers, while their leaders were equally at home in the occupations of civil government and war. Th is unity of functions sustained a high degree of patriotic commitment throughout the entire public, and formed a ‘permanent and regular’ system of national defence.45 Th e refi ned nations of Europe, how-ever, had reversed the correct ordering of civil and military functions:

It was certainly never foreseen by mankind, that in the pursuit of refi nement, they were to reverse this order; or even that they were to place the government, and the military force of nations, in diff erent hands. But is it equally unforeseen, that the former order may again take place? and that the pacifi c citizen, however distinguished by privilege and rank, must one day bow to the person with whom he has intrusted his sword. If such revolutions should actually follow, will this new master revive in his own order the spirit of the noble and the free? Will he renew the characters of the warrior and the statesman? Will he restore to his country the civil and the military virtues? I am afraid to reply. Montesquieu observes, that the government of Rome, even under the emperors, became, in the hands of the troops, elective and republican: but the Fabii and the Bruti were heard of no more, aft er the praetorian bands became the republic.46

Th e severance of civil and military functions was as much a moral as a political problem. Participation in the arduous duties of war and politics was a necessary stimulus of a vigorous, patriotic ‘national spirit’. Savage and barbarous nations, such as the tribes of North America and the primitive Germans described by Tacitus, preserved the martial virtues of vigour, independence and courage due to the ‘frequent dangers’ they faced and the ‘frequent practice of war’.47 Th e modern state’s reliance upon professional soldiers had in this respect been one of the most corrupting of all the ‘boasted refi nements’ of civil society. In creating an artifi cial distinction between soldier and pacifi c inhabitant, the polished nations of Europe had created a ‘breach’ in the system of national virtues, thus destroying the patriotic ‘zeal’ or ‘national spirit’ that constituted the fi nal guarantee against the prospect of both domestic ‘usurpation’ and foreign invasion:

Th e boasted refi nements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of danger. Th ey open a door, to disaster, as wide and accessible as any of those they have shut. If they build walls and ramparts, they enervate the minds of those who are placed to defend them; if they form disciplined armies, they reduce the military spirit of entire nations; and by placing the sword where they have given a distaste for civil establishments, they prepare mankind for the government of force.48

From this perspective, Montesquieu’s advocacy of a more diff erentiated set of civil and military institutions for the modern monarchy, the defence of which would be based upon a small body of disciplined, regular troops, was an inadequate solution to the long-term military and political challenges facing modern states. Ferguson’s point was that, in the socially and economically divided nations of modern Europe,


the military would gradually come to be dominated by the lower ranks of society, creating a dangerous asymmetry in the balance of powers between the propertied and the poor. It was for this reason that he criticized the delegation of military responsibilities (through substitution) from the propertied ranks to a paid class of ‘subordinate’ mercenaries, whose lack of property rendered their interest in the maintenance of the constitution almost nil.49 Th e ‘dangerous alliance of faction with military power’ that would potentially result from this process paved the way for a ‘usurpation’ of political power under demagogic leadership.50

From an international perspective, however, the ramifi cations were even more disturbing. Unlike Montesquieu, Ferguson assumed that the compulsions of conquest and aggrandizement continued to dominate the international poli-tics of Europe, and he had little confi dence in Montesquieu’s thesis that modern nations had begun to be ‘cured’ of Machiavellian power-politics. He pointed out that commercial interests had spawned new forms of ‘domination and enlargement’, and argued that the increasingly globalized character of modern commerce had dangerously raised the stakes in the ancient quest for national grandeur and prestige. In the scenario Ferguson presented in the Essay, however, the fate of Rome would be experienced not as a direct consequence of extended empire, but as an unintended consequence of European rivalry and the dysfunc-tional security arrangements to which it had given rise:

It is vain to affi rm, that the genius of any nation is adverse to conquest. Its real inter-ests most commonly are so; but every state which is prepared to defend itself, and to obtain victories, is likewise in hazard of being tempted to conquer.

In Europe, where mercenary and disciplined armies are every where formed, and ready to traverse the earth, where, like a fl ood pent up by slender banks, they are only restrained by political forms, or a temporary balance of power; if the sluices should break, what inundations may we not expect to behold? Eff eminate kingdoms and empires are spread from the sea of Corea to the Atlantic ocean. Every state, by the defeat of its troops may be turned into a province; every army opposed in the fi eld to-day may be hired tomorrow; and every victory gained, may give the accession of a new military force to the victor.51

Ferguson’s analysis went beyond earlier critiques of Europe’s political system by pointing to fl aws in the balance of power that threatened a collapse more total – and geographically more widespread – than previous commentators had imag-ined. Th e continental military empire that would emerge from any such collapse would be far less ‘civilized’, but appreciably more powerful, than any of the mon-archies that currently made up the states-system. With this prospect in mind, it is easier to see why Ferguson continued to insist so emphatically upon Britain’s vulnerability to foreign invasion, even aft er the astonishing military gains of the Seven Years War.52 Th e prospect of a powerful military government emerging on the Continent, matched against a wealthy (but politically divided and morally


depleted) British state, would stimulate Ferguson to think more carefully about the history of republican Rome.

Military Government in Ferguson’s Roman RepublicTh e History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic was the prod-uct of roughly twelve years’ sustained thinking upon the predicament Ferguson had analysed in the Essay.53 Th e work certainly refl ects many British and Euro-pean anxieties of the 1770s, the decade in which Britain not only went to war over its American colonies, but also became the subject of philosophical criti-cism as the most obvious pretender to a new, commerce-driven global imperium. In Britain itself, it was increasingly felt that the unwieldy empire acquired dur-ing the Seven Years War had become simply too large to be governed eff ectively and that it had given rise to dangerously powerful military establishments that threatened constitutional balance at home. Th e supposedly ‘despotic’ character of English rule in India was regarded as merely one symptom of a burgeoning militarism which, many observers feared, might reignite the ancient peril of universal empire under a new guise.54 Ferguson’s Roman Republic echoed these critiques of Britain’s apparently resurgent imperial ambitions in a way not dis-similar to the great French history of European colonialism produced during this period: the Abbé Raynal’s enormous (and hugely successful) Histoire Des Deux Indes. Th e evidence of the Roman Republic suggests, however, that Fergu-son’s primary concern remained that of securing Britain’s independence against threats that lay closer to home. For this reason, he combined standard criticisms of Rome’s imperial conquests with a defence of the republican constitution and its system of military provision. Th e new argument was that Rome’s constitu-tion, despite its many defects and inconsistencies, provided the republic with a powerful defensive force and a virtuous governing elite – both of which consti-tuted fundamental guarantees against the prospect of military government. As he put it in an early chapter of the Roman Republic:

No State has a right to make the submission of mankind a necessary condition to its own preservation; nor are many States qualifi ed to support such pretensions. Some part of the political character, however, so eminent in this famous republic, is neces-sary to the safety, as well as to the advancement of nations. No free State is safe under any government or defence than that of its own citizens. No nation is safe that per-mits an ally to suff er by having espoused its cause, or that allows itself to be driven, by defeats or misfortunes, into a surrender of any material part of its rights.55

Here Ferguson took a decisive stand against those, such as Montesquieu, who failed to distinguish patriotic political values (which Rome possessed in abun-dance) from the egalitarian, democratic republicanism that (in both authors’ views) ultimately corroded the liberty of the Roman state. Essentially, he called


for the renovation of modern Britain’s military and political system along the lines of the early (uncorrupted) Roman republic. As the fi rst chapters of the Roman Republic demonstrated, patriotic states like Rome possessed huge advantages over their less public-spirited neighbours. Ferguson emphasized two features which brought Rome its success in war. Th e fi rst was the citizens’ militia, the ‘establish-ment by which the Romans conquered the world’.56 Th e invention of numerous military rewards and distinctions gave additional impetus to the development of the citizens’ military spirit. Even more importantly, the convergence of civil and military powers and responsibilities meant that Rome’s senators were both ‘statesmen and warriors’. Th is combination of roles underpinned the authority of the senatorial government and instilled Rome’s generals with the virtues of ‘penetration, sagacity, and courage’. Rome thus united the advantages of civil and military states by ‘blending the professions of state and of war together’, an insti-tutional formation to which Ferguson ascribed ‘the great ability of her councils, and the irresistible force with which they were executed’.57 By way of contrast, the commercial republic of Carthage had separated its civil and military depart-ments, relied on mercenary soldiers for its defence, and therefore ‘stifl ed or neglected the military character of their own citizens’.58 Rome’s triumph over the wealthier Carthaginians was owing entirely to her superior ‘national character’.

Having described the initial advantages of the Roman constitution, the remainder of Ferguson’s narrative was taken up with analysing the causes that had led to Rome’s ‘termination’ in the military government of the Empire. Unsurprisingly, given the critique of military adventurism outlined in the Essay, Ferguson identifi ed Rome’s ruthless policy of territorial expansion as the main factor. Echoing earlier traditions of hostility to universal monarchy, he noted that Rome’s case clearly demonstrated ‘how odious, and in the end, how calami-tous for both, it is for one nation to become subject to another’.59 Underlying his account was a powerful critique of the acute ‘national animosity’ that motivated the republic’s foreign policy. Ferguson had long cautioned British statesmen against undertaking wars motivated by excessive ‘ambition’, although at this point it is equally likely that he had France uppermost in his mind.60 It was Rome’s exaggerated ‘love of dominion’ that corrupted its initially virtuous ‘mili-tary character’ and had such poisonous eff ects upon international politics. Th e cruelty displayed following the defeat of Carthage was only the most notorious example of the republic’s fi erce ‘jealousy’, ‘animosity’ and ‘antipathy’.61 Like the Spanish conquerors of the New World, Rome gratifi ed its ‘avarice and ambition, at the expense of nations to whose possessions they have no reasonable or just pretensions’.62 Th is ‘insatiable thirst of dominion’ fi nally led the republic into a series of wars undertaken ‘not in defence of their own possessions, but for the enlargement of an empire already too great’.63 Th e consequence was the slow but inevitable haemorrhaging of those martial virtues that, in Ferguson’s political


theory, could be sustained only among a plurality of independent nations. It was no accident that Rome’s moral decline could be dated from the ‘absence of alarms’ in an increasingly complacent, self-absorbed city. Despite the ‘peace’ and ‘protection’ supposedly conferred upon the provinces by the sovereign authority of the Roman Empire, Ferguson entirely rejected the Roman model of imperial rule as inconsistent with the long-term security or prosperity of nations.64

We need to reconstruct in more detail, however, precisely how Rome’s impe-rialism undermined its liberty. It should be emphasized fi rst of all that Ferguson did not seek to establish direct parallels between Rome’s military empire and the maritime and commercial empire of eighteenth-century Britain.65 His argu-ment depended upon a distinction between republican and monarchical forms of government and their degree of compatibility with extensive dominions, the upshot of which was that monarchies possessed distinct advantages over repub-lics in preserving large-scale empires. Echoing both Hume and Montesquieu, Ferguson noted that republican states generally exercised a far more severe and despotic form of rule over their provinces than monarchies did.66 Rome’s failure to develop a coherent set of political institutions analogous to those of the Brit-ish mixed monarchy was one of the reasons why its empire was so completely maladapted for long-term survival:

[I]t might, no doubt, have been still better for the empire, if the spirit of legal mon-archy could at once have been infused into every part of the commonwealth; or if, without further pangs or convulsions, the authority of a Prince, tempered with that of a Senate, had been fi rmly established.67

Ferguson argued that the government of large states depended upon hierarchi-cal systems of ‘subordination’ or, to use the standard terminology of Scottish Enlightenment political theory, upon a ‘distinction of ranks’. Having acquired its enormous territory, Rome owed ‘its safety and the order of its government to a respectable aristocracy, founded on the distinctions of fortune, as well as personal qualities, or the merit of national service’. Th e republic should have accepted the ‘disparities’ and ‘subordinations’, ‘which mankind in such situa-tions universally have found natural, and even necessary, to their government’.68 In Ferguson’s reconstruction, however, the legitimate political authority of the patrician class was gradually eroded by the democratic politics of the corrupt popular faction in the city, beginning with the radically egalitarian land-reform proposals of the Gracchi.69 Subsequent demagogues pressed for a series of legal and institutional measures (the abolition of debts; the secret ballot in legislative assemblies; the distribution of free grain), all of which strengthened the demo-cratic component of the Roman constitution and undermined the authority of the government. All of this demonstrated the tribunes’ acute misunderstanding of the foundations of liberty in large political communities and violated the ‘nat-


ural’ progress of political institutions as they underwent adaptation to changing material and political circumstances.

Ferguson’s argument that Rome’s liberty depended upon a powerful aristoc-racy, whose authority derived from wealth as well as virtue, represents a reworking of Montesquieu’s thesis of the unsuitability of republican government for the large, unequal monarchies of modern Europe. Yet Ferguson made clear that the real damage to Rome’s government resulted from the impact that the strains of empire placed upon the composition of the military itself. Th e establishment of provincial military governments (which replaced the earlier colonies) created intractable contradictions between the demands of war and civil government, as the higher ranks withdrew from military occupations and thereby lost much of their former prestige as both ‘statesmen and warriors’. Marius’s unprecedented expedient of employing the very poorest class of citizens (the capite censi) in the legions marked the real point of no return:

Th is circumstance is quoted as a remarkable and dangerous innovation in the Roman State, and is frequently mentioned among the steps which hastened its ruin. Th e exam-ple, no doubt, may instruct nations to distinguish the military operations required at a distance, from the more important object of preservation and home-defence; so that in declining the distant service, the more respectable orders of the People may not think it necessary to abandon themselves to depredation at home. In the fi rst ages of Rome, the citizens in political convention, were styled the Army of their Country, and such in every age is the army in whose hands the freedom of nations is secure. From the date of these levies at Rome, the sword began to pass from the hands of those who were inter-ested in the preservation of the republic, into the hands of others who were willing to make it a prey. Th e circumstances of the times were such, indeed, as to give warning of the change. Th e service of a legionary soldier was become too severe for the less indigent order of citizens, and now opened to the necessitous the principal road to profi t, as well as honour. Marius, to facilitate his levies, was willing to gratify both; and thus gave beginning to the formation of armies who were ready to fi ght for or against the laws of their country, and who, in the sequel, substituted battles in the streets of Rome, for the bloodless contests which had hitherto arisen from the divisions of party.70

Following this transformation of military arrangements, the Senate was rendered both politically and militarily insignifi cant. It soon became impossible for even the most public-spirited general to bring the armies under control, while noth-ing could ‘compensate for the ruinous tendency of a precedent which brings force to be employed as an ordinary resource in political contests’.71 Military government, in Ferguson’s analysis, was thus the result of the explosive combina-tion of popular licence and military power characteristic of the later republic. Th e absence of political and institutional resources at the disposal of the Sen-ate meant that the ‘disorders arising from the weakness of government’ could be corrected only by instituting military despotism. From a more philosophical perspective, the subsequent military regime was the culmination (rather than


the betrayal) of the corrupted republican understanding of liberty as consisting in a ‘perfect freedom from all restraint’.72

Ferguson’s narrative concluded with an analysis of the Roman imperial regime that warned against the possible recurrence of a similar collision between ‘democratic’ politics and military power in modern states. Although Rome’s post-republican government bore little resemblance to the ‘mixed constitution of monarchy’ that subsisted ‘with so much advantage in some of the kingdoms of modern Europe’, Ferguson underlined the structural similarities between the ancient and modern political trajectories.73 It was for this reason that he empha-sized so strongly the Tacitean theme of the disjunction between appearance and reality under the early emperors. Although Augustus succeeded in preserving the forms of the ancient republican constitution, the Roman Empire was a state in which the sovereign imperator must ‘forever submit to the head of the army’, and where genuine power rested ‘with those military bodies who are in possession of the capital, or who surround the person of the Prince’.74 Th e discrepancy between the realities of servitude and outward legality, moreover, served as a ‘caution, to those who need to be told under what disguise the most detestable tyranny will sometimes approach mankind’.75 It was ‘instructive to observe with what care this sovereign endeavoured to fl atter the vanity of Roman citizens, by preserving the distinction of ranks, while in reality his policy was calculated to remove every dis-tinction, and to render all ranks equally dependent on himself ’.76 Ferguson thus drove home the argument (already touched upon in the Essay) that the modern mixed constitution might itself harbour despotic tendencies beneath the external lineaments of liberty: ‘the constitution indeed may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfi t to preserve it’.77 Th e Roman Republic made clear that without a truly independent intermediary nobility between sovereign and people – a military-patriotic version of Mon-tesquieu’s pouvoirs intermédiaires – modern politics was in danger of swinging violently from those extremes of popular anarchy and despotism manifested in the later Roman republic, and fi nally succumbing to a military government. In practi-cal terms, genuine independence on the part of such a patriotic nobility meant that they, unlike the Roman senators in the later republic, shoulder their military responsibilities with commitment, courage and energy, thereby preserving the unity of civil and military roles that formed the centerpiece of Ferguson’s theory of the modern state.

Conclusion

A ‘licentious’, pseudo-democratic state under the auspices of a military ‘mon-arch’ was the worst possible outcome imaginable for Ferguson. It is quite clear, furthermore, that he viewed the threat of military government as coming less


from above than from below: from the novel combination of popular passions and military power that had come increasingly to dominate the politics of eighteenth-century Britain. In this respect, Ferguson’s thought took a diff erent direction to that of many French readers of Montesquieu, for whom the danger remained the gradual imposition of military government under the auspices of the Bourbon monarchy itself.78 Ferguson had already criticized Montesquieu (and unnamed others) for failing to understand British politics on precisely this issue: ‘Th ey only think of the dangers to Liberty that come from the Crown. Th ey do not consider the dangers to Liberty that come from the Populace.’79 Ferguson’s alternative conception of the bases of rule in a modern ‘civil soci-ety’ – based upon the unity of civil authority and military force embodied in a patriotic nobility – was designed to meet precisely this threat of popular dema-goguery, while at the same time to secure the military defensibility of Britain against potential foreign aggressors. But Ferguson’s warnings also applied to the monarchies of mainland Europe, where – as the Essay made clear – the authority of ‘civil’ governments had come to seem increasingly precariously established in the light of the menacing expansion of large and disciplined standing armies.

Of course, it was in France that events most closely resembling Ferguson’s predictions fi rst came to pass, as the French Revolution passed from civil war, through the Terror, to the military-despotic imperialism of Napoleon. Unlike his younger Scottish compatriot, James Mackintosh, Ferguson readily conceived this ‘history’ in precisely the same terms in which he had understood the collapse of republican government in Rome, as a consequence of the misplaced political loyalties of the military establishment:

In this the Revolution consisted or by this alone it was eff ected. If the Army had adhered to the King the popular Assembly would have been dismissed and a Military Government had been Established in the House of Bourbon Innocent indeed Com-pared to that which has since taken place in the House of Buonaparte.80

In Ferguson’s view, the resulting military empire demonstrated just how fragile the ‘long boasted balance of power’ really was.81 Napoleon’s military usurpation was ultimately a long-term consequence of the fi erce military rivalries between the European monarchies, and their inability to contain the forces they them-selves had unleashed in their pursuit of military security. Th e combination of corrupt republican politics and militaristic adventurism that Ferguson had diag-nosed as the cause of Rome’s ‘termination’ in the Roman Republic had returned to haunt the politics of modern Europe.

– 131 –

8 FERGUSON’S ‘APPROPRIATE STILE’ IN COMBINING HISTORY AND SCIENCE: THE

HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY REVISITED

Annette Meyer

Adam Ferguson’s place in the history of ideas has been understood variously. For example, some have portrayed him as an early founder of modern sociology, but others have interpreted his thought as representative of the ideal of civic human-ism.1 However, Ferguson is rarely recognized for his work as a historian,2 in contrast to the famous English-speaking historians of the Enlightenment, David Hume, William Robertson and Edward Gibbon. Th is is all the more surpris-ing given that Ferguson not only undertook historical work but also refl ected theoretically on the writing of history. In this essay I investigate why it is that Ferguson has played only a minor role in the history of historiography. My argu-ment focuses on how Ferguson’s marginalization may derive from his theoretical conception of history as combining empirical and rational elements. Ferguson’s unique contribution, his ‘Appropriate Stile’,3 develops from David Hume’s con-ception of history, anticipates nineteenth-century hermeneutics, and suggests that the focus of historical research should be the species, or ‘mankind’.

Oscillating between moral philosophy, erudite historical narrative and the science of natural history, Ferguson’s historical essays are not easily catego-rized. As a preliminary consideration one might seek to situate his work within either the history of historiography or the history of science.4 On the one hand, however, the history of historiography does not accept the constraints of the naturalistic approach that Ferguson advocated; on the other hand, the history of science does not respect the forms of historical erudition to which he applied his methodological considerations. As an alternative, one might consider that Ferguson’s contributions to political or civil history off er a categorical contrast to his work in the science of natural history. However, since his theoretical con-siderations embraced both of these genres, it seems problematic to diff erentiate between his idea of ‘history’ and his concept of ‘natural history’. Aft er all, the term historia implies that empirical circumstances are relevant for both types of


inquiry. Th e specifi c order of historical material and its narrative construction were traditionally subsumed under the ‘artes historicae’, engendering thereby the long-lasting debate about the appropriate style or method in writing history.5 An analytical distinction between Ferguson’s concept of ‘natural history’ – as employed in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) – and his political historiography thus overlooks the common empirical basis of both sorts of his-torical inquiry.

In so far as I focus on a unitary reading of Ferguson’s historical works, a read-ing which leads us to certain methodological (if not epistemological) questions, we must fi rst describe the gulf that exists between two parallel interpretations of his work. Th e two non-intersecting responses are the German-dominated line of the history of historiography and the predominantly Anglo-American tradition of the history of science. Both traditions agree that historical writing underwent a profound change around 1800, but their perspectives are diff erent. For the fi rst, the horizons of history emerge from romanticism and idealism, for the lat-ter from empiricism and positivism. Th e very boundaries of these traditions did not allow for a true or full understanding of Ferguson’s conception of history. Th us, it is only in the imagined intersection of these two traditions that one may identify Ferguson’s particular contribution to the theory of historiography.

Th e Boundaries of the History of Historiography

Of the two traditional interpretations of Ferguson’s historical writings, the fi rst is the historiographical approach. A penchant for writing histories of histori-ography would appear to be typically German. Supporting this impression is the widespread belief among German historians that, since the late nineteenth century, they have played a decisive role in establishing history as a science. Th e new self-assuredness of these historians was throughout the nineteenth cen-tury accompanied not only by debate about methodology but also by a shift in historiographical paradigms. Intellectual renewal was also accompanied by the institutionalization of historiography in seminars, institutes and journals.6 Th us placed in the limelight, ‘historicism’ seemed to be a German export, and German historical writers went to great lengths to trace the source of their own achieve-ments from this development.7

Th e term ‘historicism’ was coined in the late nineteenth century when the unique privilege of eighteenth-century historical explanation (the ‘sciences of man’) and the genre of ‘histories of mankind’ – including Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Voltaire’s Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) or Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91) – came under serious doubt. Th e con-cept of historicism is ‘indispensable to any attempt to account for the passage

Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in Combining History and Science 133

of historiography towards social science in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-tury’,8 especially if one considers the theories, methods and self-description of the professionals and their newly-founded discipline: the science of history. Yet the question of when the disciplinary study of history started – when history ceased to be either a synonym for empirical facts or a matter of literary scholar-ship – is important. At what juncture did the scientifi c claims for history as an independent subject – with its own objects, methods and theories – fi nd their justifi cation? In fact, the boundaries set at the beginning of the history of his-toriography are still eff ective. For this reason we must return to the keepers of the Pantheon of historicism, such as philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey or the later steward of historicism Friedrich Meinecke. Although these thinkers certainly gave credit to Italian, French and (especially) English historians in developing modern historiography, it was only the ‘German mind’ that they considered able to create the great synthesis of natural right, idealism, philosophy of history and religiosity.9

Meinecke attributed to both Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke a pre-romantic style of historiography, suggesting thereby that each possessed a distinctive understanding of the individual essences of various epochs.10 Th is understanding, said to be elementary for the development of historicism, diff ered fundamentally from the theoretical constructs of Enlightenment historiography, whose rigid intellectualism, according to Meinecke, tended to produce unhis-torical analyses. Despite praise for his historiography, Ferguson’s writings were subject to criticism.11 Focusing on Ferguson’s reliance on ancient literature, Bar-thold Georg Niebuhr, for example, penned a devastating review of Ferguson’s History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1782).12

Even when criticism of Ferguson was not as severe as that doled out by the author of the Römische Geschichte (1811), the work singled out by Dilthey and Meinecke as having fi rst ‘opened the stage for modern historical writing’,13 there was no doubt among Anglo-American historians of historiography that Ferguson’s historical writing had been infl uenced by what were taken to be ‘rationalistic’ currents moving within the Enlightenment. Writing in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, American historian Th omas Preston Peardon found the meaning of ‘rationalistic historical writing’ to be self-evident. None-theless, he summarized its two main features as its ‘pragmatic value’, that is, its ability to provide ‘lessons for life’ (a feature Peardon valued as a traditional ele-ment of history), and its ‘philosophical spirit’, by which he meant its analytical illumination of the causes and eff ects of historical events, rather than its narra-tive fl ow. Against Ferguson’s description of his own work as demanding that the tenets of natural history be derived ‘from observation and experiment’,14 Pear-don perceived a rationalist mode of history in Ferguson’s writings consisting in a one-sided use of history, a neglect of sources and a careless projection of value


judgements onto past events.15 Yet in fact it was Ferguson’s explicit intention to avoid such practices.

Peardon was able to render his diagnosis more precise by using the oft en-repeated genre description off ered by Dugald Stewart, who seemed to function as ideographic custodian of the inheritance of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although Stewart had not spoken of ‘rationalistic historical writing’ as Pear-don would, he coined the term ‘conjectural history’ in regard to Adam Smith’s account of the origin of language in his Dissertation on the Origin of the Lan-guages (1761). Stewart also broadened the term to include narratives in the works of David Hume, Henry Home, Lord Kames and John Millar.16 Another representative of the next generation of Scottish scholars, professor of universal history at the University of Edinburgh, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Wood-houselee, decided that the label ‘conjectural history’ also suited Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), calling the work ‘the most elegant of this specimen’.17 Despite the fact that this historiographic categorization – both Stewart’s and Lord Woodhouselee’s – was part of an almost hagiographical approach towards their academic teachers, and thus excluded a fundamentally critical position per se, the label ‘conjectural history’ nonetheless allowed Stew-art and Lord Woodhouselee to distance themselves from Hume’s and Ferguson’s attempts to develop a universal history with scientifi c claims.

For Stewart, the advantage of the method he identifi ed as a form of ‘phil-osophical investigation’ was that it fi nally allowed historians to extend their studies into eras – prehistory, for example – that were not accessible via histori-cal-empirical methods and to speculate on the correlation of the development of society and the advancement of sciences. According to Stewart, the strategy of ‘conjectural historians’ was to replace the absent sources on human prehistory with travellers’ reports. Th ese accounts would allegedly reveal all-encompassing models of civilization and enable the historical reconstruction of various states of successive refi nement.18 Th e reliance on accounts of ‘rude nations’ and the use of anthropological data permitted the development of analogies that would allow plausible conjecture about epochs of early history otherwise subject only to wild fantasizing. However, in another work, Stewart expressed fundamental qualms about this philosophically-inspired but only apparent empiricism:

To a philosophical mind, no study can certainly be more delightful than this species of history; but as an organ of instruction, I am not disposed to estimate its practical utility … It does not seem to me at all adapted to interest the curiosity of novices; nor is it so well calculated to engage the attention of those who wish to enlarge their scientifi c knowledge, as persons accustomed to refl ect on the phenomena and laws of the intellectual world.19


Lord Woodhouselee was even less inclined to hide his discomfort with the fl awed methodological foundations of this form of philosophical and natural history. For him it was a question of scientifi c integrity to exclude ‘sourceless’ prehistory from his concept of ‘universal history’. He thus restricted himself to the history of political events for which sources existed.20 For this reason, his view of ‘conjectural history’ was even more drastic than Stewart’s:

To readers of a metaphysical turn, or even to those of a lively imagination and sanguine temperament, who are caught by a beautiful and artful hypothesis, such inquiries aff ord the highest pleasure; while by the more sober, cautious, yet penetrat-ing intellect, they are received with jealousy, scrutinized with phlegm, and in the end coldly laid aside, as airy, vague, and unsubstantial speculations.21

In supporting a new concept of history, the self-assurance of Stewart and Wood-houselee is unmistakable. In fact, their single-minded confi dence in the empirical focus of the historical sciences already points to nineteenth-century positivism, one representative of which, Henry Th omas Buckle, would echo clearly Dugald Stewart’s more cautiously formulated criticism of ‘conjectural history’.22

Th e contrast between Anglo-American ‘positivism’ and German ‘histori-cism’ was most fully expressed in the methodological debate between Buckle and Johann Gustav Droysen. Droysen rejected Buckle’s naturalistic approach to history, insisting that there was only one specifi c method necessary to ‘elevate history to the rank of a science’: hermeneutics.23 Despite their methodological diff erences, there was agreement concerning the limits of the Enlightenment concept of the history of mankind, regardless of whether it was exposed in Scot-tish (Lord Kames, John Millar, James Dunbar), French (Anne Robert Turgot, Condorcet) or German (Isaak Iselin, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Herder) considerations of the history and diversity of the species.24 Furthermore, not-withstanding diff erent views about whether naturalistic models could be applied to historical investigations, there was agreement regarding the need to jettison theoretical frameworks that invoked the ‘natural history of man’, just as there was a shared recognition of the methodological potential inherent in eight-eenth-century historical anthropology.25

In the debate on the paradigm shift from Enlightenment historiography to historicism, Peter Burke introduced the term ‘counterrevolution’ to describe how the new methodological canon of the nineteenth century was a reaction to an earlier and fundamental methodological renewal of historical writing in the eighteenth century.26 Ferguson’s understanding of historiography permits an investigation of the very nature of this renewal. If one adopts the vantage point delineated above (the construction of genealogies in the history of histo-riography), then the criticisms of subsequent generations resemble primarily a polemical gesture aimed at setting boundaries. Th e condemnations, especially


of the nineteenth century, miss their target precisely in so far as the methodo-logical contrast between empiricism and rationalism, as used by scholars such as Stewart, Droysen, Buckle, Meindecke and Peardon, is invoked to discredit Fer-guson’s approach as lacking the requisite empirical or rational element. Droysen and Meinecke charge Ferguson with a defi cient philosophical understanding of history, but Buckle and Peardon indict the Scot for an insuffi cient empirical grounding.

Why are such divergent critiques possible? Th e answer may reside in how both sets of criticisms are anachronistic projections on a model that, in fact, rejects such a binary scheme. Th e simplistic model of the history of science was constructed on legends of putative clarity about the methods of each philosopher and was typically combined with a schematic epistemology.27 In such teleologi-cal histories of epistemology it was pretended that all historical methods could be categorized into a rationalist or empiricist lineage. In contrast to this simplis-tic scheme, the defi ning principle of Ferguson’s model sought to reconcile the methodological poles of induction and deduction, which only a short time later, prominently represented by Immanuel Kant, were said to be incommensurate28

Ferguson’s methodological considerations concerning the history of man were beyond the pale of traditional history of historiography on the one hand and beyond the limitations of history of science on the other. In combining the scientifi c empirical and the rationalistic philosophical approach to natural his-tory, Ferguson developed a specifi c historical advancement of Hume’s ‘science of man’.

Hume’s Concept of the ‘Science of Man’David Hume’s concept of the ‘science of man’ may be considered as the intel-lectual starting point for Ferguson’s model of history. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), Hume portrays the aims and postulates of a scientifi cally-renewed study of humankind as a clearly executable battle plan:

From this station we may extend our conquests over all those sciences, which more intimately concern human life … Th ere is no question of importance, whose deci-sion is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in eff ect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security. And as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.29

Th e inductive method should no longer be restricted to the philosophy of nature but introduced to the study of the causes of human actions.30 As a result, anthro-


pology no longer serves as a preparation (propaedeutic) for other sciences but becomes their very foundation. What the empirical data for this new science should consist of and what methods should be used in this ‘science of man’ – questions that concern practical implementations – were only secondary to Hume.31 He restricted himself to the statement that sources such as historical accounts and anthropological fi eld studies should be consulted and that these could be obtained primarily from travel reports.32 In this respect, history off ered a reservoir of case studies to replace the experimentation called for in the natural sciences:

Th ese records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fi xes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.33

However, Hume remained sceptical about the extent to which the historical process itself – beyond functioning as a source of data for anthropology – could be scientifi cally apprehended. Although Hume’s philosophy and historiography must be interpreted as very closely related,34 he always perpetuated a curious epistemological separation between his philosophical and historical work. He pursued historical studies primarily for their literary and educational value, not for their innovative use of sources, their theoretical refl ections, or even their putative scientifi c claims.35 In relation to his ‘science of man’, he found the use-fulness of history to be based on the axiom of the uniformity (and immutability) of human nature throughout time and place,36 a postulate of natural law that in hindsight seems to contrast with historical thinking but whose acceptance was requisite for the scientifi c permeation of anthropological laws to which Hume aspired.

For Hume, historia, as the empirical foundation of the ‘science of man’, was comparable to experimentation in nature. History was consulted both as an inexhaustible reservoir of anecdotes (in the rhetorical sense) and also as a tem-poral space out of which one might glean information on the development of certain human qualities, just as a natural scientist might derive knowledge from the observation of natural events.37 History itself, however, remained a region that could not be fathomed scientifi cally; its laws, like those of nature, could not be deciphered. Th us, the generally valid principles of the ‘science of man’, which in Hume’s view should serve as the foundation for all other sciences, are not found or discovered in any historical laws or processes but in the nature of human beings. Th e evidence for a specifi c and uniform human nature is gleaned from cases and examples scattered throughout history. Th rough appeal to human nature, now understood to provide the scientifi c basis of our knowledge of the


causes of human actions, Hume sought to comprehend social phenomena such as religion, economy and morals.

Hume’s account implies that history is the foundation of the ‘science of man’, which itself is the basis for all other avenues of knowledge; yet history itself lacks any grounding. If this is so, then Hume has left open some methodological prob-lems in the realization of the ‘science of man’.38 Th is is not to say that Hume’s philosophical and historical works do not off er some mutual substantiation; however, whereas Hume’s mitigated empirical epistemology opens a perspective on man as a scientifi c object, history has no independent, or scientifi cally revis-able, status in the ‘science of man’.39

Turning from history to natural history, Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) reveals his interest in anthropological as well as historical insights. A ‘nat-ural history’ sits between the poles of a philosophical treatment (which assumes uniformity) and a historical treatment (which assumes change). Traditionally, historia naturalis had been reserved for empirical-classifi catory data collection. By expanding it to include humans, and thus incorporating historia humana, it gained completely new signifi cance.40 Th e result was that authors of ‘natural histories of man’, such as Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames or John Millar, were now confronted with theoretical questions. Some of these pertained to the inter-dependent relationship between historical investigation and the philosophical hypothesis of uniformity. For example, to what extent can basic anthropologi-cal axioms – such as uniformity or perfectibility – tolerate diverging empirical results? Similarly, is it possible to reconcile static anthropological assumptions with models of historical movements, such as those already furnished in Buf-fon’s Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (from 1749)?41 Buff on not only included man within his concept of natural history, but he emphasized the his-torical development of the whole species. Th e apparent polarization between uniformity (philosophy) and change (history) in the fi eld of the natural history of man could be overcome once it was noticed that the very focus of investi-gation, mankind or humanity, could also serve as both historical object and philosophical subject.42 Ferguson plays a decisive role in that process.

Ferguson’s Epistemological Foundation for the Natural History of Mankind

Hume assumed that history provided the standard for creating an account of human nature that would be theoretically fruitful. Yet history seems to have no foundation of its own. How does Ferguson confront such problems emerging from Hume’s account?43 Ferguson seeks to defend the scientifi c investigation of history against the objection that any description of historical events is but an arbitrary sequence of collected data. To meet that objection, he must show


that history (or natural history) is not an enterprise in which there is simply an accumulation of facts; rather, history must invoke new methodological (and epistemological) standards to discover and to order facts.44 Ferguson seeks, therefore, to reconcile the alleged opposition of the nature of man on the one hand and the structure of history on the other. In Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769),45 an unusually popular textbook46 to accompany his classroom lectures, a schematic guide was off ered. As a contemporary reviewer summarized, ‘Th ese institutes contain heads from which lectures are given, which comprise masterly refl ections on the history of mankind, and an instructive analysis of the human mind; which exhibit an elegant and ingenious system of morality; and the most comprehensive views on jurisprudence and political law’.47

According to Ferguson, the only scientifi c account of all human concerns – whether present, past or future, whether of the species or of the individual – is the ‘natural history of man’.48 Only investigations along this path could yield knowledge of human nature. Th e complexity of any such ‘natural history’ arises out of its relation to two seemingly distinct disciplines: ‘history’ and ‘sci-ence’.49 Th is twofold allocation likewise results in two concerns: to describe how humans are, and, through the derivation of laws of natural history, to recognize how humans should be. For any description, the available data must be used as in natural philosophy: scientifi c results, according to Ferguson, can be obtained only if ‘general rules’ have been derived from the collection of otherwise isolated phenomena: ‘facts’. Every general rule that either describes facts or sets forth what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ is a ‘law of nature’. A general rule that is transferred to isolated phenomena is a ‘principle’. Explanations based on such principles are ‘theories’ or ‘systems’. In its method of creating ‘general rules’ from individual observations, science proceeds in an ‘analytic’ manner, while, on the other hand, the purpose of the ‘synthetic’ method is to advance from a general rule to its particular application. Th e analytic method is responsible for scientifi c ‘inven-tions’, while the synthetic method is responsible for ‘instruction’. A justifi cation or proof of some conclusion is either taken from ‘law’ (‘a priore’) or from the isolated phenomenon (‘a posteriore’).50

Ferguson’s account, however schematic, suggests that there is a methodologi-cal bridge between thesis development (scientia)51 and empirical data collection (historia).52 How is this so? Th e link relating the two diff erent forms of knowl-edge is the inquirer or agent. Th e general rules that are derived from observation are gleaned only through being an engaged participant in the ‘natural history of man’ that is under investigation. Only by being a participant could the histori-cal process prove decipherable. Th e epistemological linkage between the natural phenomenon ‘man’ and the cultural construction of ‘mankind’ as its own his-torical process – the identifi cation of the subject and object of perception – was a precedent condition for combining the natural and moral sciences. In relat-


ing the engaged participant to the knowledge of history, Ferguson created an all-embracing model for an innovative scientifi c genre that had no appropriate name in eighteenth-century epistemology.53

In the early nineteenth century, however, a method able to mediate between an isolated empirical phenomenon and its surrounding structure came to be called ‘hermeneutics’. During the late eighteenth century this peculiar (and at that time unnamed) method was confi ned to religion, philosophy and literature. But with the invention of ‘hermeneutics’ in the nineteenth century historians of science came to neglect the eighteenth-century roots of this approach to under-standing human nature. Th e hermeneutical potential of eighteenth-century thought, such as Ferguson’s, consisted of understanding the rules of the natural history of mankind qua being a man.

One way of understanding the infl uence and innovation of Ferguson’s per-spective is by appealing to one of the German translators of Hume’s Essays, the Königsberg philosopher Christian Jakob Kraus. He redefi ned the adequate method for what ‘Stewart calls theoretical or conjectural history’ and what ‘Hume calls natural history’ as twofold: ‘Th e principles and use of history are followed by a doubled form of theory: 1) hermeneutics as the critique of histori-cal data 2) heuristic as the critique of historical method’.54 With these epistemic considerations Kraus seeks to follow Ferguson’s impulse to mediate between the empirical natural history of man (Anthropologie) and the philosophical history of mankind (Geschichtsphilosophie).55 Kraus’s example shows that Ferguson’s solution – the synthesis of the empirical and the philosophical history of man-kind (combined with an interest in moral philosophy) – was acknowledged for its methodological innovativeness, a theoretical export of the Scottish Enlight-enment not typically recognized as such.

Ferguson pointed out that, analogous to the physical law, the correspondence between the isolated historical fact and the scientifi c historical theory was ‘moral law’.56 Whereas the subjects of the physical laws are collected under such catego-ries as mechanism, vegetation and animal life, the subjects of moral science are ‘any matters of choice, together with the nature and actions of free and voluntary agents’.57 Ferguson’s essential contribution to the history of historiography was consequently no proto-materialistic model, as sometimes understood, but a con-ception of individual morality as the indicator of the historical sustainability of societies. ‘Any matters of choice’ were linked with the moral law which again was deduced from human nature. At fi rst glance Ferguson’s proposal might suggest his embrace of a Kantian solution, but the crucial diff erence consists in Fergu-son’s empirical, not metaphysical, foundation of morals. By combining history and science, his epistemological foundation of the natural history of mankind had a lasting eff ect on the theoretical refl ections of historiography, whose purely rhetorical function in the tradition of the historia magistra vitae was relegated


to the background, like static constructions of natural law – similar to a natu-ral condition.58 Especially in the Anglo-American historiographical tradition – as represented in Peardon’s account – Ferguson’s style of historical writing was traced to the humanist rhetorical tradition. Th is attribution ignores, however, that the travelogues reporting the customs of ‘rude nations’ did not serve only as a storehouse of synchronous moral examples but provided a diachronic per-spective to assist in understanding the progressions and regressions of societies. In this way Ferguson’s preoccupation with history would allow him insight into the political and moral status of contemporary society. His interest in Roman history must be interpreted in this context.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the methodological wand for all comparative studies and fashionable natural histories of mankind involved the application of analogies, comparisons and causalities; the application of such analogies, which presumed the basic anthropological axioms of the uni-formity and the perfectibility of man, led to an ever more predictable history of mankind.59 Under the auspices of a critical, always revisable theory of civi-lization, daring and unhistorical constructions were no longer tenable for Ferguson, for these served primarily to legitimize certain philosophical aims.60 Ferguson’s methodological reservation therefore aimed at authors who uncriti-cally supported the theory of perfectibility or depravity, theses closely related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy and its epigones.61 In line with Hume’s academic scepticism, Ferguson reminded readers that such heuristic models of society could not be mistaken for historical facts, nor did they mirror reality.62 Every form of historiography serves to create ‘informations’ as Ferguson put it: classical-political historiography does this illustratively, in narrative form, while the ‘natural history of man’ analyzes facts explanatorily, in descriptive form.63 Th is is why the responsibility of every natural historian is to discover and to expound on facts, not to engage in supposition: ‘the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to off er conjectures’.64

Dugald Stewart’s equation of ‘natural history’ with ‘conjectural history’ not only ignored Ferguson’s own conscious methodological demarcation,65 it manifested the narrowing of the scientifi c view to a method whose focus was strongly inductive. Stewart’s codifi cation of the natural historian’s approach as ‘philosophical investigation’ lost sight of the fact that the natural historian con-sciously rejected conjecture.66 At this juncture, the scientifi c-historical aspect of Burke’s claim of ‘counterrevolution’ must not be forgotten: For the early critique of conjectural history may explain less about the concept itself than about the desires of a new generation to silhouette their claims against the achievements of a previous generation – regardless of how revolutionary the earlier groups might have been.


Stewart used his hagiographic studies to stylize his own approach as the crowning end of a diffi cult tug-of-war to establish the right method. For Stewart, his approach was ‘in strict conformity to the rules of inductive philosophizing’ and thus strictly distinct from systems based on ‘hypotheses’, a description (or accusation) that Stewart, following Th omas Reid, aimed at Hume’s entire philo-sophical system as well as at ‘conjectural historians’, such as Ferguson, who stood in Hume’s tradition.67 As a matter of fact, nothing seemed more senseless to Fer-guson than the simple collection of facts with no systematic approach.

In collecting the materials of history, we are seldom willing to put up with our subject merely as we fi nd it. We are loth to be embarrassed with a multiplicity of particu-lars, and apparent inconsistencies. In theory we profess the investigation of general principles; and in order to bring the matter of our inquiries within the reach of our comprehension, are disposed to adopt any system.68

To counteract the arbitrary choice of particulars, Ferguson fi rst categorizes facts in accordance with two natural laws: the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral’. A phys-ical law designates a change to which one may attribute two types of causes: ‘Effi cient, and fi nal. Th e effi cient cause, is the energy or power producing an eff ect. Th e fi nal cause, is the end or purpose for which an eff ect is produced.’69 Th e ‘fi nal cause’ is the goal of moral laws whose validity and power are obliga-tory; however, physical laws are related only to actual changes and are thus the immediate object of the sciences. Accordingly, for Ferguson, the function of a theory is to reduce observed changes to general principles.70 Th ese general principles could not be arbitrarily accepted, however, but had to stand up to the same criteria of ‘probability’ and ‘compatibility’ that were expected of the other natural laws.71

Th e problem of the theoretical distinction between the arbitrary and the probable ascertainment of a general rule was elucidated by Ferguson – as well as other eighteenth-century authors – by comparing Newton’s method with the Cartesian world view. While Newton derived his theory of planetary motion from the general study of the movement of bodies and forces, Descartes pro-moted a ‘false science’ through his untenable hypotheses: ‘Th us the vortex of Descartes, being a mere supposition, could not explain the planetary motions: and the terms, idea, image, or picture, of things, being terms merely metaphori-cal, cannot explain human knowledge and thought’.72

With this prominent example from the history of science the contrast between inductive and deductive methods was tempered because it was obvi-ous that, in the end, every theory rests on basic facts and no fact can be proven a priori.73 Th is sort of justifi cation of empiricism invokes the very limits of knowl-edge and, in so doing, makes Ferguson a learned disciple of Hume. Nonetheless, there remain diff erences between the two. In the tradition of the early modern


meaning of historia, Hume uses natural history as a research fi eld for the study of human motives. Ferguson’s conception of history is more universal because it includes historia naturalis and historia civilis. Analogous to Hume’s Natural His-tory of Religion, Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society is laid out as a compendium of the characteristics of man. But, in contrast to Hume, Ferguson regards the characteristics of human nature as accessible only by comprehending the continual development of mankind over time: ‘Th is progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal. Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.’74 It is unambiguously clear that, for Ferguson, human nature cannot be derived from an arbitrary series of historical examples. Only a systematic comparative review of the whole process of civilization can prove man’s development: ‘If the question be put, What the mind of man could per-form, when let to itself, and without the aid of any foreign direction? we are to look for our answer in the history of mankind.’75

‘Mankind’ as the Object of History

By presenting a concept for combining and naturalizing the traditional divi-sion of man according to an animal and a rational nature, Ferguson followed the maxims of the ‘science of man’, thereby invoking anthropological premises such as the ‘uniformity’ and ‘perfectibility’ of man.76 Although the object of his eff orts was also to establish universal laws of human nature, his scientifi c pro-gramme was decisively expanded. As his object of research Ferguson chose not ‘man’ but ‘mankind’: ‘Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted. Th e history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and the thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species; and every experiment rela-tive to this subject should be made with entire societies not with single men.’77 By discovering the ‘system of things, in the midst of which mankind are placed, and from the varieties of aspect under which the species has appeared under dif-ferent ages and nations’, it seemed possible for Ferguson to acquire knowledge of human nature.78

Ferguson’s new focus on ‘mankind’ made him one of the founders of sociology in the lineage of modern sciences.79 Without question the discovery of mankind as a scientifi c object paved the way for further inquiries into the diff erent forms and conditions of society. Yet this was not Ferguson’s original intention. His investigations sought a scientifi c foundation for moral philosophy, as well as the elucidation of guidelines for moral practice. By increasing our insights into our own species, the human being is granted perspectives on the laws of his nature and the possibility to mould his political environment. In other words, for Fer-guson, the fi ndings of natural philosophy are accompanied by a liberation from


external forces, thereby allowing the possibility of self-determination: ‘And it may be said of mankind in general, that the extension of knowledge is an acces-sion of power’.80

Th e possibility to engage creatively in human development reveals how Fer-guson has broadened the older concept of ‘natural history’ – as the propaedeutics of anthropological data for moral philosophy – so as to incorporate the concept of ‘civil history’.81 Such a bivalent approach is refl ected in Ferguson’s dual-struc-tured historiography that manifests a theoretical and inductive method, as well as a narrative structure with a pragmatic intention (one guided by its very inductive procedure). Ferguson’s attempt at draft ing a ‘civil history’ has to be understood as a ‘humanistic experiment’ for transmitting his opinion of ‘civic virtues’;82 it is also a manifestation of the increasing infl uence of a specifi c historical conscious-ness in the Scottish Enlightenment. An Essay on the History of Civil Society is a watershed that marks Ferguson’s increasing distance from ‘pure’ pneumatics and moral philosophy and his growing alliance with a scientifi cally studied history as an indispensable basis for anthropology. His History of the Progress and Ter-mination of the Roman Republic – which he considered as his main work – is the product of this development.

Not only does Ferguson provide, in his appeal to mankind, a modifi ed object of history, but he also suggests that the whole species is the target, or addressee, of his moral philosophy. Th e whole species (‘mankind’) now becomes the benefi ciary and intention (‘humanitas’) of history. Th us, ‘mankind’ is both the ontological basis of research and the normative goal of human beings.83 Once history becomes an ancillary science of moral philosophy, it is of crucial importance whether historical data are used as a basis for an act- or end-ori-ented version of practical philosophy.84 Hume’s study of history was indebted to the act-oriented practical philosophy and showed its normative content in the analysis of historical conditions. In Ferguson’s Essay, history serves as a basis for an end-oriented practical philosophy, and there we observe a shift of the telos: turning from the individual maxims to the historical process itself. Th e limits of a scientifi cally ascertainable history of mankind become the framework of a historically derived and secular moral philosophy. Th at Ferguson created a secu-lar, practical and generic moral philosophy in a historical perspective makes it appropriate to describe his style as ‘pragmatic historiography’.85 Th e pragmatic nature of Ferguson’s style is not that which Peardon characterized as within the humanist rhetoric tradition; rather it is a narrative method bridging the confus-ing empirical material on man – as provided, for example, by travel reports – and the new theoretical conceptualization of the history of mankind.86

Ferguson thus presented a methodological solution to mediate between disparate elements (man, mankind), specifi c epistemological worries (a priori, a posteriori) and various methods (deduction, induction) of naturalizing the


history of mankind. Ferguson’s methodological proposition was a sort of mid-dle road between empirical observation and abstract formalization. Hence his model of a historically-informed anthropology existed beyond the limitations of the newly-founded sciences at the beginning of the nineteenth century.87 How-ever these new disciplinary limitations obstructed the view of the histories of science.

Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in history implied that the contrasts between anthropology, history and moral philosophy could be amalgamated into a sci-entifi c anthropological history that diff ered fundamentally from the historical anthropology propagated in Hume’s ‘science of man’. Th e discovery of mankind, its development and destination as an object of science, has had fundamental consequences for the history of historiography. Even if successive generations defamed the combination of philosophy, ethics, anthropology and history as inadmissible, propagating instead a purely empirical, positivistic or historicist solution, the new scientifi c focus on mankind (civilization, society, species, cul-tural history) was the indispensable basis for their own writings.88 Ferguson’s epistemology of the natural history of mankind was one of the fi rst daring attempts to emancipate history from its traditional propaedeutic function and establish it as a methodically independent, scientifi cally comprehended research discipline.

AcknowledgementsI should like to thank Gregor Pelger and Bethany Wiggin for their indispensable help. I am also grateful to Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle for their criti-cism and encouragement.

– 147 –

9 FERGUSON’S POLITICS OF ACTION

Fania Oz-Salzberger

‘Th at man is not made for repose’1 is a major conclusion of Adam Ferguson’s analysis of human nature and of human history. Men act or languish; nations are at best ‘forward, enterprising, inventive, and industrious’,2 at times suff er ‘periods of remissness’,3 and at worst decline and die. Th e need and the desire for action are common to men and beasts, but they are interwoven into human history in ways unique to the species. To begin with, human exertion is the fundament of society and polity. Yet human motives – such as ambition and avarice – may overturn political structures and reduce liberty. In modern times, safety and well-being can render physical exertion elective and induce political laziness, causing corruption and decline. Commercial societies also run the risk of departmental-izing human actions in a way that may – but need not – threaten active political virtue, which Ferguson took to be man’s highest end.

Ferguson’s philosophy of action is not part of a metaphysical system. Unlike his good friend David Hume, he did not create a theory of passion, action and eff ect. Still less does his work constitute an early contribution to analytic phi-losophy of action of the twentieth-century brand.4 His aim, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and in the Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792),5 was twofold: to off er a descriptive natural history of the human species, and to interpose it with a civil history of human societies with a prescriptive core. Th us, his description of active human nature led to a normative analysis of action in society, ripening into an assertion of the importance of public commitment requisite from citizens of a good polity. Th e normative aspect of his writings, indeed, stretched beyond the extrapolation of what needs to be done: his texts and lectures were themselves intended as a mind-enhancing and politically aff ec-tive enterprise, an action through words. Most of his major works, including the Essay, the Roman Republic, the Principles and many of the essays, could be read in context as essayistic political acts, rather than mere intellectual exercises in system-making.6


Ferguson lived up to his creed; his own public exertions, from the Black Watch chaplaincy through the Carlisle Commission, place him among the polit-ically active thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, of which he was arguably the most military-minded. Considering the distinct overlap between his moral-political standards and his historical actor’s persona, it is somewhat ironic that an anonymous posthumous estimation tended to focus on the fi gure Ferguson had cut, a ‘Scottish Cato’ in manners and appearance, rather than on his well-aligned philosophical and active pursuits. ‘He was’, one nineteenth-century biographer wrote of him, ‘more than he did’.7 It would be fairer to say that Ferguson was a constant doer, and a great pontifi cator for deeds.

Active Nature and Public Exertion

Th e idea of human self-realization through exertion, smoothly coupled with civic prowess8 through active political participation, runs the gamut of Fergu-son’s philosophical writings. It is found in the strongly-worded Essay, in the far milder university textbook Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769), and, in histori-cized form, in Th e History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783); it is also prevalent in the politically more cautious, post-Revolution Principles. If Ferguson reconsidered his conviction in his late years, this did not tone down his commitment to political vita activa as such.

More than any other Scottish writer of his day Ferguson equated ‘mankind’ with a vigorous notion of ‘men’, and ‘society’ with active civic life. His famous dictum on the historical and methodological primacy of society, ‘mankind are to be taken in groupes’,9 is in eff ect complemented by the statement that ‘nations consist of men’.10 Polities owe their existence and welfare to the exercise of certain natural traits that are essentially and exclusively masculine, such as play, pursuit and confl ict. Th e ‘disposition to action’, the love of adversity, is what ‘every boy knows at his play’.11 In ‘rude’ societies man is the hunter, gamester, warrior; in the ancient polities he was the soldier and statesman; in modern states he ought to maintain an all-rounded civic personality, a non-specialized political skill and military prowess. Perennial human psychology, inborn masculine traits, primi-tive tribal codes, and the history of ancient and modern societies – all provided Ferguson with a linear or concentric model for substantiating a general truth: men are prone to action.

Ferguson does not off er a theoretical justifi cation for the transition from a pre- and extra-political ‘disposition to action’ – which he treats mostly in a descriptive manner – to the highly normative treatment of political exertion and public-minded activism. His works, especially the Essay, glide with ease from manly turbulence as a natural trait to the virtuous political exertions of dedi-cated members in a functioning republic.

Ferguson’s Politics of Action 149

At the bottom of this great chain of exertion are ‘[man’s] associates, the dog and the horse’, and other ‘noble’ animals that share his love of play and fi ght.12 At the top are the loft iest human goals, political freedom and individual integ-rity, which must be supported by constant action and fruitful civic strife. ‘Th e rivalship of separate communities, and the agitations of a free people, are the principles of political life, and the school of men’, in the words of the Essay.13 Th e Institutes tones down the case for discord but praises political exertion: ‘Th e rea-son and the heart of man are best cultivated in the exercise of social duties, and in the conduct of public aff airs’.14 Th e endorsement of confl ict resurfaces in the Principles, where ‘Th e trials of ability, which men mutually aff ord to one another in the collisions of free society, are the lessons of a school which Providence has opened for mankind’.15 As late as 1796, in a letter to John Macpherson, the septuagenarian Ferguson again emphasized the need for individual civic involve-ment, even at the price of political restlessness and civil strife.16

Competing boys, pugnacious savages and playful animals were thus part of Ferguson’s assertion of the active role of individual citizens in a contingent, open-ended, and not necessarily progressive history of civil society. Yet modern polities complicate the issue of exertion in ways unknown to savage societies or to childhood playgrounds. As David Kettler suggested, active lives require an accommodating locus, a ‘presentation of circumstances as hospitable to action’.17 While beasts, savages and young boys normally enjoy a natural stomping ground, men and citizens, ancient as well as modern, require both good fortune and civic fortitude in order to act out their natural propensity.

Th e crux of Ferguson’s moral philosophy, defi ned as ‘the study of what men ought to be, and of what they ought to wish, for themselves and for their coun-try’,18 was thus a theory of constant business as opposed to repose, of negotium rather than otium, on the personal as well as the political level.19 Th e underly-ing dichotomy was not between savage and civilized man, but between man employed in action, natural or moral, and man languishing in corruption or slav-ery. Accordingly, ‘Th e admiration Cicero entertained for literature, eloquence, and civil accomplishments, was not more real than that of a Scythian for such a measure of similar endowments as his own apprehension could reach’.20 Never-theless, the balance between negotium and otium was not a constant in human history. Refi nement undermines man’s active nature in general, and the citizen’s public exertion in particular. Hence Ferguson’s move from descriptive to nor-mative tenor as his accounts of civil society reach eras of luxury, ancient and modern.

Political virtue, for Ferguson, was thus a matter of conscious participation. Good states, he insisted, are ‘states where diff erent orders of men are summoned to partake in the government of their country’.21 Th is ran against the grain of fashionable social ideas of sensibility and aestheticism, against the recent enno-


blement of the private sphere – in eff ect, against the new-found respectability of domestic and female approaches to life. Ferguson’s history of civil society was not a story of growing harmony and peace – ‘man is too disposed to opposi-tion’ – but of perpetual discord which is deliberately poised against the model of feminine domesticity. Men, Ferguson is happy to say, ‘will be forever sepa-rated into bands, and form a plurality of nations’, at least until ‘we have reduced mankind to the state of a family’.22 As the context makes clear, this ‘reduction’, or reversal of the Aristotelian account of social evolution, will fortunately never take place. Ferguson had little time for the female version of human nature, and even less time for the ‘feminine principle’ in the rise of Western civilization. He did not take the trouble, as Hume did, to relate to ‘my female readers’.23 Th e only women making any meaningful appearance in the Essay are the ladies who ‘never look abroad’ and complain about bored husbands disturbing them on a rainy day, thereby demonstrating men’s natural disposition to outdoor life.24 ‘Looking abroad’, in the Essay as well as the Principles, denotes Ferguson’s notion of an essential human (that is, male) cognitive activity: in order to enhance his ‘improveable capacity’, man ought to be accountable to society and ‘to look abroad into the general order of things’.25 When societies decline into excessive fi nesse and compartmentalize the classical civic tasks, ‘citizens and soldiers might come to be distinguished as much as women and men’.26 Men, unlike women, are in need of ‘pursuit’.27

Th e noun ‘pursuit’, Ferguson’s favourite term for manly exertion as well as political verve, appears no less than seventy-six times in the text of the Essay, and no less than fi ft y times in the Roman Republic, without counting its derivative verbs. In Ferguson’s language, ‘pursuit’ is not limited to the perusal of material improvement, nor is it solely the game-hunter’s expertise. It is, rather, the diff er-ential marking manly departure from eff eminate sensuality, from the non-action of the languid. ‘Sensuality is easily overcome by any of the habits of pursuit which usually engage an active mind. When curiosity is awake, or when passion is excited, even in the midst of the feast when conversation grows warm, grows jovial, or serious, the pleasures of the table we know are forgotten. Th e boy con-temns them for play, and the man of age declines them for business.’28

‘Play’ is a constant companion of Ferguson’s rhetoric of pursuit, game, sport, business and civic action. His usage of the term smoothly encompassed the full spectrum of its meaning – playing a role, theatre acting, child’s play – with a unifying panache. A signifi cant early appearance couples ‘play’ with ‘man’ in Ferguson’s sermon to the Black Watch Regiment in 1746, where he quoted 2 Samuel 10:12, ‘be of good courage, and let us play the man for our people, and for the cities of our God’. Th is was a well-chosen citation. Ferguson’s sermon was aimed to make sure that his Highlander soldiers, fresh from the Jacobite trauma of 1745, understood that civic loyalty must be given to demos (qua body


politic) rather than to ethnos or tribal affi liation, to commonwealth rather than to birthplace:

By a man’s country is meant that society or united body of men, of which he is a mem-ber, sharing all the advantages that arise from such a union. Not merely the soil or spot on which he was born … No: the name of country bears a meaning more sacred and more interesting. It was not for the place of their nativity that Jacob exhorts the Israelites to play the man; it was for their people and for the cities of their God.29

‘Playing the man’ is no accidental turn of phrase. Ferguson took play in all its guises to be the true matrix for human happiness through exertion.30 Borrowing the Stoic account of life as a constant game, he latched it to his notion of compe-tition and restlessness igniting every happy civil state:

Th e Stoics conceived human life under the image of a Game; at which the enter-tainment and merit of the players consisted in playing attentively and well, whether the stake was great or small. Th is game the author has had occasion to see played in camps, on board ships, and in presence of an enemy, with the same or greater ease than is always to be found in the most secure situations.31

Th ere is thus a continuum of hunt, war, play, ‘business’ (in its broad eight-eenth-century sense) and civic participation, all epitomizing for Ferguson the realization of men’s true nature: ‘business or play may amuse them alike’.32 Out-side this spectrum of exertion is the luxurious repose of the eff eminate, as well as the narrow dealings of the specialized economic actors, a product of the separa-tion of professions. Both these areas, which may technically provide activities of certain kinds, are excluded from natural manly action, as well as from moral active virtue. Th e indolent rich and the confi ned producers and traders are, to use Kettler’s terms, acting out of proper place. Th ey lack ‘a context consonant with actions meeting an ethical obligation’.33

On this point Ferguson parted ways with both David Hume and Adam Smith. It was partly with a view of Hume that Ferguson may have directed his critique of modern scholarship as divorced from political life. ‘It is peculiar to modern Europe’, he wrote, ‘to rest so much of the human character on what may be learned in retirement, and from the information of books’.34 Th is is not so much a refrain against Hume’s own idea of active man,35 but a critique of histori-cal analyses of modern states that disposed of the active citizen.

Ferguson’s engagement with Hume over the kernels of human motivating power is laid out in the Essay without referring to Hume by name, but poign-antly denoting his A Treatise of Human Nature:

Th e very terms pleasure and pain, perhaps, are equivocal; but if they are confi ned, as they appear to be in many of our reasonings, to the mere sensations which have a ref-erence to external objects, either in the memory of the past, the feeling of the present,


or the apprehension of the future, it is a great error to suppose, that they comprehend all the constituents of happiness or misery.36

Ferguson rejects the gleaning of actions, even more so of moral actions, from pleasure and pain alone. ‘Th e mind’, he argues, ‘during the greater part of its existence, is employed in active exertions, not in merely attending to its own feeling of pleasure and pain’. Echoing the unnamed Hume again, he continues: ‘and the list of its faculties, understanding, memory, foresight, sentiment, will, and intention, only contains the names of its diff erent operations’.37 Such opera-tive categories are by no means exclusively reliant on the attraction to pleasure or the resentment of pain. Nor do they emerge from these, or any other, particular sensations or the mental picturing thereof. Rather, the mind’s faculties are set in their operative mode within the broader parameters of the human propensity for action itself. Men act, fi rst and foremost, because it is in their nature to act rather than repose:

[I]f what we call pleasure or pain, occupies but a small part of human life, compared to what passes in contrivance and execution, in pursuits and expectations, in conduct, refl ection, and social engagements; it must appear, that our active pursuits, at least on account of their duration, deserve the greater part of our attention. When their occasions have failed, the demand is not for pleasure, but for something to do; and the very complaints of a suff erer are not so sure a mark of distress, as the stare of the languid.38

A similar reliance on active pursuit underlies Ferguson’s critique of Hume’s and Smith’s political economy. Commercial society in its modern phase may become hostile to ‘active pursuits’ not because of the accumulation of wealth and the attachment to luxury in themselves, but because of the physical and political laziness they generate. Similarly, the ‘separation of professions’ left mankind pur-suing activities, no doubt, but such that deprived them of well-rounded manly exertion. Unlike Hume and Smith, Ferguson’s idea of the polity nevertheless depended on sustaining the derogatory sense of the eff eminate, the economi-cally self-interested and the apolitically ‘polite’. Prosperity and progress could well be the unintended consequences of commercial selfi shness and accumula-tion of technical skill – indeed, Ferguson was one of the best presenters of this innovative idea – but political membership must always remain intentional, assertive, and thus (by defi nition) ‘manly’. Political participation and military valour, Ferguson argued against Smith, cannot be ‘delegated & become matter of Separate Profession’ without undermining ‘the Genius & Character of man’.39 A modern society of polite and commercial fellow-subjects is doomed to decline – just like its ancient predecessors – if stripped of its citizens’ militia and, so to speak, its agora. Th us, Ferguson was perhaps the only major Scottish Enlighten-ment thinker for whom the term ‘politics’ denoted a lively practice as well as a


scholarly pursuit. A man of action was no less entitled than a retiring scholar to be called a politician.40 It is from within the active life, not from the scholar’s detached stance, that both philosophy and virtue derive their true meaning.41

Active Political VirtueTh e derivation of man’s political persona from his natural restlessness, and the ensuing emphasis on modern man’s political calling in the midst of – if not against the grain of – commercial and polite society, are hallmarks of Ferguson’s attempt to reconstruct a politics of action for the modern European state, or at least for Britain.42 Th e extent of Ferguson’s republican commitment is a mat-ter for controversy among scholars. As I have argued at length,43 Ferguson used republican language oft en and consistently. Th us, the Essay’s second edition, in 1768, spelled out that in the past ‘men civilized were men practiced in the duty of citizens’, while in the refi ned and commercial society of his day ‘men civi-lized are scholars, men of fashion and traders’.44 Acknowledging that the term ‘civil’ and its derivatives ran a broad gamut of denotations in eighteenth-century vocabularies, oft en opposed to his preferred meaning, Ferguson left no doubt on his preference for meanings linked to public-minded active citizenship.

Th at republican ideas are linked to citizens’ public-minded actions is made clear by numerous citations, such as the following passage in the Essay. Fergu-son’s moral approbation of the republican citizen rather than the monarchic subject is clear from the context.

Th e republican must act in the state, to sustain his pretensions; he must join a party, in order to be safe; he must form one, in order to be great. Th e subject of monarchy refers to his birth for the honour he claims; he waits on a court, to shew his impor-tance; and holds out the ensigns of dependence and favour, to gain him esteem with the public.45

Notwithstanding his fascination with commercial modernity and his anticipa-tions of modern sociology and anthropology, Ferguson remained insistent on the classical idea of active political virtue during his whole philosophical career.46 While the Essay, published in 1767, is rightly considered the most ‘republican’ of Ferguson’s books, compared to the student textbook Institutes and to the later, post-Revolution, Principles, attention should be drawn to the strong republican colour of the Roman Republic of 1783, a three-volume opus tracing the demise of active civic virtue in Rome.47

Here was Ferguson’s distinct, and late, contribution to the Neo-Roman tradi-tion, which in early modern republican thought decisively broke from the Greek ideal of vita contemplativa and embraced the Roman notion of public-spirited citizenship.48 In the Principles, Ferguson pointedly cited Cato’s praise of action and process rather than ‘the end or purpose to which the action was directed’,


as quoted in Cicero’s De Finibus.49 Th is Ciceronian mindset made, for Fergu-son, the fi nest historical example for the requisite admixture of active virtue in philosophical thought and historical performance.50 Rome, republic at best and tyranny at its imperial worst, off ered the best historical array of civic experience. In sum, the Principles was aimed at demonstrating how ‘the turbulence of free states is contrasted with the seeming tranquillity of a despotical government’.51

Political freedom was born in action, borne by political actors, and eff ective only as the fruit of contemplation created within a pulsating vita activa. Such ideas shed much of their meaning in the reclusive calm of modern libraries. Most modern readers are no longer civic actors. Th ey tear politics – indeed, Greek and Roman expression as a whole – from its living context and turn it into an abstract aesthetics.

[W]e endeavour to derive from imagination and thought, what is in reality matter of experience and sentiment: and we endeavour, through the grammar of dead lan-guages, and the channel of commentators, to arrive at the beauties of thought and elocution, which sprang from the animated spirit of society, and were taken from the living impressions of an active life.52

Th is claim, in the fi rst part of the Essay, amounts to a demand that politics must not be reduced to a science. Ferguson did not mention Hume by name, but for-mulations such as the following target Hume’s ‘science’ by allusive vocabulary. If Hume’s pivotal essay claimed that ‘so great is the force of laws … that conse-quences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences aff ord us’,53 then so is Ferguson’s wording suggestively polemical in such passages as this:

Our attainments are frequently limited to the elements of every science, and seldom reach to that enlargement of ability and power which useful knowledge should give. Like mathematicians, who study the Elements of Euclid, but never think of mensura-tion, we read of societies, but do not propose to act with men: we repeat the language of politics, but feel not the spirit of nations: we attend to the formalities of a military discipline, but know not how to employ numbers of men to obtain any purpose by stratagem or force.54

Was Hume, for Ferguson, a political scientist seeking mathematical certainty but ‘feeling not the spirit of nations’? Th is can be left as an open question. It is signifi -cant, I suggest, that despite Hume’s psychological commitment to man’s active nature, his political histories tended to exclude individual actions – including public-minded ones – as viable means of making changes in history. Th us, Hume’s defi nition of ‘politics’ is invariably that of a discipline of enquiry rather than a practice, and his ‘politician’ is always a theorist, never a statesman. Furthermore, politics as science, just like physics and chemistry, ‘treat of general facts’,55 ‘laws


and forms of government [have] a uniform infl uence upon society’,56 and laws have ‘little dependence’ upon ‘the humours and tempers of men’.57

Ferguson may not have wished to confront Hume directly in the Essay, let-ting his vocabulary ensconce the polemics instead. His direct engagement with Hume was spelled out more clearly in an unpublished manuscript, ‘Of the Prin-ciple of Moral Estimation: David Hume, Robert Clerk, Adam Smith’, compiled in 1801 and 1806.58 In this imaginary dialogue, Clerk, evidently serving as Fer-guson’s mouthpiece,59 taunts Hume for thinking that ‘morality is founded on utility and that virtue is only a cow that gives milk of a particular sort, alms to the poor, and every mans due to himself ’.60 In the dialogue the personage of Hume cheerfully concedes that ‘moral virtue … is the utility or usefulness that proceeds from mind’, and he goes on to provoke Clerk (and Ferguson) by saying that ‘virtue for the most part is admired as a principle of self denial’.61 Clerk’s response is sharp:

Th at proceeds from the stupid notion that man is to estimate himself as he estimates a dead ox from his belly and four quarters so whatever he does without a view to that self is said to be self denial.62

And, a few paragraphs later, with evident Fergusonian equation of virtue as hap-piness and happiness as exertion:

When I talk of happiness, I do not go to the rabble in the street for an account of it. … I call that man happy who is habitually courageous and benevolent, whose occu-pations and thoughts are pleasant … If virtue is a term of praise and felicity, here I fi x it on goodness and wisdom, on fortitude, temperance and the occupations of a strenuous mind.63

Th e individual’s ‘strenuous mind’, blessed with fortitude and courage, is the cor-nerstone of Ferguson’s politics of action. It is the basis for his consistent demand that citizenship ought to return to the state of a self-conscious practice. As his unpublished dialogue makes clear, and his selection of words in the Essay sug-gests, he felt that his politics of action was, at the very least, on a collision course with Hume’s philosophical politics.

Unintended Consequences and Political Action

As the present context makes clear, Ferguson’s memorable phrasing of the con-cept of unintended consequences is misleading when taken, as is oft en the case, separately from his politics of participation. To be sure, the principle of sponta-neous historical progress is beautifully laid out in the Essay:

Like the winds, that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long


before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations, of men. Th e croud of mankind, are directed in their establishments and measures, by the cir-cumstances in which they are placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of any single projector.64

Yet Ferguson argued vehemently against reliance on self-regulating mechanisms in politics. Th e Habeas Corpus Act, touchstone of English freedom, ‘requires a fabric no less than the whole political constitution of Great Britain, a spirit no less than the refractory and turbulent zeal of this fortunate people, to secure its eff ects’.65 Nothing can replace constant, deliberate, virtuous human support for the legal mechanism of the well-ordered state. Modern society can rely neither on the man-made clockwork of its constitution, nor on the natural mechanism of self-regulating interests converging in the marketplace. Nature and laws are indispensable but insuffi cient; self-interest and professionalization are histori-cal explicatory factors but not political guarantors. All good states, regardless of their form of government, need some degree of manual operation by keen amateurs.

Th e essentiality of individual political action, derived from a broad theory of man’s active nature, is at the very core of Ferguson’s moral philosophy, from his 1745 sermon to the Highlanders regiment to the Principles of 1792. His politi-cal convictions may have fl owed and ebbed; his trust in the rule of the many may have abated as he grew older and witnessed its abuses; but his idea of the active, playful, turbulent man-citizen-warrior remained untainted by historical disappointment. Its presence throughout Ferguson’s life and work is a story of philosophical consistency.

– 157 –

10 FERGUSON AND THE ACTIVE GENIUS OF MANKIND

Craig Smith

From what we have already observed on the general characteristics of human nature, it has appeared, that man is not made for repose. In him, every amiable and respect-able quality is an active power, and every subject of commendation an eff ort. If his errors and his crimes are the movements of an active being, his virtues and happiness consist likewise in the employment of his mind; and all the lustre which he casts around him, to captivate or engage the attention of his fellow creatures, like the fl ame of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues: the moments of rest and of obscurity are the same.1

As the details of his life testify, Adam Ferguson, in all of his roles as academic, minister, soldier and diplomat, was fi rst and foremost a ‘man of action’,2 and it is perhaps only natural that a man of action should become so preoccupied with the concept of activity. Action lies at the heart of his social thought. His very understanding of human nature is couched in terms of his recognition of its active nature and the interactive nature of the societies in which mankind assembles. Th roughout his writings Ferguson considers the theme of action with remarkable consistency and frequency. Drawing from across his works, this essay reconstructs how Ferguson blends descriptive and normative argument to develop his conception of action, as a principle of human nature, into a ‘stand-ard of estimation for mankind’.3 Ferguson’s combination of the descriptive and the normative confronts him with a problem: how can he reconcile his crite-rion of moral judgement with his growing awareness of the signifi cance of the unintended consequences of social interaction? It will be argued that Ferguson seeks to resolve this question through the development of a concept of national character. Ferguson’s discussion of the fall of the Roman Republic illustrates his attempt to utilize a concept of national character or spirit as a means of extend-ing his moral principle to the assessment of social level outcomes. It is to this concept of national character that he attributes moral responsibility for out-


comes beyond the active power of individual agents. As a result of this Ferguson maintains that the fate of nations can provide us with moral lessons.

In the eighteenth-century debate over wealth and virtue Ferguson is oft en seen as the most ambivalent of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers in his reac-tion to commercial modernity. He has been characterized as an old-fashioned moralist fi ghting a ‘rear-guard civic moralism’4 against the acceptance of com-merce found in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. However, Ferguson is also fi ghting another, altogether more serious, sort of rearguard action. Th e increasingly sophisticated understanding of social interaction and history that developed in the eighteenth century had begun to undercut the traditional act of moralizing itself. Th e growing awareness, perhaps most famously expressed in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, of the distinction between naturalis-tic observation and normative judgement, and the conceptual sleight of hand employed by theories that shift between the two,5 was compounded by the reali-zation of the implications of social complexity. Ferguson himself is credited with one of the most eloquent descriptions of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with unintended consequences and social complexity with his statement that institutions are ‘the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’.6 Th e signifi cance of the idea of unintended consequences, or the ‘law of the heterogeneity of ends’ as Duncan Forbes would have it, is that it precludes any simplistic link between individual intention, action and social-level outcomes.7 Th e challenge mounted by Bernard Mandeville in Th e Fable of the Bees exercised many of Ferguson’s contemporaries and, for all the energies expended on attack-ing Mandeville’s alleged normative conclusions, the accuracy of his distinction between individual-level motivations and social-level outcomes itself presents a serious challenge to the traditional moralist intent on drawing wider lessons from the moral assessment of the character of individuals engaged in social life.

In a passage in which Ferguson discusses action and design he cites an exam-ple from Oliver Cromwell quoted by Cardinal de Retz. In his Memoires, de Retz grapples with a similar dilemma about how to preserve moral judgement in the face of unintended consequences.8 Deeply infl uenced by Niccolò Machi-avelli, de Retz produced a theory that rests on the belief that history is shaped by the purposive actions of great men, and that their actions can be analysed and assessed by building detailed psychological portraits of the fi gures involved. De Retz’s aristocratic view of history faces a problem similar to that confronting Machiavelli’s analysis of virtù: circumstances outside the control of individuals can frustrate their plans and prevent a clear attribution of praise or blame. Tak-ing its cue from the scholarship of J. G. A. Pocock, much of the literature on this topic adopts the language of Machiavelli.9 Th e schematic of virtù and fortuna is seen as a discourse for the intersection of the sphere of individual control with that of social circumstances, and Ferguson’s twin interests in sociological obser-

Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind 159

vation and didactic moralizing place this intersection at the heart of his work. De Retz’s response to this problem was to cling to the aristocratic ideal, and he fi nds himself criticizing actions which achieved successful outcomes through the intervention of ‘fortune’ while praising unsuccessful actions that were frustrated by circumstances outside the individual’s control. Although there is more than a little of this attitude in Ferguson, particularly in his treatment of Cato during the waning of the Roman Republic, it is also apparent that Ferguson is reluctant to dispense with the traditional didactic role of the moralist in an increasingly hostile academic and social context.

Th e central problem, then, is that the ramifi cations of social complexity (the unintended consequences of purposive action) seem to obscure any straightfor-ward attribution of a causal relationship between individual action and morally assessable outcome. In other words, if social interaction in complex societies inevitably produces unintended consequences then does this allow either for attributions of responsibility or for moral assessments of individual conduct as they relate to social-level outcomes?

Action and Human Nature

In the Scottish Enlightenment the language of action makes its most prominent appearance in the discussion of the attribution of moral responsibility. Perhaps the most explicit discussion of this theme among Ferguson’s contemporaries lies in Th omas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Reid employs the term ‘action’ in a specifi c technical sense in order to distinguish those aspects of human behaviour associated with the will. By Reid’s understanding, active power is necessary to make moral assessments of human behaviour: ‘Active power, there-fore, is necessarily implied in the very notion of a morally accountable being’.10 If we are to attribute moral responsibility for an outcome we must identify an individual as having the active power to have either caused or prevented it from occurring.11 As Reid notes, we cannot apply moral evaluation to a person’s physi-cal appearance or racial origin as each lies outside the scope of one’s active power as an individual. Reid undertakes this discussion under the division of ‘rational’ and ‘animal’ principles of action,12 arguing that only rational creatures can be held to be morally responsible. Reid’s use of active power as a qualifi cation for moral judgement off ers us an interesting window into Ferguson’s attempt to deploy the notion as a basis for moral judgement.

For Ferguson humans are ‘formed to act’ and ‘fi tted to act’13 – activity is something integral to our make-up. Human nature, he notes in the Institutes, is actually ‘in motion’,14 while in the Principles he asserts that all living creatures carry ‘a principle of active exertion in themselves’.15 In relation to man this results in a situation by which ‘Every quality of his nature is an energy, not a quiescent


mode of existence’.16 It is this life force or spirit that lies behind man’s ‘active nature’.17 Th us far mankind does not diff er from other animals that are similarly embedded in this active system of nature; or as he puts it in the Institutes, all creatures are ‘active from original choice, and propensity’.18 However, it is cru-cial to Ferguson’s understanding of humanity’s place in the system of nature that they alone possess higher intelligence and as a result are ‘more active than any other nature’.19 Th is intelligence manifests itself in the fact that Man is a ‘Being destined to act from observation and experience’.20 His distinction between man and other animals goes further. In the Essay he argues that man is possessed of a ‘principle of progression’21 which distinguishes his actions from the more instinctual acts of other animals. Th e means of acquiring knowledge from obser-vation and experience and the power that it brings is a product of the application of mind to ‘active exertions’.22 Strength of mind, like strength of body, is ‘the result of exercise’.23 Active participation in the world improves the mental capac-ity of humans and lends them successive powers to attain the objects of their ambitions. Learning and civilization arise from ‘the bustle of an active life’24 and not from ‘the repose of a pacifi c situation’.25

Like Reid, Ferguson believed that it was the characteristic of an intelligent being to be the ‘artifi cer of his own condition’.26 In the Principles man is ‘by nature an artist’27 who is ‘destined to be the artifi cer of his own fortune’.28 As a result of his possession of rationality and his ability to shape the world around him, man becomes a moral agent who can be judged as having responsibility for his actions. Ferguson then identifi es the principle that drives or directs man’s action and progress as ambition, understood as ‘the desire of something better than is possessed at present’.29 Th is desire for improvement is ‘never disposed to acqui-esce in its present attainment’30 and leads man constantly to direct his attention towards realizing ‘hope to hope’.31 Action prompted by ambition shapes the course of man’s intelligently directed behaviour. Th e progress of the individual and species is driven by this ambitious activity aimed at the satisfaction of our ‘continual’32 and ‘insatiable’33 desire for further improvement. In Ferguson’s view men ‘are destined to improve on their lot’,34 as a result of their ‘active and pro-gressive natures’.35 At this point in the Principles Ferguson begins to insert a set of normative assumptions into what has thus far been a descriptive anatomy of the distinction between humans and animals.36 Th e naturalistic observation of the principle of action in human behaviour is about to be extended into a series of assertions about the moral desirability of particular forms of action.


Action and Virtue

Having described how action, prompted by ambition, is the root of social and intellectual experience, we can now reconstruct how Ferguson extends this analysis of the centrality of action into a prescriptive moral theory that can be traced across the body of his work. Th e fi rst step in this process is a return to the observation that action is a principle of human nature. Ferguson glosses this to observe that ‘Mind is an active power and mere action is agreeable or what is called amusing’.37 In the Essay Ferguson describes human happiness as an active principle, depending on ‘an active, and strenuous mind’.38 He returns, in the Principles, to this same idea when he notes that, in order to be happy, humans must: ‘be employed, or have something to do’.39 If ambition provides the prompt to action, then this ambition is compounded in our active nature by the enjoy-ment of the task at hand. A clear consequence of this in all of Ferguson’s work is that ‘Happiness is not that state of repose’.40 If man is an ‘active and aspiring being’41 then inactivity would be a form of torture, a condition of ‘weariness, suff ering, and disgust’,42 as it runs against the grain of our nature.

If, however, many of our actions are directed towards ‘a point of repose to which we aspire’43 in the understanding that it represents a happy condition, then we are woefully misguided: ‘It is a wretched opinion, that happiness con-sists in a freedom from trouble, or in having nothing to do’.44 Happiness is not the product of leisure, nor is it the enjoyment of the ‘mere animal pleasures’45 that are the principal object of our ambition. Rather it is realized in ‘the exer-tion and application’46 of our faculties. What Ferguson is suggesting here is that our active nature and the prompt of ambition come together to deceive us into constant pursuit of an unattainable idea of repose. Moreover this repose is not true happiness any more than it represents an end to ambition. In the Essay Ferguson observes: ‘Th e attainment of one end is but the beginning of a new pursuit’.47 Human ambition is insatiable, it cannot be satiated by the security of any level of wealth or achievement as each new acquisition ceases to be an object of pleasure and is taken as ‘a necessary’.48 As does Adam Smith, Ferguson attributes this deception to the wisdom of Nature,49 explaining ‘But nature has wisely, in most particulars, baffl ed our project; and placed no where within our reach this visionary blessing of absolute ease’.50

Happiness is attained from the exercise of active pursuit, not from the satis-faction of securing the goal, and as such it is not a static outcome but a dynamic process. Moreover, if action itself is the true source of happiness, then the greater the degree of vigour or ‘ardour’51 involved in the activity, the greater the hap-piness inspired. In other words, far from being happy in pacifi c situations of repose, we are exhilarated by ‘calls to danger and hardship’52 as they prompt us to exert ourselves and fi nd enjoyment. In the Essay, one example Ferguson off ers of


this is hunting.53 Th e thrill of the chase is a greater source of happiness than the kill. Indeed the chase can be enjoyed without a kill. Humans, with greater intel-ligence than other animals, are disposed against inactivity and when they have secured their subsistence they require to be ‘otherwise occupied’.54 Indeed they are so far from valuing peaceful repose that they frequently fi ll up their leisure time with ‘hazardous sports and diversions’.55

From here we can reconstruct how Ferguson’s argument moves decidedly from the descriptive and sociological to the evaluative and prescriptive as he seeks to distinguish types of activity that produce greater degrees of happiness.56 Humans naturally seek active diversion in times of ease and this leads to the creation of ‘pastimes’.57 However, a pastime is just that, it is a form of activity undertaken to divert us from the languor induced by repose. For Ferguson pas-times represent a ‘disease’58 and are worthless compared to ‘business’59 or ‘real aff airs’.60 In the Principles Ferguson understands ‘business’ to refer to that type of activity that is ‘prescribed by some consideration of interest or duty … [and] distinguished by the importance of the object’.61 Th e trivial nature of pastimes lends them the whiff of ‘dissipation’,62 a condition that displays a ‘weakness of the mind which loaths its best occupations, as the sickly stomach is found to loath the most wholesome food’.63 Pastimes reconcile men to a less vigorous manner of living. In the Essay Ferguson compounds this observation by noting that these sorts of amusements can, like drunkenness, also reconcile men to inaction. As he puts it: ‘the gaming-table, dogs, horses, and wine, are employed to fi ll up the blank of a listless and unprofi table life’.64 Th ey are taken up as a distraction to defl ect our distress at failing to engage in serious ‘business’.

Th e result of this observation is that serious ‘business’ is to be preferred to ‘mere amusement or pastime’.65 As he notes in the Institutes: ‘Men are best amused with exercises that engage them most, that awaken their aff ections, and occupy their talents. For this reason, the more serious and urgent occupations are to be preferred to the more slight, and apparently pleasant.’66 Indeed, in the Principles, those who avoid business ‘reject what is fi tted to employ them agreeably’.67 Th us Ferguson has extended his observation about the active principles inherent in human nature to observe that active beings fi nd happiness in the exercise of their talents. He then develops this understanding of the human condition to observe that scenes of activity that engage the attention and try the faculties in serious business are likely to be a greater source of happiness for mankind than the dis-tractions of pastimes. In Ferguson’s view:

Th e human mind is not amused without an object, and the nearer that its object, in the interest it creates or the ardour it excites, approaches to what are termed the important aff airs of life, the more eff ectual the amusement or pleasure it brings. Th e dissipated, accordingly, while they fl y from business as an application of too serious a nature, fi nd some other interest or passion to command their attention.68


It has become apparent that Ferguson, despite his own strictures against mix-ing naturalism and moral judgement, is operating with a particular, normatively loaded understanding of human activity. Human nature is active, human hap-piness depends on activity and receives its fullest realization in the conduct of ‘business’. What Ferguson understands as the ‘business of real life’69 becomes clear through his consideration of the role of the citizen. ‘Business’, he writes in the Institutes, ‘is supposed to terminate in some serious purpose’.70 In the Prin-ciples, it lies in the ‘offi ces of private friendship, or of public station’ beyond the ‘necessities’ of our own condition.71

Ferguson appears to exclude commercial activity from his defi nition of ‘busi-ness’. Th is exclusion seems to rest on the assumption that if an unambiguous standard of moral conduct is to invoke the notion of ‘serious business’, then such ‘business’ must involve the ‘free’ exercise of choice rather than a reaction to physical necessity. In other words, the classical idea of the independent citizen is being subtly invoked as a necessary condition for the type of serious ‘busi-ness’ that represents the most eff ectual arena for human happiness and virtue. Ferguson, in opposition to the ‘modernism’ of Hume and Smith, is operating in a classical tradition of thought that seeks to distinguish between the human, ‘virtuous’ sphere of serious ‘business’ and the animal, ‘sensuous’ sphere of neces-sities and material enjoyment.72

Having made a practical judgement as to the superiority of serious ‘business’ as an arena for the exercise of man’s active nature, Ferguson then returns to the well-known Stoic theme of the identity of happiness and virtue. True happiness is to be found in the active exercise of virtue. As a result happiness and virtue are identical and both are the product of the proper exercise of our active natures. A consequence of this is that virtue itself is an ‘active’73 principle in nature, and, moreover, that it is most eff ectually attained when men are vigorously engaged in serious ‘business’. As Ferguson notes in the Essay: ‘Th e virtues of men have shone most during their struggles, not aft er the attainment of their ends’.74

If we attach this to the previous argument about the defi ciency of pastimes we see a typically Stoic argument that activity and the true happiness it brings are to be found in the exercise of virtue. Virtue is a product of ‘active exertions’75 and, as a result of our possession of the active power of intelligence, we are capa-ble of the choice to pursue genuine virtue in the serious ‘business’ of life. One result of this for Ferguson, as for Reid, is that for us to be able to make a moral ‘discernment’76 about another person, that individual’s character must fi rst take on an external manifestation. Or, as he puts it in the Principles:

Th e distinction of moral good and evil cannot be ascertained in the description of mere external action; nor can the merit or demerit of a man be known until he has acted. Insomuch, that, although in abstraction we may take asunder, and state apart,


qualities of the mind and movements of the body, yet these in reality are combined in the conception which men mutually form of their moral distinctions.77

External action is a necessary condition for us to be able to judge the internal motivation that is the true hallmark of virtue. As Ferguson would have it: ‘Th e worth of a man is made known by its external eff ects; and though external eff ect is subordinate in value to the aff ection of mind, yet neither this nor any other connection in the minds of men could exist otherwise, than by means of the external eff ects and appearances which cause them to be mutually known’.78 Th us when we moralize we assess the ‘moral action’79 which includes both the intent behind and the consequences of the physical action. In other words, humans must act in order for us to be able to pass judgement upon their character. While both the intention behind and the consequences of an action can be applied as standards of judgement, the act itself is necessary for us to be able to draw any kind of lesson. However, given the reality of the unintended consequences of purposive action, the connection between intention and outcome becomes obscured in many cases and leaves moral judgement and attribution of responsi-bility focused on the intention that guides the action.

Ferguson judges that the virtuous man is possessed of a ‘disposition to act well’80 and to pursue active virtue with ‘zeal’ and ‘vigour’.81 Th e degree of vigour thus acts as an indicator of the virtuousness of the individual as he goes about ‘business’. In the Essay, Ferguson returns again and again to the idea that vigor-ous activity in serious ‘business’ is the hallmark of moral worth. For example: ‘Men are to be estimated, not from what they know, but from what they are able to perform; from their skill in adapting materials to the several purposes of life; from their vigour and conduct in pursuing the objects of policy, and in fi nding the expedients of war and national defence’.82 Active life is not simply a descrip-tion drawn from the natural history of man, it is also a moral principle that can be used to judge the value of actors and the vice or virtue of their actions. Given all of this Ferguson has developed an understanding of human nature and activ-ity that includes a normative assertion about the value of vigorous activity in ‘business’ which he uses to make moral judgements about the virtuousness of individuals.

In Th e History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic we have a clear example of Ferguson applying action as a criterion of moral judgement.83 Ferguson peppers this history with character sketches and these sketches reveal his assessment of each individual’s character and his relative success. Two sketches are particularly revealing for our purposes. Ferguson’s praise for Cato notes his virtuous motives and lack of success, while his sketch of Caesar attacks his weak-ness of character but admits his success in securing his designs.84 Employing the twin criteria of success and virtue, Ferguson’s account of ‘moral action’ leads him


to acknowledge that the ‘virtuous’ Cato was (admirably) mistaken in fi ghting for a republican system that was already doomed by the time he took to the stage. As Ferguson explains:

Th e change therefore from republic to monarchy, it may be alleged, was seasonable; and Cato, with Cicero, Brutus, and all the other partisans of the commonwealth actu-ated by a mistaken, though commendable zeal for liberty, would have supported their fellow-citizens in their pretensions to government aft er they were unworthy of it; in this attempt they fell a necessary sacrifi ce to their own error; and in their ruin made way for an establishment better fi tted to the condition of the age, and to the character of the people, than that for which they contended and bled.85

In the Principles he even approaches de Retz’s aristocratic valorization of noble failure. For example, he goes so far as to argue that: ‘Th e mere attempts of a vir-tuous man to serve his friend, or his country, is an object of moral esteem; not only where he may have failed in his purpose, but even where the event may have been calamitous to himself, or to others’.86 What we see here in an extreme form is the separation of the two standards used to judge the character of individu-als (the virtue of their intentions and the success of their actions), with virtue clearly given preference over success in the moralist’s assessment of individual character.

Action and National CharacterHowever, Ferguson is not yet ready to give up on the criterion of success as an aspect of moralizing. If, as is clearly the case, man’s power to shape the world is limited by the natural and social circumstances in which he fi nds himself, then the task of including outcomes in moralizing becomes decidedly more diffi cult. Ferguson was keenly aware that the active system of nature is, in reality, a con-stant process of interaction. As he describes it in the Principles, ‘All nature is connected; and the world itself consists of parts, which, like the stones of an arch, mutually support and are supported. Th is order of things consists of move-ments, which, in a state of counteraction and apparent disturbance, mutually regulate and balance one another’.87

Th e observation that institutions are the product of ‘human action’ but not the result of ‘human design’88 indicates that Ferguson was well aware of the role of unintended consequences in the process of social change. Armed with his evolutionary understanding of social change, he tends to deprecate theories that place excessive focus on ‘great legislators’89 as explanations for the emergence of social phenomena. Given his theoretical outlook, Ferguson’s criteria of virtue and success, as applied to individuals, cannot be applied to make judgements about wide-scale and long-term social change in so far as these changes are pro-duced by social interaction. In other words, because these outcomes are the


product of the unintended consequences of social interaction and not the direct result of deliberate action by any one individual, the criterion of vigorous activ-ity in serious ‘business’ cannot be applied in any meaningful sense. If judgement is to be made and a ‘moral’ to be drawn from the ‘Progress and Termination’ of the Roman Republic, then it must be of the people as a whole and their manners and institutions. Cato acted from virtuous motives but was unsuccessful; Cae-sar lacked virtue, but was successful. Yet neither of these character sketches can explain the fall of the Republic in a satisfactory manner. If this is the case, then Ferguson cannot draw larger moral lessons from their behaviour because he can-not attribute the fall of the Republic to events that were within the active power of specifi c individuals. Instead, if there is to be a moral lesson drawn from the fall of the Republic it must be provided on a societal level. As he concludes in the Essay: ‘this state fell not into obscurity for want of eminent men’ but because ‘the people was corrupted’.90 As a result it is not the active virtue of de Retz’s great individuals that is of signifi cance here, but the spirit of activity among the people as a whole. Ferguson’s concern becomes how to move moral judgement beyond the acknowledged reality that in most cases social complexity and unintended consequences preclude simple causal attributions of outcomes to the purposive actions of specifi c individuals.91

Th is leads Ferguson to understand the situation of a nation at any given point in its history as a form of balance arising from social interaction. Th e ‘vigour’92 of a state is related to Ferguson’s theme of liberty secured by balance, competition and an active citizenry and, in turn, this idea of vigour is advanced in the twin languages of healthy individual and national character. As he would have it: ‘Th e reason and the heart of men are best cultivated in the exercise of social duties, and in the conduct of public aff airs’.93 Liberty can be preserved only amongst an active citizen body with the ‘resolute spirit’94 to defend it from internal and external threats. Like the order of nature, social order is a product of a constant balancing of interaction, ‘counteraction and apparent disturbance’.

Ferguson’s analysis of the ‘scenery of an active life’95 leads him to conclude that it is the active participation of citizens in serious ‘business’ that is the mark of a fl ourishing society. If mankind is active by nature and ‘destined’96 to exist in social groups, then groups of individuals must be understood as ‘an active society’.97 Th is leads Ferguson to develop his idea of a ‘National Spirit’.98 An active people possess a vigorous spirit that indicates a healthy society. We see the judgements of the character of individuals in the Roman Republic extended to a judgement of the character or spirit of nations. By utilizing the concept of the national spirit, Ferguson extends the idea of individual spirit or character (as a locus of moral responsibility) to the collective behaviour and manners of a people.


In one sense, such an extension obviously means that the spirit of the nation is composed of the spirit of the individuals who form the people, but Fergu-son also believes that generalizations can be made on a more holistic level about shared behaviour patterns and customs. Th is is a direct result of his observation that humans are social creatures whose behaviour is deeply infl uenced by sociali-zation within a particular group. Parallel to Hume’s argument in ‘Of National Characters’, Ferguson’s conception of national spirit is a generalization cover-ing the manners of a whole people, but it is not the crude national stereotyping that Hume rejects at the start of his essay.99 Ferguson wants to make generaliza-tions about the character or spirit of a people at a certain point in their history. Th us progressive nations possess an active spirit, declining nations a relaxation of spirit. For example, in the Essay the confl ict between Rome and Carthage is to be understood as ‘the natural exercise of an ambitious spirit’100 that marked both nations at that point in their history. When Ferguson uses phrases such as ‘national vigour’101 or ‘the active genius of mankind’102 he is laying out a link-age between an ‘active’ individual character and a generalization about societies composed of such characters and the manners that prevail in them. Th e corrup-tion of Rome was a result of the demise of the ‘prevalence’,103 among the body of the people, of active citizenship and so it is the body of the people who are to ‘blame’ for the fall of the Republic.

Ferguson has attempted to develop a theory for the moral judgement of both individual and national character that is grounded in the centrality of the active pursuit of serious ‘business’. As we saw above in the discussion on pastimes, repose is a deceptive ideal and this is especially the case when it leads to political quietism. As Ferguson notes in the Essay:

We have reason to dread the political refi nements of ordinary men, when we consider, that repose, or inaction itself, is in a great measure their object; and that they would frequently model their governments, not merely to prevent injustice and error, but to prevent agitation and bustle; and by the barriers they raise against the evil actions of men, would prevent them from acting at all.104

For Ferguson there is a very real danger that ‘the boasted refi nements of civil society, will be mere devices to lay the political spirit at rest, and will chain up the active virtues more than the restless disorders of men’.105

A result of ‘a remission of the national spirit, and a weakness of character’106 among the nation as a whole, national decline occurs as the activity necessary for a healthy society gives way to dissipation and national spirit is sapped. Th us we can reconstruct how Ferguson extends his criteria of successful and virtu-ous action into the judgement of social interactions. Th e national character or spirit is the ‘active power’ responsible for the virtue and success of the nation and national decline is the result of ‘Relaxations in the National Spirit’107 or a corrup-


tion of national character. Th e distinction being drawn here between relaxation and corruption appears to be between an ‘internal decay’108 produced by ‘volun-tary neglects’109 and a corruption of manners. Ferguson adopts this vocabulary in the Essay, where he argues that ‘the measure of a national spirit’ is to be found in the ‘ardour and vigour’ with which a people pursue serious ‘business’.110 Th is ardour is subject to natural ‘paroxysms’ and ‘intermissions’111 that correspond to periods of national progress and stagnation. National spirit can ‘relax’ when there is a dearth of national objects that warrant serious activity – most notably in prolonged periods where there is an absence of external threat.

Th e theme of corruption is illustrated in Ferguson’s treatment of the concept of luxury. He begins his discussion by noting that it is an ambivalent concept, made more so by the fact that discussions of luxury are always relative to the state of material advance attained by a society: one man’s luxury is another’s neces-sity. However, Ferguson believes that luxury goods themselves tend to promote neither virtue nor vice. Luxury goods are merely one object of our natural, and insatiable, ambition. Th e incidence of corruption relates to the ‘character’ of individuals, and by extension to the opinions and manners of a people, not to the physical ‘equipage’.112 Corruption occurs when human activity is directed towards ‘eff eminate vanity’113 rather than serious ‘business’. Ferguson defi nes a corrupt society as one in which the objects of esteem and emulation are not virtuous acts in serious ‘business’, but the frivolous rewards of riches and ‘court-favour’.114

What emerges from the discussion of luxury in the Essay is an argument that parallels that noted previously about pastimes. Th e pursuit of luxury goods can become the primary focus of individual attention, and the enjoyment of lux-ury goods can breed ‘intemperance or sloth’, only when there is a ‘remission of other pursuits’ among the population at large.115 In other words, a relaxation of national spirit opens the door for a corruption of manners. Ferguson is then free to argue that the vices traditionally associated with luxuries (sloth, deca-dence, avarice) are not necessary features of wealth.116 Instead they are the eff ect of an absence of calls to action in other serious spheres of human ‘business’, of ‘an intermission of national and political eff orts’.117 While trade is not itself mor-ally admirable, on account of its connection to physical necessities and sensuous frivolities, neither is it morally objectionable. Th e origin of corruption is not a direct product of commercial society, but is rather an incidental eff ect of inat-tention to serious ‘business’. Corruption and remission of national spirit are the dangers of peace whatever the level of material development. When it comes to Ferguson’s concerns about his own society the argument returns to the dangers of ‘the repose of a pacifi c station’118 as a temptation to inaction because in a com-mercial society ‘we may fi nd him become eff eminate, mercenary, and sensual: not because pleasures and profi ts are become more alluring, but because he has


fewer calls to attend to other objects’.119 For Ferguson politics becomes the pri-mary arena of virtue because it deals with the exercise of choice in the serious ‘business’ of life.

Inaction in the serious ‘business’ of the public realm is the mark of a corrupt national character or of a diminished national spirit. What is sought is a balance between ‘the disinterested love of the public’ and the ‘desires of preferment and profi t’.120 Ferguson’s disquisition on the need for active political participation by the people is part of his attempt to preserve this balance and to maintain the activity necessary to sustain individual and national spirit. Indeed his preoccu-pation with establishing militias is as much an attempt to ensure action in the public realm as it is a genuine tactic of military preparedness.121

Ferguson combines his argument about the corruption of national character with the recognition that national progress is cyclical in nature. He draws on the observation of history to assert that the ‘vigour of a nation’122 is subject to ‘par-oxysms’.123 Nations rise to prominence and decline into obscurity once the active spirit that drove their advance settles into complacency. Th roughout his Roman Republic there is a sense that the very forces and national vigour that drove the expansion of Roman power throughout the ancient world would eventually give way to relaxation, eff eminate complacency and civil dissension when peace was secured by absolute dominion.124 He observes that, in answer to the threat of Caesar, the people of Rome were ‘incapable of the exertions which such an occa-sion required’.125 Th e source of this incapacity was to be seen in the character of the forces arraigned under Pompey’s command: ‘Nursed in luxury, and averse to business, petulant in safety, useless in danger, impatient to be at their villas in the country, and their amusements in the town’.126

Th e fall of the Republic saw the beginning of the long cycle of Roman decline. Th is decline was the result of an absence of external threats and a corruption of individual manners that led to a dissipation of national spirit. Ferguson draws a clear lesson from the facts of the Roman Republic as he related them.

Th e military and political virtues, which had been exerted in forming this empire, having fi nished their course, a general relaxation ensued, under which, the very forms that were necessary for its preservation were in process of time neglected. As the spirit which gave rise to those forms was gradually spent, human nature fell into a retro-grade motion, which the virtues of individuals could not suspend; and men, in the application of their faculties even to the most ordinary purposes of life, suff ered a slow and insensible, but almost continual decline.127

Ferguson recognized that no one individual could be held morally responsible for the fall of the Republic, just as no one individual could save the Republic. But this did not prevent him from attributing the fall to the character of the whole people through a ‘fatal dissolution of manners’.128 Ferguson believed that


his analysis of the function of action in human nature and society had allowed him to make didactic moral judgements, not only about individual characters, but also about the national characters best fi tted to preserve virtue. Success and virtue are the criteria of character judgement on an individual level, and so too are they the criteria of judgement on a national level through assessments of interaction, participation and ‘spirit’. In both cases the lesson is that active virtue should not be surrendered to complacent success.

In many respects Ferguson stands at a crossroad in intellectual history. Th e classical tradition that held virtue as an ideal actively pursued – a standard by which we might judge men and their actions – was giving way to a world in which awareness of social complexity prevented the sort of simple moralizing that linked virtuous individuals with virtuous outcomes. It was not necessary to accept all of Mandeville’s conclusions in order to accept the truth of the observa-tion that old-fashioned moralizing failed to provide a satisfactory account of the reality of unintended consequences. In attempting to deal with this challenge, and to preserve the possibility of drawing moral lessons from the history of indi-viduals and nations, Ferguson’s sociological interests led him to become an early player in the development of modern historicism. His attempt to draw wider lessons from history through the idea of national character or spirit would later be developed and systematized in G. W. F. Hegel’s work. In Ferguson’s case it represents an attempt to use the concept of action as a unifying feature of human life that could preserve the traditional didactic role of the moralist in the face of the complexity of social interaction.

AcknowledgementsTh e author wishes to thank the editors and anonymous referees for their invaluable comments, attention to which greatly improved the paper, and the British Academy for their generous funding under the Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme.

– 171 –

11 PROVIDENCE AND PROGRESS: THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION IN FERGUSON’S

DISCUSSION OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Jeng-Guo S. Chen

Scholars who have examined the political and social thought of Adam Fergu-son oft en conclude that he is a secular thinker.1 Th ey discern no theological dimension to his theories of society and progress, despite Ferguson’s religious upbringing and education. In his notable study, David Kettler overstates the case, arguing that ‘Ferguson’s thought was fundamentally secular – and certainly not Christian’.2 It is true that Ferguson’s theology is not classically Christian: He hardly touches on issues of original sin, revelation or redemption. In dis-cussions concerning providence and immortality, he refers not so much to the Church Fathers as to Stoic writers, including Aurelius, Epictetus and Cato, among others.3 His theology is unequivocally derived from the book of nature, not the book of words. Ferguson insisted on reinstating the connection between morality and religion, unlike Bernard Mandeville or David Hume, whose moral philosophies severed the connection between the two. Within Ferguson’s reasoned theories of society, one glimpses his lifelong attempt to combine a con-ception of progress with that of divine providence. In fact, his providentialism tends to be of a rational and systematic sort in that it does not require divine intervention but designed order, regularity and an overall structuring of cause and eff ect to benefi cial ends. Within such a providential order, Ferguson argued that humans were to conduct themselves according to moral laws that were unmistakably prescribed by God. ‘In chusing what is morally good, it is happy to know that we obey our Creator; and in obeying our Creator, it is happy to know, that what he commands is the specifi c good, and felicity of our nature’.4 God is providential in that it is God’s power and design that sustain the universe and guide human destiny. Ferguson’s ideas of civil society and morality rest upon his understanding of the human being as a uniquely important creation.

The present paper argues that one cannot fully appreciate Ferguson’s cri-tique of civil society unless one comprehends the religious aspect of his thought,


specifi cally that of providence. In delineating Ferguson’s appeal to providence, two related themes are developed. By placing An Essay on the History of Civil Society into context with his other works – as well as those of his predecessors and contemporaries, in particular his mentor at Edinburgh University, William Cleghorn – a reading is proposed that is separate and distinct from that set forth by historians who interpret Ferguson as an advocate of civic humanist virtue. Ferguson’s concern with morality is related more closely to the idea of ‘history’ than to ‘civil society’. Th e divine gift s of instinct, and other primordial qualities, are the real causes of national and social progress and these may be preserved within diff erent forms of society. Second, Ferguson’s idea of progress is illus-trated by identifying how he conceptualizes history as two-tiered: national history is subject to changes of fortune, but the progress of universal history is preserved by the creator. Th e rise and decline of national or political history are understood best within the context of universal history.

Ferguson and Scottish Religious Moderation

Along with some of his fellow ministers, Ferguson celebrated the emergence of civil society in Scotland, but he did not succumb completely to secularization. Out of his commitment to religious moderation, one of several distinct intel-lectual currents of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson sought to provide a religious edge to the apparently secular notion of civil society. Reared within a Calvinist family, Ferguson ‘remained prone to an intense earnestness of the sort which Calvinism has so oft en imparted in Scotland’.5 Th e mark of Calvinism faded considerably, however, as Ferguson interacted, intellectually and socially, with Edinburgh’s Presbyterian moderates, including William Robertson, Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle and John Home. Having resigned from his ministerial service in 1754 and taken up permanent residence in Edinburgh in 1756, Fer-guson quickly found himself advocating for a militia in Scotland and for the theatrical arts, as demonstrated, respectively, in his Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1756) and Th e Morality of Stage Plays Seriously Con-sidered (1757).

Th e moderates diff ered from other groups of Presbyterians in signifi cant institutional and theological ways. For example, moderates laid great store in the higher education of ministers and preachers and distrusted the method of preaching that Methodists and other radical religious sects deployed to encourage spontaneous expressions of feeling. Sympathetic towards material progress, the moderates disdained religious fanaticism.6 It is small wonder that the moderates in Edinburgh were among the few clergymen who cultivated a friendship with the notorious sceptic David Hume, whose writings, as early as 1748, cast doubt on the possibility of miracles and on any purported providence.7 In his History

Providence and Progress 173

of England, Hume ridiculed Oliver Cromwell as a man of political and religious fanaticism,8 and in various essays – including ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, ‘Th e Sceptic’, ‘Of Suicide’ and, above all, in ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ – he relentlessly criticized superstitious belief. Most moderates, in fact, sympathized with an empiricist approach to understanding the world, one that Hume aptly expressed in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: ‘the larger experience we acquire, and the stronger reason we are endowed with, we always render our principles the more general and comprehensive’.9 Accordingly, the moderates maintained an understanding of religion more sophisticated than that which some Christians had sometimes sought to impose upon the uneducated hea-then. As Th omas Ahnert has argued, in comparison with the Evangelicals and other popular sects, the moderates tended to refrain from embracing orthodox Christian doctrine, including such tenets as that of immortality and revelation.10 Th e moderates’ intellectual kinship with Hume brought them to stand for him at his excommunication trial by the Presbyterian Church in 1756, and Ferguson was among those defending him.11 According to Ernest Mossner, the Evangeli-cal divines who tended to execrate Hume were thinkers who ‘sought to derive natural philosophy from Scripture alone’.12

Apparently, Ferguson held a more secular and unorthodox view of human history than the Evangelicals. For example, in his Essay, he considered the evi-dential value of the Bible to be no stronger than that of fables of other nations, and he curiously described the descendants of Adam and Eve as ‘their race’, indi-cating a distance of identity.13 He asserted, instead, that ‘from the Greek and Roman historians … we have not only the most authentic and instructive, but even the most engaging, representations of the tribes from whom we descend’.14 In opposition to the sermon he preached at the battle of 1745, Ferguson unam-biguously opted for a secular, rather than a sacred, history.15 Having abandoned his oath as a minister, Ferguson appears to have undergone a secular turn, but is that the whole story?

In fact, the gulf between Ferguson’s religious outlook and that of Hume is greater than that between Ferguson and the Evangelicals. Believing in God as the creator, Ferguson rejected sceptical empiricist doubts about the immortality of the soul. As late as 1780, he considered the immortality of the soul a semi-nal issue for his students. In his lecture notes for his class on moral philosophy, he wrote, ‘In treating of mind it was common in the Schools to enumerate the Faculties of the human Mind & to discuss the Celebrated Questions relating to the Immateriality & Immortality of the Human Soul’.16 His notes state that he treated other topics of religious, if not Christian, belief, including how one ought to ‘Ascend to God to state the Evidence of his Existence & enumerate his attributes’.17 In his Principles of Moral and Political Science, published in 1792, Ferguson recapitulates the issue of the immortality of the soul, as well as that of


providence.18 He states emphatically that the knowledge of morality cannot be separated from a theistic view of the world. For Ferguson, to criticize religious superstition and to hold a positive attitude towards the material world was one thing, to deny the connection of religion and morality was another.

Under this apprehension, there is reason to hope that the principles of morality should be strictly connected with those of religion … Superstition is the fear of harm and disorder from invisible powers.

… Th e knowledge of nature, to which mankind aspire, may, in its progress, improve their conception of God, and at once reform their belief, and its application to practice.19

Into the last decade of the eighteenth century, Ferguson continued, in a less pub-lic way, to elaborate on the idea of providence and related issues, as evidenced in his manuscripts and essays.

Despite his later congratulations to Ferguson for the success of the Essay, Hume urged Blair and Robertson to prevent its publication, remarking that the style, reasoning, form and content of the manuscript would not fi nd a welcome audience.20 Th e immediate popularity of the Essay proved, however, that Hume was, at least on this subject, out of touch with the public. Although it does not profi t to guess which particular aspects or features of Ferguson’s treatise proved worrisome to Hume, it is certainly worth pointing out that the Essay contains discussions not only of the refi nement of arts and taste but of providential design and the proper understanding of self-interest; these last two, in particu-lar, Hume would have found diffi cult to digest. One might well conclude that in comparison with other moderates, such as Robertson or Blair, Ferguson is the most powerful voice within that camp to renounce Hume’s scepticism and to defend the idea of a providential ordering of civil society.

Civil Society and ProvidenceCivil society is distinctly human because it is created by human eff ort, which itself is made possible by human faculties, including rationality, that are endowed by God. Accordingly, from its very conception, civil society conveys a providential meaning. For Ferguson, this understanding links an eighteenth-century idea of progress (discussed below) with traditional Christian humanism. Since the Renaissance, many Christian humanists, such as Pico della Mirandola and Mar-silio Ficino, had argued eloquently that humans occupy a special place in the universe and, consequently, bear a duty corresponding to their blessed posi-tion.21 Th e relationship and distinction between humans and animals, and their respective places in nature, were oft -debated issues in eighteenth-century Scot-land. Francis Hutcheson, for one, believed that God created humans to govern the world, in benign fashion, placing other animals within their power. Animals


were a providential provision from God proportioned to human necessities for food and labour.22 To Ferguson, the emergence of civil society manifests that humans have been granted a blessed position. In the Essay, he explains that ‘In other classes of animals, the individual advances from infancy of age or maturity; and he attains, in the compass of a single life, to all the perfection his nature can reach: but in the human kind, the species has a progress as well as the individual’.23 The collective progress of human society is derived from the very fact that humans are endowed with mind (reason, soul or spirit),24 a special grace of God. Ferguson maintains, ‘Man, in the result of his animal nature, dif-fers from the brutes only in the degree or manner of what he exhibits; but in that of his intellectual nature, he diff ers totally, and in kind’.25 Because of this human faculty of the mind, Ferguson confi dently assumes, in a Neo-platonic vein, that this species ‘appears to be highly favoured & destined to move in a higher Sphere than any other Species’.26

Th e self-transformation of humans via the development of their minds gives further evidence of the providential destiny of Man: Not only are humans able to create their own histories, but they can refl ect on these histories, thereby arriving at an appreciation of providence. Very early in his Essay, Ferguson proclaims that ‘We forget that physical powers, employed in succession, and combined to a salutary purpose, constitute those very proofs of design from which we infer the existence of God; and that this truth being once admitted, we are no longer to search for the source of existence; we can only collect the laws which the author of nature has established; and in our latest as well as our earliest discoveries, only come to perceive a mode of creation or providence before unknown’.27 Th e great advantage of the emergence of civil society is that people become ‘more active and curious’ as they are more ‘knowing and … polished’.28 However salu-tary the creation of civil society, it is, nevertheless, but a transition in historical progress. Civil society is not the fi nal object of history or human enjoyment. Ferguson repeatedly reminds readers that the true and vital value of civilization is the progress of the mind, on which human happiness must rest. ‘To know himself, and his place in the system of nature, is the specifi c lot and prerogative of man.’29 Likewise, the true goal of civilization is to assure and safeguard intel-lectual progress until the human mind understands or approximates the mind of God. As argued above, Ferguson attests that, ‘Th e knowledge of nature, to which mankind aspire, may, in its progress, improve their conception of God, and at once reform their belief, and its application to practice’.30

A concept of providence fi gures unequivocally, if inconspicuously, in the Essay. Th ere Ferguson mentions the word ‘providence’ only four times,31 and otherwise refers to this idea on but a handful of occasions (typically in reference to the wisdom or plan of God).32 What exactly is providential order and what is its role in human history? Th is remains a problem for Ferguson. Th roughout


his life, he pondered and addressed insistently, if intermittently, the issue. As early as 12 November 1777, a year aft er Hume died, Ferguson told students in his classes on moral philosophy that they would consider, ‘Th e existence of God His attributes His Providence & Government in the present and future States’. ‘In these’, he continued, ‘will consist the fi rst great division of our course relating to the fact as it stands in human nature & respects to Providence of God’.33 In another lecture, Ferguson exclaimed, ‘In stating the Fact with respect to Mankind & the Providence of God. Th e Subject is necessarily divided into two Principal Branches. Th e Knowledge of God & the Knowledge of Man. Th e Knowledge of man as being most attainable comes fi rst in order.’34 In these lectures, Fergu-son did not provide substantial arguments for providence or for the existence of God. It is understandable that aft er the publication of some of Hume’s writings (including his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)) it became harder, not easier, for the moderates to reaffi rm the idea of providence.35

In fact, however, Humean scepticism did not really hinder the moderates from utilizing notions of providence to explain human aff airs. As late as the 1800s, Ferguson still frequently drew on the knowledge of God or God’s prov-idential works. According to David Fate Norton, both George Turnbull in A Philosophical Enquiry Concerning the Connexion between the Doctrines and Mir-acles of Jesus Christ and Henry Home, Lord Kames, in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, argue for the certainty of human knowledge by deploying a version of ‘Providential Naturalism’. According to this doctrine, everything created by God or providence had been ordered fi t for humans to understand. Th e human mind or common sense, as Turnbull asserted, had the capacity to obtain knowledge and to pursue virtue successfully.36 In addition, Ferguson’s close associate William Robertson used the idea of providence to teach virtue and to explain civilization, not to mention the British coloniza-tion of India. For example, in Robertson’s sermon ‘Th e Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance’ he claims that reason and careful observa-tion could enable humans to ‘form probable conjectures with regard to the plan of God’s providence’.37 Likewise, Ferguson aspires to situate civil society within a religious framework that not only explains the causes and origin of human progress but bestows on civil society a transcendent meaning.

Providential Order, Universal Progress and the Infl uence of Cleghorn

Ferguson’s late writings show a committed eff ort to theorize his lifelong belief in God, an endeavour undertaken with an eye to making religion more congenial to the modern mind. His understanding of providential order, as God’s benevolent design for his rational creatures, should not be confused with either miracles or divine intervention in human history.38 Ferguson regarded history – even the


universal history of all individuals and nations – as a composed of ‘secondary causes’. Th rough careful investigation of these secondary causes, and their rela-tions to each other, humanity could discover the moral laws intended by God, the fi rst cause, for his rational creatures. Secondary causes are, then, the substances (including humans) that God, the primary cause, creates and conserves. Th ose substances are ‘causes’ because they contribute to or bring about eff ects – events, relations, actions and institutions. In so doing, secondary causes evidence God’s benevolence and reveal how nature is instrumental to human beings.39 In con-trast to either an intuitive comprehension of the ‘fi rst cause’ or some revelation of that being, the knowledge of secondary causes is hard-earned and progressive: the more the mind understands the system of secondary causes, and their rela-tion to a fi rst cause, the more society will advance and the mind will unfold.

If the Almighty were to operate merely by Acts of Will without the intervention of Secondary means Th e Intelligent Creature would have no resources but that of Prayer to the Almighty for Interposition in Obtaining the end or purpose in View.

Th e Secondary Cause is an Instrument in the hand of Man by which to eff ect his Purpose in many Instances and the Materials strewed on the Earth or hid in its bosom are Subjects of his Art …40

Ferguson contends that, because of the Creator’s benevolence in gracing humans with reason,41 and by means of due and proper exploration of the variation of things as secondary causes, ‘the Final Cause of the Systematick Variety of Th ings is discernible’.42

In fact, Ferguson suggests that providential order is manifest in two major social phenomena: the universal progress of history and the inequality of ranks within society. Th e idea of a universal progress owes much to William Cleg-horn, the professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh when Ferguson studied there in 1743. Cleghorn’s moral philosophy emphasizes the development of the mind and its ability to perceive the beauty of the universe as it progresses. Cleg-horn rejects Hobbesian materialism and argues for the immortality of the soul.43 Cleghorn explains that ‘the mind cannot intuitively view the ideas of good and beauty, this only belongs to the Deity. However from this discursive faculty we may learn some imperfect hints and anticipations of that ultimate good com-prehended by the intellect or the Deity, in which they are perfect.’44 In his social inquiry Ferguson seeks to provide a scientifi c edge to his mentor’s conclusions.

Th e most signifi cant feature of providential order is, to Ferguson, the constant progress of nature and the universe, including its human inhabitants. Cleghorn relies on both his Platonic and Newtonian infl uences to expound an ever-shift ing and progressive picture of the universe as providentially ordered.

Th ere is more Room for Power Wisdom & Design in the progressive than in the Qui-escent System. In the latter the same purpose is always separate, whereas in the former


several Designs are carried on; – this of the Adv[antage] of the pro[gressive] [sys]tem is farther evidence from its good Eff ects with regard to Man. Th is System is the most obvious Connection betwixt the present state of Man and the Universe. 1.Th is gen-eral Appearance of Progression thro’ Nature is a great proof of Providence. Nature is ever active & full of Variety. Everything is shift ing itself to a more perfect form – Th e internal Energy never ceases & by each of its Operat[ions] discov[ers] Deity. Th is Invisible animating Power gives us the most striking evidence of the Divine Opera-tion in the Universe that he is ever at work without ostentation but in the most silent manner. Th is is a great proof that the World was not formed by Atoms because it is more probable that Atoms would provide a Quiescent than a progressive System such as this World. In this world all things tend to Perfection in a constant Order.45

As late as 1780, Ferguson revisits Cleghorn’s contemplation of the progressive universe. On one page of the manuscript of Ferguson’s Lectures on Pneumat-ics and Moral Philosophy, a title ‘Providence’ is curiously present in red. In the corresponding lecture, which focuses on the succession of death and birth, Fer-guson employs a language reminiscent of renaissance imagery, paying tribute to the providential order of the progressing world.

We perceive in Nature the Vestiges of Intelligence & Power, always superior & oft en very diff erent in Character from what we should intend or could accomplish … We neither should conceive nor can we accomplish the mode of preserving a Species of which every Individual is Perishing. But in Nature every Species is preserved by Suc-cession, & the Death of one Generation is not less a part in the order of Nature than the Birth or Succession of Another. In this Manner all Nature is continually Perishing & continually reproduced.46

Th is is a rational contemplation of providence in the robe of the economy of nature. What would seem evil to individuals, such as death, could be benevolent to the whole species; providence seeks preservation not annihilation. National history, of which civil society is an embodiment, is an allegory of the universal history of human beings. Individuals or nations might suff er from corruption and decay, but history, composed of individuals and nations, progresses inces-santly. Th e loss of some individuals and nations is balanced by the generation and success of others. Providence does not create only the form but also the seeds of constant progress. Th e human mind is endowed with an instinct for perfection, as well as reason and other cognitive faculties, so that nations can progress. Perishing is as individual as corruption is accidental, but human advancement can be collectively restored and reborn.

Th e progress of individuals is limited and predestined by the creator. But thanks to the faculties of reason and foresight, the progress of human society is open-ended, if not inevitably endless. Ferguson says little about revelation or eschatology. Likewise, he never addresses the limit of the collective progress of human history, as if it was the will of God that lay beyond human comprehension.


What the Fergusonian idea of progress emphasizes is its theoretical continuity. Th us, civil society is by no means the last stage in history, just as the “savage” state is but a transience.

Every thing human indeed is subject to perish; and in the same race of men, know-ledge gives way to ignorance. Th e light of science is no more in corners where it formerly shone: but this is rather the removal than the extinction of light. It passes from one race of men to another, and, when it seemed to be extinguished, is perhaps about to be restored with additional force.47

It is in the context of providential order, or progressive universal history, that Ferguson’s famous and notoriously puzzling idea of ‘spontaneous order’ can be understood. As argued above, progress is a feature of the providential order, in which national histories are parts. Th us, ‘Every step and every moment of mul-titude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’.48

Yet it remains the case that human reason and action are essential to conserving whatever progress has been collectively gained. Indeed, in the Essay Ferguson also suggests that reason and conscious actions are necessary for national or political history.

Although free constitutions of government seldom or never take their rise from the scheme of any single projector, yet are they oft en preserved by the vigilance, activity, and zeal of single men.49

In relation to providence, a citizen’s performance of duty becomes in actuality an instrumentality of God. As early as 1769, Ferguson professed,

Religion is the sentiment of the mind relating to God. Th e transaction of religion is its tendency to infl uence men’s conduct. Th is tendency is of two kinds. Th e fi rst is, to make men love wisdom and benefi cence, as being the characteristics of the Supreme Being, whom they adore; and to make them love their situations, and their duties, as being appointed by providence.50

By reinstating God’s benevolence into the progress of society, Ferguson’s theory of natural religion becomes a recommendation for the ‘Age of Improvement’, as well as a call to acknowledge the importance of religion and to recognize one’s duties to God.51

Ferguson stated unequivocally that human beings were by nature sociable and that they had a duty towards others. Moreover, humans tended to self-correct their actions through refl ection. Cleghorn had pronounced uncompromisingly that there was ‘no higher being in the universe than the intelligent mind’. Even though the perfect mind, i.e. God, would not make mistakes, the human mind


could err. For example, the commission of ‘moral Evil’, Cleghorn suggested, must ‘proceed from a wrong Order of the Mind’ – ‘from the Imagination that the Beauty of the Will consists in the Prosecution of the inferior Order of Beauty’.52 Ferguson translated the metaphysical and aesthetic language of Cleghorn into moral precepts that invest in the human mind the primary role in making human history.

Man may mistake the objects of his pursuit; he may misapply his industry, and mis-place his improvements … He must look for it [i.e. the best state of his nature] in the best conceptions of his understanding, in the best moment of his heart; he must thence discover what is the perfection and the happiness of which he is capable.53

Providential Order and Inequality

Ferguson’s intellectual eff orts were aimed at buttressing his religious moderation with a philosophical grounding that would not contribute to the dissolution of social order, a tendency he perceived in both Mandevillean egoism and Humean scepticism. Ferguson argued forcefully for certain forms of social inequalities: thus, rank and distinction warrant full acknowledgement as manifestations of a providential ordering. Many Scots ‘materialist’ theorists of social disparity, fol-lowing Pufendorf, disputed the contractarian view that human inequality was derived from a historically-determined and unequal distribution of property.54 Th ose Scots maintained that, within the four-stage theory, social distinction resulted from the fi ctions of property law instituted aft er agricultural society had been fully established. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature implied a peaceful and egalitarian society rooted in a presumption of the nobility of human nature. Against Rousseauean egalitarianism, Ferguson translated the Scots literati’s material economy into a moral economy guided by a providential imperative. Ferguson maintained that inequalities of prop-erty were a ‘natural’ development of the primordial and providential inequality of humans: ‘Th ere is a Principle of Subordination in the diff erence of Natural Talents in the distribution of Property Power & Dependence’.55 Furthermore, ‘Unequal strength and capacity, unequal knowledge resolution and courage, create a subordination. Th e weak are dependent on the strong, the ignorant on the knowing, and the timorous on the brave.’56 Although human inequality had natural, primordial and providential origins – just as the strong, the wise and the brave ‘naturally’ led diff erent lives, refl ecting distinct social and economic status – such a genesis did not contradict the fact that people of diff erent ranks had mutual needs and obligations.

To Ferguson, social inequality had to be maintained to the extent that it was part of a dynamic harmony within society. It was not the charity of the rich,


but the ‘industry and sobriety’ of the poor that contributed to the harmony of society.57

It has pleased Providence, for wise purposes, to place men in diff erent stations, and to bestow upon them diff erent degrees of wealth. Without this circumstance there could be no subordination, no government, no order, no industry. Every person does good, and promotes the happiness of society, by living agreeable to the rank in which Providence has placed him.58

Crucial for preserving civil society, government is constituted by structures of subordination and inequality. Many Scots theorists, including Lord Kames, Hume, Smith, John Millar and others, proposed that government originated from the emergence of property rights. Separate from this secular view, Ferguson’s notion of the origin of government has an unequivocally providential edge: ‘some mode of subordination is as necessary to men as society itself; and this, not only to attain the ends of government, but to comply with an order established by nature’.59 Civil society, in the last analysis, is not an outcome of human design, but a natural progress of subordination.

In justifying social disparities by alluding to providence, Ferguson was no exception. Cleghorn had pointed out, in keeping with his view of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, that all animals, including ‘Man’, are capable of submitting themselves to that which is ‘contrived by a benefi cent Being who gives every one a rank as their merit claim’.60 Likewise, in a sermon preached in support of a charity-school scheme, Robert Moss, an English minister, remarked that ‘if, by the disposition of providence, all men had been made as equal in fortune and condition, as they are in nature, it would have been an eternal dispute’. Moss concluded that the rich and the poor had to be ‘encouraged to act agreeably to the station in which God had placed them’.61

Th e idea of a providential ordering of social classes was not unconventional in the eighteenth century, but Ferguson redirects the conventional under-standing towards a new way of thinking about progress. In both his Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously Considered and his Essay, Ferguson suggests that provi-dentially-ordained progress is based on the division of labour. In the Principles, Ferguson claims that human wants are ‘evidence of the wisdom and good-ness of Providence’ and ‘fi tted to an active being’.62 Human wants buttress the mechanism of the division of labour and thus provide the basis for the gradual refi nement of arts. Accordingly, just as natural history with its variation of plants and animals reveals the existence of the Deity, so does civil society – whose various professions and activities respond to insatiable wants – pro-vide a historical embodiment of providential order and benevolence. In fact, Ferguson’s concern with, or rather worry about, the preservation of civil society seems to be assuaged by his belief in providence: Aft er all, providential order


ensures that a situation is ‘suited to this active and aspiring being’.63 Nonetheless, life in a polished society, as Ferguson repeatedly warns, may encourage citizens to ‘indolence and sloth’. Apparently, historical progress generates a paradox: as human beings become more civilized, so may they stray from the ostensible route of providential progress. Th at progress, in specifi c instances, may generate regress would appear to require explanation. Ferguson does not explain the pos-sibility of human sloth, wrongdoing or even decay in terms of some primordial fall of human nature. Instead, he ascribes this civilizational paradox to another providential gift : free will. In order to comprehend Ferguson’s use of free will, one must fi rst take account of his notion of progress and virtue.

Progress, Stadial Th eory and Virtue

Along with many of his continental and British contemporaries, Ferguson embraces an idea of progress that is eclectic, if not unique. Among the eigh-teenth-century partisans of progress, the French philosophes, particularly the Marquis de Condorcet, held a radical view of human progress that assumed infi -nite improvement, even perfectibility, in human reason and society.64 According to David Spadafora, many English clergymen, such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, propagated an idea of progress as human perfectibility that came close to its French counterpart. Th e English idea of progress was, however, not monolithic. Infl uential writers, such as John Brown, with his popular Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Time, and Edward Gibbon, with his even more acclaimed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, both expressed fear of the degeneration or corruption of modern society. Although both affi rmed a cyclical rise and fall occurring naturally throughout history, Brown hypoth-esized the possible rupture of the cycle.65

Compared to the English view, the Scots held a more material view of prog-ress. Generally speaking, since the 1750s the Scots, including Adam Smith, Lord Kames (Henry Home), John Dalrymple and William Robertson, all maintained, in one way or another, that human history progresses with the transforma-tion of production.66 In the Scottish context, Ferguson’s views are even more intriguingly idiosyncratic, for he does not subscribe to the material language of patterned social progress such as found in the four-stage theory or in a cyclical view of history.

He divides history into three stages: the savage, the barbarian (or ‘rude’) and the civil or polished society. Th ese stages correspond roughly to hunting, pastoral and commercial societies, or to the primitive, feudal and modern.67 From a mate-rialist view of the four stages theory, Ferguson’s stadial theory was a corruption at best. He characterizes the early stages by the seemingly more human-oriented terms of ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘rude’, enabling him to convey thereby how


such virtues as valour, fortitude and courage were affi liated with the presumed characteristics of savages and barbarians. Such a conceptualization of virtue and society off ers a contrast to his associations of luxury, eff eminacy and (possible) corruption with ‘polished’ societies.68 Many early modern theorists of classical republicanism, for instance Niccolò Machiavelli and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, shared the view that a society which had lost its virtue would sink back into its original barbarism.69 Ferguson’s sentiments towards both republi-can and civic virtue have attracted great attention, with much debate ensuing among modern historians.70 For this reason, he was variously described as an exponent of cyclical history or a pessimistic opponent of modern commercial society.71 Th is pessimistic interpretation, based on civic virtue theory, results from a misreading of Ferguson’s idea of history.

In the context of his idea of history, Ferguson’s concern with virtue and cor-ruption need not be described as ‘civic’ because, in his view, virtuous qualities do not belong to any specifi c time, place or social structure; rather, such qualities are as primordial as human nature. Ferguson explains,

Th e most animating occasions of human life, are calls to danger and hardship … and man himself, in his excellence, is not an animal of pleasure, nor destined merely to enjoy what the elements bring to his use; but, like his associates, the dog and the horse, to follow the exercises of his nature, in preference to what are called its enjoy-ments; to pine in the lap of ease and of affl uence, and to exult in the midst of alarms that seem to threaten his being.72

Th e reason that human history progresses from savage and barbarian societies to the polished and commercial society is the providential endowment of primordial virtues – instincts for sociability, perfection, struggle, vigilance and so forth. However, these virtues are on the brink of being marginalized in civil society. Many Scots, including Hume, Smith, Robertson, John Millar and oth-ers, held that human manners and institutions came to be progressively refi ned with changes in social patterns.73 Ferguson, on the other hand, was more con-cerned with how to keep intact the primordial virtues. Unlike other animals, the natural ‘respectable’ human attributes can be overshadowed or numbed by indolence, in part due to the rise of civil society. It is, thus, to Ferguson, not civic but primordial virtue that is suited to energizing society.

A close textual investigation may help us appreciate more fully Ferguson’s strategy of deploying the language of decline, on the one hand, and that of pro-gressivism, on the other. Most of Ferguson’s alleged sentiments regarding the decline and decay of civilization can be found in the last part of his Essay. In my view, Parts I and II of this work defend a theoretical proposal of universal human progress, beginning with a powerful rejection of the idea of the state of nature. Parts III and IV include a philosophical history of human evolution, from the


rude to the more polished societies. Finally, Parts V and VI describe examples from the ancient past and provide lessons from the rise and fall of nations. Th e last section harks back to the theoretical proposition of human progressivism: if history demonstrates general progress, then why have some nations been driven to decline? In Ferguson’s view, history actually consists of two tiers, a general or universal history, and a national history. Even if nations might suff er corruption and decline, history remains incessantly progressive.

Almost from the outset of the Essay, Ferguson argues emphatically for the general progress of human history. It is in the context of the great or universal history that Ferguson vehemently opposes John Locke, Th omas Hobbes and, particularly, Rousseau’s notions of the state of nature. Ferguson repeatedly main-tains that the artifacts of human creation are, in fact, natural: ‘We speak of art as distinguished from nature; but art itself is natural to man’.74 Parts I and II of the Essay are replete with assertions of a view of human progress as primordial and that ‘man is susceptible of improvement, and has in himself a principle of progress, and a desire of perfection’. Th ough slow, human progress is forced up like spring water and ‘silently presses on every resistance’.75 Individuals have a life cycle from birth and infancy to maturity and death, but a society is perpetu-ally being succeeded by members ‘renewed in every generation’, ‘where the race seems to enjoy perpetuated youth, and accumulating advantages’.76

Progress and Free WillMany modern critics have noted Ferguson’s progressivism,77 but its relation to providential meaning deserves attention. Although humans cannot envision the exact parameters that God sets for human progress, it is our responsibility to respond to the benevolent call of progress. All beings are destined to grow and progress; the higher the species in the ‘Great Chain of Being’, the more perfect and advanced it will become. In diametrical opposition to the stadial theory of moral progress, Ferguson argues:

Th e rank of a progressive subject is to be estimated, not by its condition at any partic-ular stage of its progress, but by its capacity and destination to advance in the scale of being … In the human infant, though inferior to the young of many other animals, we anticipate the beauty of youth, the vigorous soul of manhood, and the wisdom of age. And the highest rank, in the scale of created existence, is due to that nature, if such there be, which is destined to grow in perfection, and may grow without end …78

Most of Ferguson’s descriptions of the decline of modern states, appearing in Parts V and VI in the Essay, also restate his concern with ‘free will’ and provi-dence. Providential order is, as Ferguson believed, manifested in a constant progression of the universe.79 Why, then, do polities or nations suff er declines? Th e possibility of social decline, revealing human fallibility and the limits of


rationality, brings the perfection of providence into sharp relief. God grants humans freedom of will, so that they are responsible for their actions.

When we say that the Author of nature has projected a scene of discipline and prog-ress for men it is not meant to affi rm any rate of actual attainment for this versatile being. Th e faculties are given to him, and the materials are pretended for his use: but the eff ect is optional to him.80

Given that we are fallible and free creatures, the individual may overlook or neglect the ‘powers of refl ection in the mind of man, that enable him to anticipate the future … which providence has put in our power’.81 Furthermore, the precariousness of national history underscores the importance of human virtues. Accordingly, indolence or eff eminacy of the mind engenders corruption or degeneration in political or national society. Because of free will, particular nations experience vicissitudes of fortune. Th us, at the level of the individual and the nation progress is not mechanistic or determined. Benevolent providence and human free will work together to explain why human history staggers for-ward and suff ers setbacks, why some nations advance and some decline. Yet on the whole God ensures that universal history advances. Th ere is no obvious rec-onciliation of these claims. In fact, Ferguson’s concern is less to confront any philosophical diffi culties than to advance a moral point about human responsi-bility. For example, acutely aware of the confl icts of his century, Ferguson recalls, in section VI of his Essay, how the Roman Republic started to crumble when its citizens neglected to heed the call of providence, as refl ected in Stoic teachings.

Nothing stated so far repudiates the argument that Ferguson embraced some sort of republicanism. A republican exaltation is evident in his Essay.82 What this paper emphasizes is that it is fruitful to read Ferguson’s concern with republican virtue intertextually and in the context of providential history. Th e Essay is com-posed of three genres: a philosophical refl ection on human nature, specifi cally, the capacity to be active and desirous for progress; a historical or anthropologi-cal account of human progress from ancient peoples or other-worldly societies; and a moral prescription of the virtues necessary for maintaining national prog-ress. Th ese three genres correspond, in signifi cant ways, to Ferguson’s vocational rhythms as he moved from minister to historian to moral philosopher. In the context of grasping the idea of progress, his moralist teaching was imperative because, as Ferguson himself repeatedly contended, humans were ‘destined’ to progress.

Th e emergence of civil society constitutes a watershed of human progress, providing a confluence of experiences that both reveal and enable the sophis-tication, knowledge and penetration of the human mind. Civil society also facilitates, however, various sorts of enjoyments and comforts that may lead to a diminution of vigour. To preserve, if not to reinstate, the primordial virtues and


the preservation of progress, a better understanding of the divine is required. Superstitions commonly practised in ‘barbarian’ society must be disdained and forsaken, even as God’s designed order is duly acknowledged. For Ferguson, the citizen, as a rational creature of God, bears the responsibility to maintain prog-ress. With the recognition of providential order, the citizens of civil society must decide whether they aspire to be willing instruments for that design.

And thus, we may conclude, the highest point to which moral science conducts the mind of man, is that eminence of thought, from which he can view himself as but a part in the community of living natures; by which he is in some measure let into the design of God, to combine all the parts together for the common benefi ts of all; and can state himself as a willing instrument for this purpose, in what depends on his own will; and as a conscious instrument, at the disposal of providence, in matters which are out of his power.83

AcknowledgementsTh e author is deeply grateful to the Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections Department, for granting him a permission to use the manuscript materials of Ferguson and Cleghorn in this paper. He also extends his thanks to Dr Annette Munt, Dr Guo Juin Hong, Professor Vincenzo Merolle, anonymous reviewers and, particularly, Dr Eugene Heath for assistance and helpful remarks in preparing the essay for publication.

– 187 –

NOTES

1 Brewer, ‘Ferguson’s Epistolary Self ’1. On civic humanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, Th e Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Politi-

cal Th ought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, rpt 2003) and Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Th ought and History, Chiefl y in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For an analysis of how civic humanism mediated Ferguson’s sociological writings, see J. D. Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Th eme of Exploitation’, British Journal of Soci-ology, 37 (1986), pp. 461–78.

2. See A. Kalyvas and I. Katznelson, ‘Adam Ferguson Returns: Liberalism Th rough a Glass Darkly’, Political Th eory, 26:2 (April 1998), pp. 173–97.

3. Th e Adam Ferguson Institute in Ohio sums up this modern interest when it writes on its home page (http://www.logon.com/afi ) of its commitment to ‘study and discuss the works of Ferguson’ in order to promulgate what it means to be a civil societarian:

A Civil Societarian knows that, because of unintended consequences, a number of government programs cause more harm than good. Th e overall result is the creation of a permanent underclass, as the public sector reduces the private sec-tor’s ability to generate economic progress for all. A Civil Societarian knows that freedom is the road to both material and spiritual growth. Civil Societarians will not trade their freedom for security because this leads to the loss of both. Civil Societarians know that a great country is simply a place where individuals are free to do great deeds. A Civil Societarian is not willing to stand by and watch as this land we call America declines, like past civilizations whose people lost track of their liberty and trusted their rulers more than they trusted themselves. A Civil Societarian understands the purpose of the US constitution and stands against those who misinterpret and misunderstand this document as they slowly take away the freedom that it was designed to protect.

4. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. V. Merolle, intro. J. B. Fagg, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995), vol. 1 (1745–80), p. 223.

5. M. Kugler, ‘Provincial Intellectuals: Identity, Patriotism and Enlightened Peripheries’, Eighteenth Century, 37 (1996), pp. 156–73.

6. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 202.7. Emphasized by D. Allan, Adam Ferguson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press;

Aberdeen: Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2006), p. 33.

8. On which, see B. Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialization in Scotland, 1746–1832 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981); N. Phillipson, ‘Towards A Defi nition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in P. Fritz and D. Williams (eds), City and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), pp. 125–47; T. C. Smout, ‘Where had the Scottish Economy got to by the Th ird Quarter of the Eighteenth Century?’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: Th e Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 45–72.

9. On which, see R. L. Emerson, ‘Th e Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: Th e Select Society of Edinburgh 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 114 (1973), pp. 291–329.

10. L. Hill, ‘Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Confl ict: Th e Case of Adam Ferguson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), pp. 281–99.

11. J. D. Brewer, ‘Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, in D. McCrone, S. Kendrick and P. Straw (eds), Th e Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 13–30.

12. See Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Th eme of Exploitation’; and Brewer, ‘Th e Scot-tish Enlightenment’, in A. Reeve (ed.), Modern Th eories of Exploitation (London: Sage, 1987), pp. 6–27.

13. R. Pascal, ‘Property and Society: Th e Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Cen-tury’, Modern Quarterly, 2 (March 1938), pp. 167–79.

14. See R. L. Meek, ‘Th e Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, in R. L. Meek, Eco-nomics and Ideology and Other Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), pp. 34–50, also in J. Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Chapman and Hall, 1954), pp. 84–102; A. Skinner, ‘A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?’, in I. Bradley and M. C. Howard (eds), Classical and Marxian Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 95–121.

15. For example: R. H. Campbell and A. Skinner, Th e Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982); A. C. Chitnis, Th e Scottish Enlighten-ment (London: Croom Helm, 1976); J. Rendall, Th e Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment (London: Macmillan, 1979).

16. J. B. Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, pp. xx–cxvii, on p. lxxii.

17. Allan, Adam Ferguson, pp. 150–1.18. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson.19. See Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 5; D. Forbes, ‘Introduction’, in A. Ferguson, An Essay

on the History of Civil Society, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. xiii–xli, on pp. xxxviii–xxxix; D. Forbes, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Community’, in D. Young (ed.), Edinburgh in the Age of Reason (Edinburgh: Edin-burgh University Press, 1967), pp. 40–7; Hill, ‘Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Confl ict’, p. 282; and D. G. MacRae, ‘Adam Ferguson, 1723–1816’, in T. Raison (ed.), Th e Founding Fathers of Social Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 17–26, on p. 19.

20. Scott may have embellished the tale for dramatic eff ect to reinforce the impression of Ferguson’s Highland background, since Fagg’s account has him only throwing his papers at the colonel, see Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xxiv.

21. R. Sorenson, ‘Fame as the Forgotten Philosopher: Meditations on the Headstone of Adam Ferguson’, Philosophy, 77 (2002), pp. 109–14, on p. 110.

188 Notes to pages 8–9

22. Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 5.23. A. Carlyle, Th e Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle (1805), ed. J. Burton (Edinburgh:

Foulis, 1910), p. 295.24. Quoted by Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xxv.25. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 261.26. For further details, see J. D. Brewer, ‘Putting Adam Ferguson in His Place’, British Journal

of Sociology, 58 (2007), pp. 105–22.27. Statistical Account of Scotland, 1791–1799, ed. J. Sinclair, new intro B. Lenman, 20 vols

(Wakefi eld, E. P. Publishing, 1977), vol. 12, p. 81.28. Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 1.29. Carlyle, Th e Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle, p. 296.30. L. Stanley, ‘Th e Epistolarium: On Th eorizing Letters and Correspondences’, Auto/Biog-

raphy, 12 (2004), pp. 201–35, on p. 208.31. L. Stanley, ‘Shadows Lying Across Her Pages: Epistolary Aspects of Reading “Th e Event-

ful I” in Olive Schreiner’s Letters’, Journal of European Studies, 32 (2002), pp. 251–66.32. Noted by T. Butt and D. Langdridge, ‘Th e Construction of the Self ’, Sociology, 37 (2003),

pp. 477–93, on p. 483.33. For example K. Plummer, Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism

(London: Sage, 2001), p. 54.34. J. D. Brewer, Th e Royal Irish Constabulary: An Oral History (Belfast: Institute of Irish

Studies, 1990), pp. 14–19.35. E. J. Webb, D. T. Campbell, R. D. Schwartz and L. Sechrest, Unobtrusive Measures: Non-

reactive Research in the Social Sciences (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1966), p. 105.36. Stanley, ‘Th e Epistolarium’, pp. 202–3.37. Ibid., p. 212.38. Ibid., p. 223.39. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p 14; vol. 2 (1781–1816), p. 520.40. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 101–2.41. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 357–8.42. Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, vol. 1, p. xxiv; Carlyle, Th e Autobiography of Dr Alex-

ander Carlyle, p. 297.43. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 408.44. Ibid., vol. 1, p 114.45. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 411.46. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 53.47. For Pitt, see ibid., vol. 2, p. 350.48. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 18.49. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 506.50. Carlyle, Th e Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle, p. 568.51. Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xlix.52. Carlyle, Th e Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle, pp. 297–8.53. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 269.54. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 42.55. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 591.56. Details of the draft s are in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 587–9.57. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 439–40.58. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 525–6.59. Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 2.

Notes to pages 9–17 189

60. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p.10.61. Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xxix.62. Quoted in ibid., p. xxviii.63. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, pp. 525–6.64. J. Lorimer, ‘Adam Ferguson’, Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, 125 ( January 1867),

pp. 25–44, on p. 44.65. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 375.66. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 112.67. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 124.68. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 265, 340.69. See Brewer, ‘Putting Adam Ferguson in His Place’.70. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 483.71. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 495.72. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 361.73. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 340.74. For example, see ibid., vol. 1, pp. 223, 231.75. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 427.76. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 437.77. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 431.78. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 431.79. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 430.80. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 353.81. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 529.82. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 529.83. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 26–7.84. See the letter written prior to the sixth edition in ibid., vol. 2, p. 350.85. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 267–8.86. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 437.87. Quoted by Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 72.88. Ibid., p. 75.89. On one occasion Ferguson does cite Robertson’s History of Scotland in the Essay. Th is

is in reference to the military obligations to chiefs under clan systems, which he uses as an example of the history of subordination, see Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Forbes, p. 131. Clearly, therefore, he knew of the historical literature on Scotland; what he is stating in this letter is a relative lack of interest in it.

90. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 546.91. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 546.92. C. Beveridge and R. Turnbull, Th e Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intel-

lectuals (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989); C. Beveridge and R. Turnbull, Scotland Aft er Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997).

93. Beveridge and Turnbull, Th e Eclipse of Scottish Culture, pp. 7–8.94. Ibid., p. 29.95. Ibid., p. 16.96. G. E. Davie, Th e Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961).97. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 202.98. A. Murdoch, ‘Scotland and the Idea of Britain in the Eighteenth Century’, in T. M.

Devine and J. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth-Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Lin-ton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 90–106.


99. Beveridge and Turnbull, Scotland Aft er Enlightenment, p. 95.100. C. Withers, ‘Th e Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands’, in I. Donnachie and C.

A. Whatley (eds), Th e Manufacture of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), pp. 143–56.

101. Beveridge and Turnbull, Scotland Aft er Enlightenment, p. 86.102. For a similar analysis of the way in which the public and private mediated the sociologi-

cal writings of another famous sociologist from the discipline’s history, see J. D. Brewer, ‘Th e Public and Private in C. Wright Mills’s Life and Work’, Sociology, 39 (2005), pp. 661–77.

2 Allan, ‘Ferguson and Scottish History’1. E. Gellner, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Surprising Robustness of Civil Society’, in E. Gellner

and C. Cansino (eds), Liberalism in Modern Times: Essays in Honour of José G. Merquior (Budapest and London: Central European University Press, 1996), pp. 119–31.

2. W. C. Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1930); Meek, ‘Th e Scottish Contribution to Marx-ist Sociology’; R. L. Meek, ‘Smith, Turgot, and the “Four Stages” Th eory’ in R. L. Meek, Smith, Marx and Aft er: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Th ought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1977), pp. 18–32; R. L. Meek Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); MacRae, ‘Adam Ferguson’.

3. Pascal, ‘Property and Society’; Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Th eme of Exploitation’; Brewer, ‘Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’; F. A. Hayek, ‘Th e Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design’ in F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 96–105.

4. J. Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). As an established fi xture in the development of modern historiography, Ferguson also features prominently in major recent studies such as J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and M. S. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5. H. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1856), p. 49.

6. D. Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p. 4.

7. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Th e Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; rpt Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 297–317.

8. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 393, 413–14.9. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 721–2, 785, 809–10.10. D. Hume, Th e History of England, 6 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1778; rpt Boston, MA:

Little, Brown and Company, 1854; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), esp. vol. 4, pp. 251ff ; vol. 1, p. 13; vol. 6, p. 522.

11. See, for instance, Kames’s Essays upon Several Subjects in Scots Law (1747) and Essays Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (1748), Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes’s Annals of Scotland fr om Malcolm Canmore to Robert I (1776), Henry’s History of


Great Britain (1771–93) and Sir John Dalrymple’s Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1771).

12. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. F. Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 127. Th ere is also a footnote to Macpherson’s Gaelic poetry, added to the 1768 edition of the Essay (at p. 166, n., in the Oz-Salzberger edition), but this too avoids mention of Scotland and is instead used merely to reference the emergence of bardic culture in primitive societies.

13. Ibid., pp. 25, 99, 100, 102, 209.14. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 437.15. D. Hume, Letters of David Hume, ed. G. Birkbeck-Hill (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1888), p. 155.16. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch,

2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. xv.17. Monthly Review, n.s. 5 (1791), p. 403.18. K. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History fr om Voltaire to Gibbon

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 114–22.19. D. Allan, Virtue Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early

Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993); M. Fearnley-Sander, ‘Philosophical History and the Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 323–38.

20. D. Allan, ‘“Ane Ornamente to Yow and Your Familie”: Sir Robert Gordon of Gordon-stoun’s Genealogical History of the Earldom of Sutherland’, Scottish Historical Review, 80 (2001), pp. 24–44; D. Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo-Stoi-cism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540–1690 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 116–21, 145–51.

21. J. Hill, ‘An Essay Upon the Principles of Historical Composition’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1 (1784), p. 79.

22. G. Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740), p. xxiii.23. A. F. Tytler, Plan and Outline of a Course of Lectures on Universal History, Ancient and

Modern (Edinburgh, 1782), p. 5.24. G. Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education (London, 1742), p. 393; A. Gerard,

An Essay on Genius (London, 1774), p. 221.25. D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles

of Morals (1748), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P.H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 164; S. Evnine, ‘Hume, Conjectural History and the Unifor-mity of Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31 (1993), pp. 589–606; G. H. Sabine, ‘Hume’s Contribution to the Historical Method’, Philosophical Review, 15 (1906), pp. 17–38.

26. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 119.27. Ibid., p. 119.28. David Hume of Godscroft , History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus (Edinburgh,

1644), preface. Godscroft , who was fascinated by what he promiscuously presented as Fortune and Providence, also made other claims that prefi gure the Enlightenment’s interest in ‘Unintended Consequences’: about Julius Caesar, for example, he wrote that his life illustrated the role of fortune ‘which turnes the wheele of humane aff airs beyond, and contrary to their expectation’ (p. 322). At the start of the eighteenth century similar interpretative devices, this time in an ostensibly providential framework applied explic-itly to large-scale historical phenomena, were promoted by another Scottish historian,


Patrick Abercromby, who considered that the reign of Malcolm Canmore, King of Scots, showed ‘nothing so much, as that unsearchable Providence that over-rules the Projects and Eff orts of Men, gives Kingdoms and takes them away, depresses and raises Families, distracts and re-settles Nations, and by Means, humane Wisdome can neither foresee nor defeat, brings about its own secret and adorable Ends’, Th e Martial Atchievements of the Scots Nation, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1711–15), vol. 1, p. 339.

29. R. Hamowy, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Th eory of Spontaneous Order (Carbon-dale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); R. L. Emerson, ‘Conjectural History and the Scottish Philosophers’, Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1984), pp. 63–90.

30. W. Bagehot, ‘Adam Smith as a Person’, in R. H. Hutton, (ed.), Biographical Studies (Lon-don: Longman, 1881), pp. 247–64, on p. 255.

31. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 7.32. Ibid., p. 14.33. Ibid., pp. 12–14.34. Th is point has, of course, been widely discussed, and has a long pedigree, but see, for

an early exposition, Pascal, ‘Property and Society’, passim, as well as J. Clive, ‘Th e Social Background to the Scottish Renaissance’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), pp. 225–44.

35. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 214.36. A. Ferguson, Th e History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols

(London: Strahan and T. Cadell, 1783); 2nd edn, 5 vols (Edinburgh, 1799); rpt 1 vol. (New York: J. C. Derby, 1856), p. 481.

37. Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, passim.38. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 215–16.39. Ibid., p. 145.40. G. S. Wood, ‘Th e American Revolution’, in M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds), Th e

Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Th ought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 601–25, on p. 603.

41. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 70–1.42. Ibid., p. 128.43. Ibid., p. 126.44. MacRae, ‘Adam Ferguson’; Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Soci-

ology.45. F. Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-

Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); F. Oz-Salzberger, ‘Adam Ferguson’s Histories in Germany: English Liberty, Scottish Vigour and German Rigour’ in B. Stuchtey and P. Wende (eds), British and German Historiography, 1750–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–66.

46. A. Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1792), vol. 1, p. 1.

47. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 8.48. On the purging of ‘Scoticisms’, a perceived obligation among most of the Enlightenment

intelligentsia, the key primary text is the philosopher and poet James Beattie’s Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (Edinburgh, 1779). Hume, of course, was even maliciously rumoured to have confessed his Scoticisms rather than his sins on his deathbed.


3 Fagg, ‘Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library’1. Inventory of Dr Adam Ferguson, 283, Commissariat of St Andrews, Record of Invento-

ries, VIII, 574, National Archives of Scotland.2. Sir Adam Ferguson to William Adam, 18 September 1817, in Th e Correspondence of

Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 591. Th ere have been three editions of Ferguson’s manuscripts. Th e fi rst was Winifred Philip’s typescript, Th e Unpublished Essays of Adam Ferguson, 3 vols (Argyll: n.p., 1986). Th is was followed in 1996 by Yasuo Amoh’s work (in English) entitled Adam Ferguson: Collection of Essays (Kyoto: Rinsen Book Company, 1996). Th e latest edition was Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. V. Merolle, with E. Heath and R. Dix (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006).

3. John Lee to Hugh Cleghorn, St Andrews, 22 October 1817, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 591. Th e bracketed word is part of the letter as published.

4. Adam Ferguson to John Macpherson, London, SE Blackheath, 9 April 1775, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 119.

5. Adam Ferguson to Edward Gibbon, Edinburgh, 19 March 1775, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 135; and Ferguson to Adam Smith, Edinburgh, 18 April 1776, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 142.

6. Adam Ferguson to Lord Stanhope, Edinburgh, 10 March 1777, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 145.7. Adam Ferguson to John Macpherson, Edinburgh, 21 August 1780, in ibid., vol. 1 p.

250.8. Adam Ferguson to [William Creech], Argyle [Square], 5 March 1783, in ibid., vol. 2,

294. See also J. MacKenzie, Th e Life of Michael Bruce Poet of Loch Leven (London: J. M. Dent, 1905) which attempts to explain the convoluted aff air. MacKenzie, who also asserts that a rough copy of Bruce’s ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’ in the young man’s hand

had something to do with those rough copies of letters lately discovered, which had passed into the possession of the late Rev. Professor [Oliphant] Smeaton as part of a large collection of material which had been gathered by another for the purpose of publishing a life of Professor Adam Ferguson. About the time Profes-sor Smeaton got these given to him Dr John Small issued a volume of Professor A. Ferguson’s life, so that no further action was taken (p. 135).

Th e author would like to thank Richard B. Sher for alerting her to these materials.9. Adam Ferguson to ‘Madam’, 24 February 1790, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson,

vol. 2, p. 338.10. Adam Ferguson to John Macpherson, Nidpath Castle, 7 May 1796, in ibid., vol. 2, pp.

390–1.11. Adam Ferguson to John Macpherson, Hallyards, 23 December 1796, in ibid., vol. 2, p.

409.12. Adam Ferguson to [William Creech], Hallyards, 5 July 1797, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 416.13. Adam Ferguson to Alexander Carlyle, Hallyards, 2 October 1797, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 423;

and Adam Ferguson to Alexander Carlyle, Hallyards, 2 October 1797, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 425.

14. Adam Ferguson to Andrew Stuart, Hallyards, near Peebles, 28 June 1798, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 437.

15. Adam Ferguson to John Macpherson, Hallyards, 10 November 1804, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 491; and Adam Ferguson to [Archibald Alison], St Andrews, 11 July 1811, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 517.

16. L. Hill, Th e Passionate Society: Th e Social, Political and Moral Th ought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), p. 63.


17. C. P. Finlayson and S. M. Simpson, ‘Th e History of the Library: 1710–1837’ in J. R. Guild and A. Law (eds), Edinburgh University Library, 1580–1980: A Collection of Historical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Library, 1982), pp. 55–66, on p. 56.

18. Minutes of the Senatus Academicus, 1733–1790, MS, Special Collections Division, Edinburgh University Library, vol. 1, pp. 163, 166, 182, 184, 190.

19. Finlayson and Simpson, ‘Th e History of the Library’, pp. 57–8.20. Receipt Book, Books Borrowed from Edinburgh University Library, Special Collec-

tions Division, Edinburgh University Library, DA 2. 2–4 (Ferguson 1764–90, Ferguson 1790–1806). Th e entries were abbreviated and diffi cult to read, in addition to having lines drawn through them. Aft er the records in the receipt books were reconstructed the entries were expanded by checking them against many and varied sources. Th e expan-sions are shown in brackets. Th e most helpful source was Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1918–23). Computer resources were also valuable, including on-line access to the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, Google.com, Dogpile.com and World Catalog (used thanks to the kindness of Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas). Anne Stricklin provided most of the Latin translations.

21. Extracts from the Town Council Records, 16 May 1764, in A. Dalzel, History of the Uni-versity of Edinburgh fr om its Foundation, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1862), vol. 2, p. 433.

22. Adam Ferguson to Edward Gibbon, Edinburgh, 18 April 1776, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 141.

23. Extracts from the Town Council Minutes, 27 October 1773, in Dalzel, History of the University of Edinburgh, vol. 2, p. 444.

24. Extracts from the Town Council Minutes, 24 May 1775, in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 445–6.25. Minutes of the Senatus Academicus, vol. 1, pp. 333–4.26. Aft er Ferguson retired books were sometimes checked out on his page with no signature.

It is impossible to determine if they were borrowed by or for him. Th ese books have been given less complete bibliographical detail than those which can be charged positively to him. Books checked out by his sons or students have been omitted. Th e younger Adam Ferguson checked out four books, Joseph Ferguson fourteen, and James Ferguson thirty-seven. Students borrowed twenty-two.

27. Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols (rpt New York: Garland, 1978), vol. 1, p. 8.

28. A. Ferguson, ‘Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black, M.D.’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 5 (1805), pp. 101–17. Read 3 August 1801.

29. L. C. Draper, in his King’s Mountain and its Heroes ( Johnson City, TN: Peter Th om-son, 1881), p. 211, cites Ferguson’s ‘rare, if not hitherto unknown pamphlet’. Th e author would like to thank Richard B. Sher for pointing this work out to her.

30. Hill, Th e Passionate Society, p. 238.31. P. Salway, Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2000), p. 2. Th e author thanks Professor Vincenzo Merolle for sharing his insight on this matter.

32. Hill, Th e Passionate Society, p. 236.33. Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Th eme of Exploitation’, p. 473, as quoted in Hill, Th e

Passionate Society, p. 234.


4 Raynor, ‘Ferguson’s Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia’

1. ‘Lord George Sackville desired I would acquaint you, in case he had not, that My Lord Lieutenant was pleased to give Leave of Absence from the April Muster next ensuing, to Th e Revnd. Mr. Adam Ferguson Chaplain to my Regt. Which I beg the favour you’ll please write of to Ireland’, Lord John Murray to Sir Robert Wilmot, 15 March 1755, Derbyshire Record Offi ce, D3155/C1706.

2. ‘Mr. Speaker Onslow’s Speech to the King on presenting the Money Bills’, 27 May, Gentle-man’s Magazine (October 1756), p. 457; reprinted in W. Cobbett and J. Wright (eds), Th e Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols (London: Hansard, 1806–20), vol. 15, p. 770.

3. H. Walpole, Memoirs of King George II, ed. J. Brooke, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1985), vol. 2, p. 91.

4. Charles Jenkinson to Sanderson Miller, 19 May 1756, in L. Dickins and M. Stanton (eds), An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 332.

5. A. Ferguson, Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756); date of publication as given in the Public Advertiser, 25 November 1756. Th e pamphlet was very favourably reviewed in the Monthly Review (December 1756), pp. 673–5.

6. Ferguson, Refl ections, p. 53.7. Ibid., p. 3.8. Ibid., p. 48.9. Ibid., p. 17.10. Ibid., p. 30.11. Ibid., pp. 8, 13.12. ‘To the Nobility and Gentry, associated for the Preservation of the Game’, Gentle-

man’s Magazine (August 1756), p. 384; reprinted from the Daily Gazetteer. See also J. R. Western, Th e English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: Th e Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 71–2, 119–20.

13. Ferguson, Refl ections, pp. 13, 16, 17.14. Ibid., p. 25.15. Gilbert Elliot to George Grenville, 25 May 1756, in W. J. Smith (ed.), Th e Grenville

Papers, 4 vols (London: John Murray, 1852), vol. 1, p. 160 (original emphasis).16. Parliamentary History, vol. 15, p. 736.17. Gentleman’s Magazine ( June 1756), p. 295.18. Ferguson, Refl ections, p. 12.19. Lord Dacre to Sanderson Miller, May 1756, in Dickins and Stanton (eds), An Eight-

eenth-Century Correspondence, p. 333.20. Th is is evident in Gilbert Elliot’s second report of Hardwicke’s speech: ‘… my Lord

Chancellor’s argument against the Bill was worthy of so great a man, one who declared that day he was no prerogative lawyer. He, too, is a friend to militia; his idea is, that it ought to consist only of 30,000 men; a fi xed revenue for their pay, not to be annually voted; to depend solely on the Crown. Th e consent of Parliament to their being called is no doubt a violent encroachment upon prerogative. How could the House of Com-mons entertain so wild a project? At any time it would have been absurd, much more so under the present auspicious Administration. Th is hint, it is devoutly to be wished, will be adopted next session’, Gilbert Elliott to George Grenville, 27 May 1756, in Smith (ed.), Th e Grenville Papers, vol. 1, p. 161.


21. Sir Edward Turner to Sanderson Miller, 25 May 1756, in Dickins and Stanton (eds), An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence, p. 335.

22. Th ey proposed several ‘amendments designed to make the bill harmless’: that it was to be only a temporary measure limited to fi ve years; that it should consist only of 30,000 men instead of 60,000; and that ‘it was not to be raised by ballot unless it proved impos-sible to do so by volunteers’. ‘Th e great idea now was to let it die a natural death aft er the excitement that had brought it forth had evaporated’, Western, Th e English Militia in the Eighteenth Century, p. 138.

23. Ferguson, Refl ections, pp. 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 47.24. Ibid., p. 53.25. R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: Th e Moderate Literati of

Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 219; emphasis added. In his A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had proposed a militia model that ‘would be as great a school of virtue as of military discipline’ (1698; London, 1755), p. 55.

26. Parliamentary History, vol. 15, p. 757.27. Ibid., vol. 15, p. 721.28. Ferguson, Refl ections, pp. 50, 53.29. D. Hay and N. Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 2.30. Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, pp. 90–1.31. Almost fi ft y years aft er he penned Refl ections Ferguson wrote to his former student Henry

Dundas that ‘in admitting Recruits [to the militia] we are rather to Select than to solicit; For besides that it is no recommendation to any Institution, that it is open to every one; here is a Trust that must not be prostituted’. As for compulsion: ‘In this way no doubt every Subject may be forced to handle a Firelock: but this is soon Obtained and it is of little value if the Heart does not go along with it. Th ere is danger that whatever is forced may leave an impression of Servitude and consequently some degree of repugnance to the Bussiness’, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, pp. 473, 476.

5 Amoh, ‘Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions’1. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, p. 947.2. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 947.3. David Hume to Baron Mure of Caldwell, 27 October 1775, in D. Hume, Th e Letters of

David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), letter 510.4. David Hume to Baron Mure of Caldwell, 26 October 1775, in ibid., letter 509. For

Hume’s view on America, see H. Tanaka, ‘Hume on America’, Konan Economic Review, 22:2 (1981), pp. 79–112 (in Japanese); and D. W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. chs 11, 12.

5. L. G. Tait, ‘Introduction’, in Th e Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, 4 vols (1802 edn, rpt Bristol: Th oemmes Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. x. On Witherspoon and America, see R. B. Sher and J. R. Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), part 1: ‘Religion and Revolution: Th e Two Worlds of John Witherspoon’.

6. See D. Daiches, ‘John Witherspoon, James Wilson and the Infl uence of Scottish Rhetoric on America’, in J. Dwyer and R. B. Sher (eds), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Cen-tury Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), pp. 163–80. For Witherspoon’s reading


list, see D. F. Th ompson, ‘Th e Education of a Founding Father. Th e Reading List for John Witherspoon’s Course in Political Th eory, as Taken by James Madison’, Political Th eory, 4 (November 1976), pp. 523–9.

7. For Scottish opinion on the American Revolution, see D. I. Fagerstrom, ‘Scottish Opin-ion and the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 11:2 (1954), pp. 252–75. For more recent accounts, consult B. Harris (ed.), Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005); and B. Harris, Th e Scottish People and the French Revolution (forthcoming, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008).

8. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, ch. 7: ‘Th e Tolerant Con-servatives’.

9. For controversy over the presentation of Douglas in Edinburgh, see ibid., pp. 74–92; Y. Amoh, Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment (Tokyo: Keiso, 1993), pp. 93–112 (in Japanese).

10. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 275.11. C. McC. Weis and F. A. Pottle (eds), Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 360. See also, H. Mizuta, ‘Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions’, in S. Tanaka (ed.), Studies on the Scottish Enlighten-ment (Tokyo: Hokuju, 1988), pp. 277–301 (in Japanese).

12. Th ompson, ‘Th e Education of a Founding Father’, p. 528; and G. L. McDowell, ‘Com-merce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson’s Constitutionalism’, Review of Politics, 45:4 (October 1983), pp. 536–52, esp. p. 538. It is an irony of history that while Ferguson bitterly opposed American Independence, Witherspoon, who introduced Ferguson into America from Scotland, signed the Declaration of Independence and contributed greatly to the founding of a new state. Ferguson referred to Witherspoon in one of his letters, see below, p. 80.

13. Ferguson was born on 20 June, Witherspoon on 5 February, Smith on 5 June and Rich-ard Price, discussed below, on 23 February.

14. Th ey likely got acquainted when they were studying divinity at Edinburgh University: Witherspoon from 1736 to 1743, Ferguson from 1742 to 1745.

15. For Ferguson’s views on America, see H. Tanaka, ‘Adam Ferguson on America and Civilized Society: His Tract against Civil Liberty by R. Price’, Konan Economic Review, 25:4 (March 1985), pp. 187–226 (in Japanese); Y. Amoh, ‘Adam Ferguson and the American Revolution’, Kochi University Review, 37 (March 1990), pp. 55–87, which is partly used in the present essay; and R. Hamowy, ‘Two Whig Views of the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson’s Response to Richard Price’, in R. Hamowy, Th e Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005), pp. 159–82 (fi rst published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 31:1 (Fall 2003), pp. 3–35). For the contrast in the two Adams’s views on civilization, see H. Mizuta, ‘Two Adams in the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson on Progress’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 191 (1980), pp. 812–19; and for their views on national defence, see R. B. Sher, ‘Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense’, Journal of Modern History, 61:2 (1989), pp. 240–68.

16. J. Small, ‘Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edin-burgh, 23:3 (1864), p. 665.

198 Notes to page 74

17. For other accounts of Ferguson’s views on the two revolutions, see Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson; Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, pp. xlvii–lvi, lxxxii–lxxxvii; and Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, chs 7, 8.

18. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, pp. 95–6. Th e original letter is undated; Merolle conjectures that it was written in 1772 or early in 1773.

19. R. Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776), in R. Price, Two Tracts on Civil Liberty (1778 edn, rpt New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

20. A. Ferguson, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Richard Price, Intitled, Obser-vations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, &c., in a Letter fr om a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament (London: T. Cadell, 1776). Hamowy regards Remarks as ‘one of the most meas-ured of the published rebuttals’ (‘Two Whig Views of the American Revolution’, p. 160).

21. Hamowy considers that ‘a handsome government stipend’, awarded to Ferguson on 23 January 1776, motivated Ferguson to write a pro-government pamphlet (ibid., p. 163). However, it was not only the stipend but also the great sensation caused by the publica-tion of Price’s Observations (‘Several thousand copies were sold within a few days of its publication’, ibid., p. 160) that inspired Ferguson to write his pamphlet against Price’s Observations.

22. Ferguson, Remarks, p. 2.23. Price, Observations, pp. 6–7 (original emphases).24. Ferguson, Remarks, p. 7.25. Ibid., p. 4. See C. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Th e Spirit of the Laws (1748), ed. and

trans. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 155–6.

26. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzbeger, p. 160. Since Pocock’s Th e Machiavellian Moment, others have argued that Ferguson was greatly infl uenced by civic humanism. See the recent work of M. Geuna, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: Th e Case of Adam Ferguson’, in M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2002) vol. 2, pp. 177–96, and the essay by F. Oz-Salzberger, ‘Scots, Germans, Republic and Commerce’, vol. 2, pp. 197–226.

27. Ferguson, Remarks, p. 14.28. Ibid., p. 13.29. Price, Observations, p. 19. See also, Ferguson, Remarks, p. 17.30. Ibid., p. 44.31. Ibid., p. 31.32. Price, Observations, p. 70.33. Ibid., p. 71.34. Ferguson, Remarks, pp. 22–3.35. Ibid., p. 23.36. Ibid., pp. 58–9.37. Ibid., p. 58.38. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 272; see also pp. 206–11. 39. A. Ferguson, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s First Highland

Regiment of Foot, Commanded by Lord John Murray, at their Cantonment at Camberwell, on the 18th Day of December 1745 (London, A. Millar, 1746).

40. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 273.


41. See Price, Observations, pp. 104–8.42. Ferguson, Remarks, p. 60.43. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 156.44. ‘We cannot perceive at all sympathetic feeling towards America in Ferguson’s writings’,

Tanaka, ‘Adam Ferguson on America and Civilized Society’, p. 220.45. It was on 2 December 1777 that the information was conveyed to the King. See C. R.

Ritcheson, British Politics and the American Revolution (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1954), pp. 233–4.

46. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 166.47. For the history of the Carlisle Commission, see Ritcheson, British Politics and the Ameri-

can Revolution, pp. 258–86; A. S. Brown, ‘Th e Impossible Dream: Th e North Ministry, Th e Structure of Politics, and Conciliation’ in L. S. Kaplan (ed.), Th e American Revolu-tion and ‘A Candid World’ (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977), pp. 17–39. Regarding Ferguson’s commitment to the Commission, see J. B. Fagg, ‘An “Ingenious Literary Production”: Adam Ferguson and the Carlisle Commission Manifesto’, Scotia: Interdisciplinary Journal of Scottish Studies, 24 (2000), pp. 1–14.

48. ‘Proceedings of the British Commissioners at Philadelphia, 1778–9. Partly in Fergu-son’s hand’, MS, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.1.68. Along with the Edinburgh University Library manuscript, there remain two additional sets of Proceedings of the Carlisle Commission, one in the Castle Howard Archives, the other in the British Library. For more information, see Y. Amoh, D. Lingley and H. Aoki, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Proceedings of the British Commissioners at Philadelphia, 1778–9: Partly in Fergu-son’s Hand’, ed. Y. Amoh, D. Lingley and H. Aoki (preliminary version), Th e Kakenhi Supplemental Project Research Report (Kochi: Kobun, 2007). Th e section of the ‘Pro-ceedings’ referred to as ‘Orders and Instructions’ is also contained in S. E. Morison (ed.), Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764–1788, and the Formation of the Federal Constitution, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 186–203.

49. ‘Proceedings of the British Commissioners’, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.1.68, pp. 32–3.

50. Ibid., p. 33.51. Ibid., p. 31.52. Ibid., pp. 36–7.53. Ibid., p. 71.54. Ibid., p. 86.55. Ibid., pp. 170–8. At the bottom of the ‘Manifesto’ is signed ‘By their Excellencies [namely,

Carlisle, Clinton and Eden] Command. Adam Ferguson, Secretary’. For detailed analysis of the ‘Manifesto’, see Fagg, ‘An “Ingenious Literary Production”’.

56. ‘Proceedings of the British Commissioners’, p. 170. As secretary, Ferguson was charged with disseminating the document and he was, therefore, busy with the printing of several hundred copies in English and German. See also Fagg, ‘An “Ingenious Literary Produc-tion”’, p. 5.

57. ‘Proceedings of the British Commissioners’, p. 172.58. Ibid., p. 173.59. Probably John Witherspoon. See above, pp. 73–4.


60. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, pp. 201–2.61. E. Burke, ‘Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election 6 September 1780’, in E. Burke,

Th e Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. W. M. Elofson with J. A. Woods, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), vol. 3, p. 633.

62. T. Paine, ‘Th e Crisis Number VI’, in T. Paine, Collected Writings, ed. E. Foner (New York: Th e Library of America, 1995), p. 181.

63. Ibid., p. 182. Paine criticized Ferguson by name. See also Fagg, ‘An “Ingenious Literary Production”’, pp. 6–7.

64. Th e ‘Memorial respecting the measures to be pursued on the present immediate prospect of a fi nal separation of the American colonys from Great Britain’ (MS, Edinburgh Uni-versity Library, Dc.1.42, ff . 417–21) was fi rst published in Amoh, ‘Adam Ferguson and the American Revolution’, pp. 81–7, later in Ferguson, Collection of Essays, pp. 302–6, and in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, pp. 556–60.

65. ‘Memorial’, in Collection of Essays, pp. 302–3; and Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 556.

66. In the ‘Memorial’, Ferguson does not elaborate the economic details of his mercantilist assumptions. Aft er all, in the Essay he wrote that he was not much conversant in ‘specula-tions on commerce and wealth’ (ed. Oz-Salzburger, p. 140).

67. ‘Memorial’, in Collection of Essays, pp. 304–5; and Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 558.

68. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 305; and Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 558.

69. Th e ‘Memorial’ referred not only to the French intervention in the war but also to that of the Spanish. Spain entered the war on the side of France in April 1779. Th erefore, the ‘Memorial’ was written aft er that time. Ferguson and the commissioners landed at Plymouth on 19 December 1778. See Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. liv.

70. ‘Memorial’, in Collection of Essays, p. 302; and Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 556.

71. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 306; and Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 559.

72. I. R. Christie, ‘Th e Yorkshire Association, 1780–4: A Study in Political Organization’, Th e Historical Journal, 3:2 (1960), pp. 144–61, on p. 144.

73. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 233.74. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 289.75. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 292.76. Ferguson died on 22 February 1816.77. See Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, pp. lxxxii–lxxxvii.78. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, pp. 336–7.79. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 340.80. On the French translation of the Roman Republic and Démeunier, see ibid., vol. 2, p. 342,

nn. 14, 15.81. Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, rpt, intro. J. Hecht, 2 vols (Hilde-

sheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 472–3 (original emphasis).82. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 471.83. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 473.84. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 473.85. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 474–5.


86. Th e watermark of the paper, 1803 (Edinburgh University Library, Dc.1.42, ff . 1–8) and 1799 (ff . 9–36), shows that ‘Of Statesmen and Warriors’ was written aft er the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802. Th is essay may be found in Ferguson, Collection of Essays, pp. 26–38, and in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 33–46.

87. ‘Of Statesmen and Warriors’, in Collection of Essays, p. 29; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 35.

88. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, pp. 30–1; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 36.89. Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 419.90. Th e date is inferred from the watermark, 1806. ‘Of the French Revolution with its Actual

and Still Impending Consequences in Europe’ was fi rst published by Y. Kubo in Kwansei Gakuin University Annual Studies, 11 (1962), pp. 165–73. Th e essay may be found in Ferguson, Collection of Essays, pp. 132–40; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 133–41.

91. ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Collection of Essays, p. 132; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 134.

92. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 134; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 135.93. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 135; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 135.94. Kettler writes that ‘Ferguson’s animosity toward the French Revolution rested primarily

on the threat which he believed it posed to the security of England and to the peace of Europe’, Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, p. 93.

95. ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Collection of Essays, p. 138; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p 137.

96. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 135; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p 135.97. On 20 September 1792, near the village of Valmy, in northern France, the French artil-

lery defeated the invading Prussian army. Th e victory at the Battle of Valmy encouraged the French revolutionary troops.

98. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 139; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 138.99. Ferguson also feared the appearance of a dictator in a republic across the Atlantic. See

above, pp. 76–7, and Ferguson, Remarks, pp. 22–4.100. ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Collection of Essays, p. 140; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam

Ferguson, p. 139.101. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 139; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 138.102. Adam Smith had expected that ‘Should the war in America drag out through another

campaign, the American militia may become in every respect a match for that standing army, of which the valour appeared, in the last war, at least not inferior to that of the hardiest veterans of France and Spain’ (Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, p. 701).

103. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 26.104. Compare Ferguson’s essay ‘Of the French Revolution’ (see above, pp. 84–5) with Hugh

Blair’s ‘On the Love of Our Country (Preached 18th April 1793, on the day of a National Fast appointed by Government, on occasion of the War with the French Republic)’, in H. Blair, Sermons, 5 vols (London, 1777–1801), vol. 5, pp. 124–51. Blair writes, ‘We have beheld the throne and the altar overthrown together; and nothing but a wretched ruin left , where once a stately fabric stood’ (p. 135). For Alexander Carlyle’s fast-day sermon, see Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 209–10.


6 Kettler, ‘Political Education for Empire and Revolution’1. G. E. Davie, ‘Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy’, in D.

F. Norton, N. Capaldi and Wade L. Robinson (eds), McGill Hume Studies (San Diego, CA: Austin Press, 1979), pp. 43–62.

2. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Th eory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

3. Kettler, Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Th ought (New Brunswick, NJ: Trans-action, 2005), a reprint of Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, with a new introduction and aft erword; D. Kettler, ‘Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Phi-losophy: Th e Place of Traditional Problems in the Formation of Mannheim’s Th ought’, Political Science Quarterly, 82 (September 1967), pp. 399–426.

4. D. Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of Modern His-tory, 48 (March 1976), pp. 95–100; D. Kettler, ‘Linking the Philosophical and Political’, Political Studies, 24 (September 1976), pp. 334–8; D. Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society: A Reconsideration’, Political Th eory, 5 (November 1977), pp. 437–60.

5. D. Kettler, ‘Ferguson’s Principles: Constitution in Permanence’, Studies in Burke and His Time, 19 (1978), pp. 208–22.

6. A. Ferguson, Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, MS, Papers of Professor Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections Divi-sion, Dc.1.84.

7. Compare C. Loader and D. Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2002).

8. See Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, pp. 455–6, 459, nn. 31–2.9. W. A. Brown, Empire or Independence: A Study in the Failure of Reconciliation, 1774–

1783, new edn (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966). Contrary to some characterizations of Ferguson’s position, which draw on a misidentifi ed pamphlet against Price (Remarks on Dr. Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (London: G. Kearsley, 1776)), Ferguson’s proposal for major policy concessions without substantial political change anticipated the government’s version of a ‘Canadian’ settlement, author-ized when it was much too late and under the duress of the defeat at Saratoga and the subsequent imminence of the French alliance. See Kettler, Adam Ferguson, p. 77, n. 51. Th e present emphasis on the American case leaves open the question of Ferguson’s inter-est in Indian aff airs, observable not only in his unexpectedly frequent references to the subject in the Essay but also in his application in 1773 ‘for an important position relating to the government of India’. See Kettler, Adam Ferguson, p. 71, n. 17. Ferguson corre-sponded for decades with his former student and later benefactor John Macpherson, who was Warren Hasting’s short-term successor.

10. A complete set of reading notes for all of Ferguson’s lectures in the fi rst and last parts of his course (1775–85: lectures 1–34; 85–103) is available at: <http://www.bard.edu/contestedlegacies/kettler/works.shtml>.

11. R. D. Cummings, Human Nature and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

12. See in particular Hamowy, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Th eory of Spontaneous Order.

13. Kalyvas and Katznelson, ‘Adam Ferguson Returns’.


14. C. Schmitt, Th e Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976).

15. B. Buchan, ‘Civilisation, Sovereignty and War: Th e Scottish Enlightenment and Interna-tional Relations’, International Relations, 20:2 (2006), pp. 175–92.

16. R. Vernon, ‘Unintended Consequences’, Political Th eory, 7:1 (February 1979), pp. 57–73.

17. In particular, see D. Hume, ‘Whether the British Government Inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); D. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1975), pp. 180–1.

18. A. Smith, ‘Letter to the Edinburgh Review’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; rpt Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), pp. 242–56.

19. Kettler, Adam Ferguson, pp. 23–5, 86–7.20. C. Tilly, Why? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).21. On the importance of the metaphor of ‘place’ in Ferguson’s thought, see Kettler, ‘History

and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, pp. 439–44.22. Kalyvas and Katznelson, ‘Adam Smith Returns’. See also Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in

Ferguson’s Essay’.23. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1856 edn), p. 104 (II.III).24. A passage oft en cited in support of the ‘spontaneous order’ interpretation notes that

political establishments ‘are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’. Yet Ferguson credits the conclusion to the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, who is recalling stories of political intrigue. See the Aft erword in Kettler, Adam Ferguson, pp. 317–18.

25. A. Pope, An Essay on Man, in A. Pope, Th e Works of Alexander Pope (1871), collected Rt Hon. J. W. Croker, intro. and notes Rev. W. Elwin, 10 vols (New York: Gordian Press, 1967), vol. 2, p. 423 (Epistle III, VI.303–4).

26. Kettler, ‘Montesquieu on Love: Notes on the Persian Letters’, American Political Science Review, 58 (September 1964), pp. 658–61.

7 McDaniel, ‘Ferguson, Roman History and the Th reat of Military Government’

1. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 108. On the Scottish inquiries into the ‘progress of society in Europe’, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2.

2. A. Ferguson to W. Strahan, 12 October 1782, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, p. 288.

3. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1783 edn), vol. 1, p. 4.4. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 3.5. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 5, p. 155. Compare Tacitus, Th e Annals

of Imperial Rome, trans. M. Grant, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 37: ‘[T]he only possible cure for the distracted country had been government by one man’.

6. See, for example, D. Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 377–464; A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978; rpt Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), esp.


pp. 196–9. For a general explanation of Smith’s account of the advantages that modern commercial societies possessed over ancient civic republics, see I. Hont and M. Ignatieff , ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: an Introductory Essay’, in Hont and Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, pp. 1–44.

7. Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue; Sher, ‘Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense’.

8. Th e British debate of the early years of the Seven Years War revolved around the con-cept of national ‘military spirit’ and involved a number of participants. See especially J. Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), and R. Wallace, Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (London, 1758), esp. Part V: ‘Of the National Genius and Capacity for Self-Defence’, pp. 193–256.

9. Ferguson, Refl ections, p. 53. Compare Fletcher, A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias, esp. p. 8.

10. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 236–8.11. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, pp. 706–7; Ferguson, Refl ections, pp. 25–8.12. Ferguson to W. Pulteney, 1 December 1769, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson,

vol. 1, p. 88.13. Ferguson, Remarks, p. 23.14. Ferguson, ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 133–

41.15. S. Pufendorf, An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of

Europe (1682–6), 10th edn (Dublin, 1729), pp. 22–3.16. For a classic British statement of the dangers posed by France immediately aft er Utrecht,

see R. Steele, Th e Crisis: or, A Discourse Representing, fr om the most Authentic Records, the Just Causes of the Late Happy Revolution (London, 1714), pp. 30–2. For the revival of similar fears during the War of the Austrian Succession, see E. G. Gould, Th e Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 3–14, 30–4. On the French argu-ments levelled against any resumption of Louis XIV’s military adventures, see I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 22–37.

17. J. Trenchard and T. Gordon, Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, 5th edn, 4 vols (London, 1748), vol. 3, p. 285.

18. Ferguson signalled the extent of his intellectual debt to Montesquieu in his Essay: see Fer-guson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 66. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the Roman Republic, he praised Montesquieu’s earlier Considerations for ‘collecting into general points, what every reader may be pleased to observe in detail’, Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 1, p. xxiii.

19. See P. A. Rahe, ‘Th e Book that Never Was: Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Romans in Historical Context’, History of Political Th ought, 26:1 (2005), pp. 43–89; Hont, Jeal-ousy of Trade, pp. 28–9.

20. C. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), ed. and trans. D. Lowenthal (Indianapolis, IN: Hack-ett Publishing, 1965), pp. 92–4.

21. Ibid., p. 122.22. Ibid., pp. 171, 150.23. Ibid., p. 152. For further elaboration of Montesquieu’s critique of democratic republican-

ism, see V. B. Sullivan, ‘Against the Despotism of a Republic: Montesquieu’s Correction


of Machiavelli in the Name of the Security of the Individual’, History of Political Th ought, 27:2 (2006), pp. 263–89.

24. Montesquieu, Th e Spirit of the Laws, pp. 69–70.25. Ibid., p. 69.26. On Montesquieu’s demand for small ‘regular troops’ in the modern monarchy, see his

Réfl exions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, in C. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, ed. C. P. Courtney and F. Weil, 2 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), vol. 2, p. 342. Also see the characterization of monarchy contained in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: ‘Power can never be divided equally between prince and people: it is too diffi cult to keep the balance. Th e power must necessarily decrease on one side and increase on the other, but usually the ruler is at an advantage, being in control of the armed forces’, C. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Let-ters (1721), 2nd edn, trans. C. J. Betts (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993), p. 187.

27. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes, p. 146.28. Montesquieu, Th e Spirit of the Laws, p. 224.29. J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Discourse on Political Economy’, in ‘Th e Social Contract’ and Other Later

Political Writings, ed. and trans. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 28–9.

30. Abbé G. T. F. Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. O. Justamond, 8 vols (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1783), vol. 8, p. 155.

31. Marquis J. F. Chastellux, An Essay on Public Happiness, investigating the State of Human Nature, under each of its Particular Appearances, through the Several Periods of its History, to the Present Times (London, 1774), pp. 96–9, 237.

32. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 258.33. Ibid., pp. 63–73.34. Montesquieu, Th e Spirit of the Laws, pp. 27–8, 59–66; Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salz-

berger, p. 71.35. Ibid., pp. 71, 257.36. Ibid., pp. 241–3. Compare J.-F. de Saint-Lambert, ‘Honneur’ and ‘Législateur’, in D.

Diderot and J. le Rond d’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sci-ences, des arts et des métiers, par une société des gens de lettres, 17 vols (Paris, 1751–61), vol. 8, pp. 288–91, vol. 9, pp. 357–63.

37. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 241–6.38. Montesquieu, Th e Spirit of the Laws, pp. 70, 330.39. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 128, 182.40. Ibid., pp. 126–7.41. Ibid., p. 128.42. Ibid., pp. 128, 145.43. Ibid., p. 193.44. Ibid., p. 146.45. Ibid., pp. 144–5.46. Ibid., p. 145.47. Ibid., p. 99.48. Ibid., p. 219.49. Ibid., p. 146.50. Ibid., p. 256.51. Ibid., p. 148.


52. For examples of Ferguson’s continuing preoccupation with Britain’s vulnerability to for-eign conquest, see Ferguson to J. Macpherson, 27 July 1779; Ferguson to J. Macpherson, 18 December 1779; Ferguson to W. Eden, 2 January 1780; in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, pp. 218–19, 222–5, 232–6.

53. Ferguson to W. Strahan, 15 July 1782, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 284.54. For an overview of these debates see P. J. Marshall, ‘Empire and Authority in the Later

Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15:1 (1987), pp. 105–22; P. J. Marshall, ‘A Nation Defi ned by Empire, 1755–1776’ in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom: Th e Making of British History (Routledge: Lon-don, 1995), pp. 208–22; H. V. Bowen, ‘British Conceptions of Global Empire 1756–83’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26:3 (1998), pp. 1–27. For general dis-cussion see L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 – 1837, 3rd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 101–45.

55. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 1, p. 378.56. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 300–1.57. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 102–3.58. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 119.59. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 36, n.60. Ferguson, Refl ections, p. 38. Also see Ferguson’s cautions against British aggression in the

1790s: Ferguson to J. Edgar, 23 September 1795, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Fergu-son, vol. 2, p. 372.

61. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 1, p. 345.62. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 147–8.63. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 355.64. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 145.65. On the ‘ideological’ conception of the British Empire as ‘Protestant, commercial,

maritime, and free’, see D. Armitage, Th e Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and D. Armitage, ‘Th e British Conception of Empire in the Eighteenth Century’, in F. Bosbach and H. Hiery (eds), Imperium / Empire / Reich: Ein Konzept politischer Herrschaft im deutsch-britischen Vergleich: An Anglo-German Comparison of a Concept of Rule (München: Prince Albert Studies, 1999), pp. 91–108.

66. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 2, p. 319. On Montesquieu and Hume, see J. Robertson, ‘Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig Doctrine’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 349–73.

67. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 4, pp. 139–40.68. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 390, 396.69. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 388–417. On ancient agrarian laws in early modern political thought in

general, see E. Nelson, Th e Greek Tradition in Republican Political Th ought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

70. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 2, p. 59. Compare Hume’s analysis of the progress of ‘enormous monarchies’ in D. Hume, ‘Of the Balance of Power’, in Political Writings, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 160.

71. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1799 edn), vol. 2, p. 146.72. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 155, 408.73. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 138–9.74. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 155, 338.


75. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 404.76. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 244.77. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 210.78. For example, see Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History, vol. 8, pp. 155–61. Unlike

Montesquieu and Ferguson, however, Raynal and Diderot expressed hostility to the ‘odi-ous distinction’ of nobility in modern monarchies, ibid., vol. 8, p. 229.

79. Ferguson to W. Pulteney, 7 November 1769, in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, p. 83.

80. Ferguson, ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 136. Compare J. Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae: Defence of the French Revolution and its Eng-lish Admirers (London, 1791), pp. 55–6, 285–91.

81. ‘Of the French Revolution’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 137.

8 Meyer, ‘Ferguson’s “Appropriate Stile” in Combining History and Science’

1. Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology, pp. 26ff . Pocock, Th e Machiavellian Moment, pp. 499–501.

2. Pocock and Mark Salber Phillips recently incorporated Ferguson’s work into their his-tories of historiography. In contrast to Phillips, Pocock rejects the anachronistic term of ‘conjectural history’ for Ferguson’s method and attributes to him a ‘big bang theory of history’. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2, pp. 330–45, esp. p. 333; and Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 179–84.

3. ‘Of History and its Appropriate Stile’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 19–31.4. ‘Th e science of natural history’ was in transition between the simple classifi cation of the

facts of nature (res naturae) and a physical delineation of natural phenomena. See P. R. Sloan, ‘Natural History’, in R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor and J. R. R. Christie (eds), Com-panion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 295–313.

5. A. Graft on, What was History? Th e Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 28.

6. Th us, the title of Georg Iggers’s essay poses the heretical question: ‘Did History Really Become a Science Earlier in Germany than in Other European Countries?’, in W. Küttler, J. Rüsen and E. Schulin (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs: Anfänge modernen historischen Denkens, 5 vols (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 73–85.

7. See E. Fuchs, ‘Provincializing Europe: Historiography as a Transcultural Concept’, in E. Fuchs and B. Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–26, esp. p. 5.

8. J. K. Wright, ‘History and Historicism’, in T. M. Porter and D. Ross (eds), Th e Modern Social Sciences, Th e Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2003), pp. 113–30, on p. 114.

9. See Wilhelm Dilthey’s groundbreaking study, ‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’, in W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schrift en. Studien zur Geschichte des deut-schen Geistes, 30 vols (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1927), vol. 3, pp. 209–75. Meinecke formulated the idea precisely: ‘Historism [historicism] is for the time being nothing other than the application on historical life of the new principles of life developed in the great German movement that started with Leibniz and ended with Goethe’s death. Th is movement continued a general occidental movement, and the crown fell to the German


mind’ [trans. by the author, A. M.], F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1936), vol. 1, p. 2.

10. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 281–8. Vincenzo Merolle attributes a form of proto-historicism to Fer-guson. See his ‘Introductory Essay: Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. xi–lxxxvi, on p. xiii.

11. ‘Ferguson had none of the power and imagination needed to give his signifi cant approaches on historiographical thinking and unbiased evaluation of historical events the fully individual vitality they needed. Th is became truly apparent in 1783, when he published his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic’ [trans. A. M.], Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, vol. 1, pp. 286ff .

12. ‘To those who want to acquire a knowledge of Roman history the book is worth noth-ing’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 323. B. G. Niebuhr, Vorträge über alte Geschichte an der Universität Bonn gehalten, ed. M. Niebuhr, 3 vols (Berlin, 1847), vol. 1, p. 54. Some years ago, Peter Hanns Reill refuted the claim that Niebuhr presented the fi rst concise realization of the historical-critical method: ‘Barthold Georg Niebuhr and the Enlightenment Tradition’, German Studies Review, 3 (1980), pp. 9–26.

13. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, vol. 2, p. 545 [trans. A. M.]; see also Dilthey, ‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert’, pp. 269ff .

14. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 8.15. T. P. Peardon, Th e Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830 (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1933), pp. 10–11. Little is known about the context of this work, written with the encouragement of Carlton J. H. Hayes, but see H. T. Parker, ‘Hayes, Carlton Joseph Huntley’, in L. Boia (ed.), Great Historians of the Modern Age: An International Dictionary (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 738–9. Despite inadequacies, Peardon’s survey remains the most detailed overview of Anglo-Saxon his-toriography (c. 1800).

16. D. Stewart, An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, pp. 269–351, on p. 293. See also M. Schmidt, ‘Dugald Stewart, “Conjectural History” and the Decline of Enlightenment Historical Writing in the 1790s’, in U. Broich, H. T. Dickinson, E. Hellmuth and M. Schmidt (eds), Reactions to Revolutions: Th e 1790s and their Aft ermath (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 231–62.

17. A. F. Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honorable Henry Home of Kames, one of the Senators of the College of Justice, and one of the Lords Commissioners of Justiciary in Scotland. Containing Sketches of the Progress of Literature and General Improvement in Scotland during the Greater Part of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1807), vol. 2, p. 200.

18. ‘In such inquiries, the detached facts which travels and voyages aff ord us, may frequently serve as land-marks to our speculations; and sometimes our conclusions a priori, may tend to confi rm the credibility of facts, which, on superfi cial view, appeared to be doubt-ful or incredible’, Stewart, An Account of the Life and Writings of the Adam Smith, p. 293.

19. D. Stewart, ‘Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe’, in D. Stewart, Th e Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir W. Hamilton, 10 vols (Edinburgh: Constable 1854), vol. 1, pp. 384–5. On Stewart’s signifi cance for questioning ‘the hypothetical and analogical meth-ods in science’, see R. Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Science, 1750–1880: A Study in the Foundation of the Victorian Scientifi c Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 94ff .


20. A. F. Tytler’s Lectures on Universal History, 1800–1801, pres. by John Grant, Esq. MS, Edinburgh University Library, Dc. 6.115.

21. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honorable Henry Home, vol. 2, p. 112.22. Buckle writes, for example, that all major eighteenth-century Scottish authors ‘regarded

such inductions as unimportant in themselves, and as only valuable insofar as they sup-plied the premises for another deductive investigation’, H. T. Buckle, Introduction to the History of Civilization in England (1857–1861), ed. J. M. Robertson (London, 1904), p. 798.

23. G. G. Iggers, Th e German Conception of History: Th e National Tradition of Historical Th ought fr om Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), p. 111. Th e relevant work of Droysen is Die Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft [Th e Elevation of History to the Rank of a Science], in J. G. Droysen, Historik, ed. P. Leyh (Stuttgart: Frommann und Holzboog, 1977), pp. 451–69.

24. On diff ering Enlightenment conceptions of mankind, see A. Meyer, ‘Th e Experience of Human Diversity and the Search for Unity: Conceptions of Mankind in the Late Enlightenment’, Studi Settecenteschi, 21 (2001), pp. 245–64, esp. pp. 255ff .

25. See E. Fuchs, ‘Positivistischer Szientismus in vergleichender Perspektive: Zum nomo-thetischen Wissenschaft sverständnis in der englischen, amerikanischen und deutschen Geschichtsschreibung’, in W. Küttler, J. Rüsen, and E. Schulin (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs: Die Epoche der Historisierung, 5 vols (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997), vol. 3, pp. 396–423.

26. Burke was targeting Leopold von Ranke, even though Ranke certainly played less of a role in promoting historicism as a new paradigm than did his successors, P. Burke, ‘Ranke als Gegenrevolutionär’, in W. J. Mommsen (ed.), Leopold von Ranke und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1988), pp. 189–200, on p. 190.

27. As for example in William Whewell’s History of Inductive Sciences, fr om the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vols (London, 1837). See D. Kelley, ‘Th e History of Ideas in the British Tradition’, Storia della Storiografi a, 41 (2002), pp. 3–19, on p. 15.

28. For a critical examination of this system of categorizing the history of philosophy, see H.-J. Engfer, Empirismus versus Rationalismus? Kritik eines philosophiegeschichtlichen Schemas (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), pp. 312ff .

29. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. xvi.30. See Christopher Fox’s introductory essay, ‘Introduction. How to Prepare a Noble Savage:

Th e Spectacle of Human Science’, in C. Fox, R. Porter and R. Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Sciences: Eighteenth Century Domains (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 1–30, on p. 2. On the Scottish contribution regarding the connection of ‘natural’ and ‘moral philosophy’, see Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Science, p. 12.

31. Not until the Enquiry (1748) can one fi nd directions on the methods of the ‘science of man’, Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 80ff .

32. Th e connection of history and anthropology as ‘archetypical’ for the ‘Human Sciences’ is investigated in A. Pagden, ‘Eighteenth-Century Anthropology and the “History of Man-kind”’, in D. R. Kelley (ed.), History and the Disciplines: Th e Reclassifi cation of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 223–35, on p. 231.

33. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 83ff .34. N. Phillipson, Hume (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 4.


35. Hume distinguishes between history (as ‘knowledge’) and other ‘sciences’ in ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), vol. 2, pp. 388–91.

36. Hume leaves no doubt about how this axiom arises, stating: ‘It is universally acknowl-edged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages …’, Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 83.

37. Ernst Cassirer concedes Hume a special role in the ‘conquest of the historical world’: ‘he does not describe history as a constant development; but he enjoys its restless change, the view of the ‘becoming’, in and of itself. He does not look for any “reason” in this “becoming” and does not believe in it’, E. Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufk lärung, 3rd edn (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973), p. 302 [trans. A. M.].

38. ‘Hume’s philosophical history has gaps and inconsistencies and hesitancies’, Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 309. See also Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p. 30.

39. Even if the relation of history and philosophy in Hume’s work must be interpreted very closely, as Donald Livingston claims convincingly, the epistemological status of both subjects remains hierarchical: history is the touchstone for philosophy. See his Philo-sophical Melancholy and Delirium, pp. 210–46.

40. See R. Olson, ‘Th e Human Sciences’, in T. M. Porter and D. Ross (eds), Eighteenth-Century Science, Th e Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 437–62.

41. On the signifi cance of Buff on’s development model, see P. H. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 10ff .

42. Hume was not interested in ‘humanity’ as a scientifi cally fathomable historical or norma-tive entity. See G. Deleuze, Empirisme et Subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume, 4th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), pp. 23ff .

43. ‘So history is a goldmine for the science of human nature’, M. Frasca-Spada, ‘Th e Science and Conversation of Human Nature’, in W. Clark, J. Golinski and S. Schaff er (eds), Th e Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 218–45, on p. 222.

44. ‘Th e Method or Arrangement in Natural or descriptive History is in a certain degree Arbitrary & may be varyed to facilitate comprehension or Memory: but in Science it is fi xed in Nature And cannot be varyed without frustrating the very Purpose for which it is instituted’. See ‘Of the Sciences of which the Subject is the Mind’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 190.

45. Institutes of Moral Philosophy. For the use of Students in the College of Edinburgh, 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London, 1773). Th e short text Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Phi-losophy. For the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1766) is the predecessor of this text. Th e Institutes, revised and expanded, appeared in 1792 as Principles of Moral and Political Science.

46. Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, pp. 196ff .47. According to the anonymous reviewer of the second edition in the Edinburgh Magazine

and Review, 1 (1773–4), p. 103.48. Ferguson is also referring directly to ‘Buff on’s Natural History’, Institutes (1773 edn), p.

15.49. Ibid., pp. 2–3.50. Ibid., pp. 2–3.51. In the eighteenth century, the meaning of ‘science’ included epistemological questions;

no discipline of learning or knowledge was excluded from the realm of science and


deemed ‘non-scientifi c’: ‘[T]he faculty whereby we perceive things and their relations … Science is no other than a series of deductions, or conclusions, which every person, endued with those faculties, may, with a proper degree of attention, see, and draw: and a science; i.e. a formed science, is no more than a system of such conclusions, relating to some one subject, orderly and artfully laid down in words’, E. Chambers, ‘Preface’, in Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 5th edn (London, 1741–3), vol. 1, p. ix.

52. ‘Collection of facts, in description or narration, constitutes history. General rules, and their applications, to regulate or to explain particulars, constitute science’, Ferguson, Institutes (1773 edn), pp. 2–3.

53. Th e stimulus for my interpretation comes from works by P. H. Reill, in particular ‘Narra-tion and Structure in Late Eighteenth-Century Historical Th ought’, History and Th eory, 3 (1986), pp. 286–98.

54. C. J. Kraus, ‘Encyklopädische Ansichten einiger Zweige der Gelehrsamkeit [1789]’, in H. W. Blanke and D. Fleischer (eds), Th eoretiker der deutschen Aufk lärungshistorie, 2 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann und Holzboog, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 379–96, on p. 380.

55. Two realms of knowledge that Kraus’s teacher, Kant, sought to demarcate. See I. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in I. Kant, Werke, ed. W. Weischedel, 10 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaft liche Buchgesellschaft , 1998), vol. 6. On eighteenth-century concepts of anthropology, see J. H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropol-ogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 7 (on the Scottish background of historical anthropology in Germany, p. 237).

56. ‘Ferguson did not really give us strictly empirical or quantitative science of society with well-defi ned boundaries because his project is still bound up in the methodologies of the distinctively eighteenth-century disciplines of pneumatics, moral philosophy and poli-tics’, Hill, Th e Passionate Society, p. 73.

57. Ferguson, Institutes (1773 edn), p. 6.58. ‘Of History and its Appropriate Stile’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 21. See

also Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, pp. 69–70.59. ‘In this way formative analogies become prime constituents of scientifi c abstraction and

law-making’, S. Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropol-ogy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 12.

60. ‘Under this term, of the State of Nature, authors aff ect to look back to the fi rst ages of man, not without some apparent design to depreciate his nature, by placing his origin in some unfavourable point of view’, Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, p. 197.

61. Rousseau used the term ‘perfectibilité’ in diff erent writings, though most notably in his work of 1755, Sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes.

62. Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, p. 196.63. ‘Of History and its Appropriate Stile’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 19, 28,

n. 3.64. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 8.65. Dugald Stewart heard Ferguson’s lectures on moral philosophy in Edinburgh, the

Institutes serving as the accompanying text. In his own lectures on moral philosophy, delivered in 1785 aft er succeeding Ferguson, Stewart relied primarily on the works of Th omas Reid, with whom he had studied in Glasgow for one year (1771–2). Stewart’s dependence on Reid – ‘the true philosophical prophet’ – shows that he was closer to the ‘Common Sense’ philosophy than to Hume and Ferguson’s epistemology. Stewart’s biog-


rapher John Veitch also reaches this conclusion, writing: ‘No pupil ever caught the spirit of a master more fully, or more intelligently appreciated his method of philosophical inquiry’, J. Veitch, ‘Memoir of Dugald Stewart’, in Th e Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. 10, pp. v–cxv, on p. xxv.

66. As Ferguson warned: ‘We are oft en tempted into these boundless regions of ignorance or conjecture …’, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p.12.

67. Paul B. Wood sheds light on the development and fractures within Scottish Enlighten-ment philosophy in ‘Th e Hagiography of Common Sense: Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Th omas Reid’, in A. J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, its History and Historiography (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), pp. 305–22, on p. 316. See also P. B. Wood, ‘Dugald Stewart and the Invention of “the Scottish Enlightenment”’, in P. B. Wood (ed.), Th e Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 1–36.

68. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 21.69. Ferguson, Institutes (1773 edn), p. 5.70. ‘Th eory consists in referring particular operations to the principles, or general laws,

under which they are comprehended; or in referring particular eff ects to the causes from which they proceed’, ibid., p. 7.

71. In classical philosophy, ‘hermeneutic probabilism’ functioned as a counter-concept to the claims of ‘necessity and veracity’. I am not aware of literature on this issue as it relates to the Scottish Enlightenment. For similar work on the German Enlightenment, see L. Danneberg, ‘Probabilitas hermeneutica. Zu einem Aspekt der Interpretations-Methodo-logie in der ersten Hälft e des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Aufk lärung, 8 (1994), pp. 27–48.

72. Ferguson, Institutes (1773 edn), p. 8. Somewhat more conciliatory toward Descartes is F. M. A. de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: Peter Davies, Covent Garden, 1924), pp. 93ff .

73. Ferguson, Institutes (1773 edn), pp. 8–9.74. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 7.75. Ibid., p. 9. Ferguson proceeds to explain, ‘[W]e are to take the history from every active

being from his conduct in the situation to which he is formed, not from his appearance in any forced or uncommon condition; a wild man therefore caught in the woods, where he had always lived apart from his species, is a singular instance, not a specimen of any general character’, ibid., p. 9. Ferguson alludes here to the dubious methods of natural historians like Lord Monboddo, who sought, throughout Europe, examples of a pre-civilized state of society. See also J. V. Douthwaite, Th e Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster. Dangerous Experiments in the Age of the Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2002).

76. As Ferguson wrote: ‘… trace every mode of being to its source; it may be safely affi rmed, that the character of man, as he now exists, that the laws of this animal and intellectual system, on which his happiness now depends, deserve our principal study …’, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 8–9.

77. Ibid., p. 10.78. Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, p. 6.79. Brewer, ‘Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century

Scotland, p. 26.80. Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, p. 2.81. Kettler interprets Ferguson’s twofold connotation of history as a development of Bacon’s

dual use of history in ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, p. 455.


82. Pocock, Th e Machiavellian Moment, pp. 499ff .83. Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, pp. 34ff .84. O. O’Neill, ‘Practical Reason and Ethics’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.

Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 613–20, on p. 614.85. ‘Th ey [the pragmatists] hoped to save philosophy from metaphysical idealism, but also

to save moral and religious ideals from empiricist or positivist scepticism’, R. Rorty, ‘Pragmatism’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pp. 633–40, on p. 633.

86. ‘Th at the birth of man is more painful and hazardous; that the state of his infancy is more helpless, and of longer duration, than is exemplifi ed in the case of any other species, may be ranked with the apparent comparative defects of his animal nature: But this circum-stance, we may venture to affi rm, like many others of his seeming defects, is of a piece with that superior destination, which remains to be fulfi lled in the subsequent history of mankind’, Ferguson, Principles (1995 edn), vol. 1, p. 28.

87. Ferguson’s model had great impact on German ‘popular philosophers’ otherwise mar-ginalized within the current of idealism. See J. van der Zande, ‘Popular Philosophy and the History of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, in Storia della Storiografi a, 22 (1992), pp. 37–56, on p. 38.

88. Reill reveals as erroneous the critique of the supposedly inadmissible crossing of bounda-ries in the scientifi c view of this approach. See ‘Das Problem des Allgemeinen und des Besonderen im geschichtlichen Denken und in den historiographischen Darstellungen des späten 18. Jahrhunderts’, in K. Acham and W. Schulze (eds), Teil und Ganzes (Mün-chen: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1990), pp. 141–168, on p. 146.

9 Oz-Salzberger, ‘Ferguson’s Politics of Action’1. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 199.2. Ibid., p. 200.3. Ibid.4. Modern action theory pursues the cognitive aspects of human action and agency in terms

of self-consciousness, governance and intention, in addition to the moral aspects of agency. Ferguson did not engage with the majority of these issues. Intentional action, endowed with moral signifi cance in a broadly Stoic sense, was a departure point, not an object of analy-sis, of his moral and political philosophy. See D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); C. Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and, for a broad range of contemporary action theory expositions, A. Mele (ed.), Th e Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

5. Ferguson, Principles.6. Th is point is convincingly made by Kettler in ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’.7. Edinburgh Review, 125 (1867), pp. 48–9.8. ‘Civic’, used in this essay as an adjective denoting matters pertaining to the public-minded

civilian, is not intended as a derivative of Hans Baron’s controversial concept of ‘civic humanism’; see Baron, Th e Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955; rev. edn, 1 vol., 1966). Ferguson’s source material and conceptual framework were not gleaned from Italian Renaissance texts. He did use the terms ‘citi-zen’, ‘civil’ and ‘civilized’ in a sense pertaining to public-minded active citizenship (see below). For a classic critique of Baron’s ‘civic humanism’, see J. Seigel, ‘Civic Humanism, or Ciceronian Rhetoric?’, Past & Present, 34 ( July 1966), pp. 3–48.

9. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 10.


10. Ibid., p. 213.11. Ibid., p. 48.12. Ibid., pp. 47–8, see also p. 28; Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, pp. 14–15.13. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 62–3.14. Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy. For the Use of Students in the College of Edin-

burgh (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1769), p. 291.15. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, pp. 508–9.16. Ferguson to John McPherson (2 June 1796), in Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson,

vol. 2, p. 393.17. Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, pp. 439ff .18. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 84.19. On the neo-Roman application of the otium-negotium dichotomy, see Q. Skinner,

‘Th omas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, in Q. Skinner (ed.), Visions of Politics, Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 213–44; Nelson, Th e Greek Tradition in Republican Th ought, pp. 22ff .

20. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 14–15.21. Ibid., p. 58.22. Ibid., p. 26.23. Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, p. 563. See also V. J. Sapp, ‘Th e

Philosopher’s Seduction: Hume and the Fair Sex’, Philosophy and Literature, 19 (1995), pp. 1–15.

24. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 45.25. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, pp. 5, 6.26. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 219.27. Ibid., p. 15 and passim; Ferguson, Roman Republic (1783 edn), p. 36 and passim.28. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 46–7.29. Ferguson, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language, p. 6.30. On Ferguson’s idea of play, see Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, pp. 114–

16; of its possible impact on Schiller’s concept of ‘play-drive’, see pp. 304ff . Histories and cultural analyses of play, most notably Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938; Bos-ton, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), have not mentioned Ferguson’s use of the term, which, I argue, bears directly on his politics of action.

31. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 7.32. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 46.33. Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, p. 441.34. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 33. See Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics,

pp. 138ff , for a description of Hume’s self-conscious transformation from an active poli-tician into a contemplative one.

35. Hume certainly asserted that ‘Man is also an active being; and from that disposition, as well as from the various necessities of human life, must submit to business and occupa-tion …’, and also ‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man’, Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 9 (I.iv). I thank Eugene Heath and an anonymous reviewer for helping to delineate the extent to which Ferguson followed Hume, and the point at which he parted from him.

36. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 44. Ferguson’s passage closely echoes Hume’s terminology of pleasure, pain, memory, sensation and anticipation, as used in A Treatise of Human Nature, I.i.2–3, II.i.8–10.



38. Ibid., p. 45.39. Ferguson, ‘Of the Separation of Departments, Professions and Tasks resulting from the

Progress of Arts in Society’, ed. Y. Amoh, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 3 (1989), p. 14. Th e essay may also be found in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 143–52, on pp. 149, 150. See also Ferguson, Collection of Essays, pp. 141–51, on pp. 150,151.

40. Ferguson’s Essay plays on both meanings of the word, hailing Montesquieu as a ‘pro-found politician’ (p. 66), but also mentioning the active ‘politician, whose spirit is the conduct of parties and factions’ (p. 47). See F. Oz-Salzberger, ‘Th e Political Th ought of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Th e Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. A. Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 157–77.

41. See Kettler’s telling reading of Ferguson as opposing Smith’s concept of non-active ‘Spec-tator’ and embracing a ‘distinct actor’s perspective’ in its stead: ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, pp. 443–4.

42. For major interpretations emphasizing Ferguson’s republican bent, see especially Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson; Forbes, ‘Introduction’; Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue; Gellner, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Sur-prising Robustness of Civil Society’; Geuna, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’.

43. Oz-Salzberger, ‘Introduction’, in Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. vii–xxv, on pp. xvii and passim.

44. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 195, n. s, 271.45. Ibid., pp. 181–2.46. Th is point is duly stressed by Hill, who otherwise engages with Ferguson’s role as pred-

ecessor of modern sociology, in ‘Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Confl ict’, esp. pp. 290–2.

47. A recent reassessment, attempting to underplay Ferguson’s ‘resolute republicanism’ and to underscore his amalgamation of republican ideas with commercial liberalism, signifi -cantly fails to make a single reference to the Roman Republic: Kalyvas and Katznelson, ‘Adam Ferguson Returns’.

48. Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On Ferguson’s Ciceronian context, see Kettler, ‘History and Th eory in Ferguson’s Essay’, p. 442. A diff erent view of Ferguson’s Ciceronianism is presented in Merolle’s ‘Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, pp. xi–xlv. On this issue I cast my vote with Hill, who stresses Cic-ero’s impact on Ferguson’s idea of public virtue and service; see L. Hill, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline’, History of Political Th ought, 18 (1997), pp. 677–706, esp. pp. 701–2.

49. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 327. See also Hill, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline’, p. 702.

50. Cicero, easily the greatest hero of Ferguson’s Roman Republic, was mentioned no less than 420 times throughout the 3-volume opus.

51. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 510.52. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 34.53. Hume, ‘Th at Politics may be Reduced to a Science’, in Hume, Political Writings, pp.

4–15, on p. 5.54. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 34.55. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 165 (XII.iii.132).56. Ibid., p. 90 (VIII.i.70); the point is phrased as a rhetorical question: ‘How could politics

be a science, if laws and forms of government had not a uniform infl uence upon society?’


See also pp. 97–8 (VIII.ii.76): ‘All laws being founded on rewards and punishments, it is supposed as a fundamental principle, that these motives have a regular and uniform infl uence on the mind, and both produce the good and prevent the evil actions’.

57. Hume, ‘Th at Politics be Reduced to a Science’, p. 5.58. Th is text was fi rst published by E. C. Mossner, ‘“Of the Principle of Moral Estimation: A

Discourse between David Hume, Robert Clerk, and Adam Smith”: An Unpublished MS by Adam Ferguson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 21 (April–June 1960), pp. 222–32. I have used the text in Ferguson, Collection of Essays, pp. 204–14. See also Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 207–15.

59. Collection of Essays, pp. 321–2, fn. 3, 9, 16. Similarly Kettler, Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, pp. 113–14.

60. ‘Of the Principle of Moral Estimation’, in Collection of Essays, p. 205; and Th e Manu-scripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 208.

61. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, pp. 205, 206; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, pp. 208, 209.

62. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 206; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 209.63. Ibid., in Collection of Essays, p. 207; and Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 209.64. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 119. See also Hamowy, Th e Scottish Enlighten-

ment and the Th eory of Spontaneous Order; Hill, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline’.


10 Smith, ‘Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind’1. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 199.2. Merolle, ‘Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, p. xxxiv. In her biographical essay on Ferguson,

Jane Fagg refers to ‘his fi ts of impatient restlessness’. See Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduc-tion’, p. xxxiii.

3. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 114.4. R. B. Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlighten-

ment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce’, in D. Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 368–402, on p. 398.

5. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 469.6. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 119.7. D. Forbes, ‘“Scientifi c Whiggism”: Adam Smith and John Millar’, Cambridge Journal,

7 (August 1954), pp. 643–70, on p. 651. Christopher J. Berry, in his discussion of the ‘de-moralization’ of luxury in the eighteenth century debate, notes that ‘Given that individual actions have unintended consequences, then the area of individual moral responsibility is also correspondingly curtailed’, Th e Idea of Luxury (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1994), p. 163.

8. For a discussion of de Retz’s theory of history, see D. A. Watts, Cardinal de Retz: Th e Ambiguities of a Seventeenth-Century Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

9. Pocock, Th e Machiavellian Moment, pp. 499–503.10. T. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in T. Reid, Works, ed. Sir W. Hamilton, 6th

edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1863), vol. 2, p. 622.11. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 524–7.12. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 554.


13. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 64. Lehmann describes this as a principle of ‘activism’ in human nature. See Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology, p. 113.

14. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), pp. 163–4.15. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 12.16. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 37.17. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 48. Th e terminology of spirit, vigour and health is adopted from the eight-

eenth-century discussions of pneumatology, a subject which transferred the language of metaphysics into a discussion of what John Wright calls the ‘psychophysiological’ theo-ries of Descartes and Malebranche. See Wright, Th e Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 74.

18. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 69.19. Ibid., p. 150.20. Ibid., p. 118. Mankind are ‘Intelligent creatures destined [by God] for Active life’, Th e

Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 125. Indeed Ferguson goes so far as to assert that the ‘Final Cause’ of the system of nature ‘appears to be, that the talent of man for invention should be employed’ (Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 15). For a discussion of Fergu-son’s epistemology and his distinction between learning through experience and learning from testimony or books, see my ‘Adam Ferguson and the Danger of Books’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 4:4 (2006), pp. 93–109.

21. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 14.22. Ibid., p. 44.23. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 55. See, for example: ‘To his Active Nature

the Active Scene is accommodated. And to his progressive Nature Th e Observation he is concerned to make the Lessons of Experience and the faculties acquired by Practice are fully and specifi cally accommodated’, Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 183.

24. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 169.25. Ibid., p. 242. A point noted by Lehmann in Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Mod-

ern Sociology, pp. 51–4. Ferguson links this to his attack on scholasticism, though it also represents an extended rumination on Aristotle’s distinction between practical and theo-retical knowledge; Ferguson seems convinced that mental acuity is not the product of retired or abstract contemplation but can be produced only by a life of active participa-tion in the world.

26. Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 177.27. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 200.28. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 52. See also the discussion of the will and freedom of choice at ibid., vol.

1, p. 152.29. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 207 (italics omitted).30. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 32.31. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 13.32. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 99.33. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 39.34. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 257.35. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 297. Vincenzo Merolle neatly encapsulates this view: ‘Man is presented

with a scene of action, and society off ers the occasion of his best exertions. Consequently, progress has no end’, Merolle, ‘Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, p. xv.

36. Th is is hardly surprising given the explicit aim of much of Ferguson’s work to provide both a natural history of man and a discussion of moral principles. He explicitly divides


the Principles into two separate volumes that deal respectively with the natural history of man and the principles of moral law.

37. Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 196.38. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 60.39. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 14.40. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 51.41. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 178.42. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 29. Ferguson returns frequently to this point, arguing that action is the

true source of happiness and that ‘languor’ is a condition of suff ering, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 46. For a discussion of this see L. Hill ‘Th e Invisible Hand of Adam Ferguson’, Th e European Legacy, 3:6 (1998), pp. 42–64, on p. 47.

43. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 205.44. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 165–6. See also Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol.

2, p. 87.45. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 51.46. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 185.47. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 205.48. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 249.49. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 205. Smith’s extended discussion of the ‘poor

man’s son’ in Th e Th eory of Moral Sentiments ends with the observation that ‘nature’ cre-ates the ‘deception’ of convenience that prompts mankind to practise industry in pursuit of an illusory ease. See A. Smith, Th e Th eory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D. D. Rap-hael and A. L. Macfi e (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; rpt Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982) p. 183.

50. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 205.51. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 15.52. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 47.53. Ibid., p. 45.54. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 9. For Ferguson’s discussions of sport see vol. 1,

pp. 14, 186–7, 222; vol. 2, pp. 12, 88.55. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 88.56. David Kettler has noted this shift between descriptive sociology and evaluative moral

judgements in Ferguson’s writing. See his Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Fer-guson, p. 224. It has also been the subject of a recent discussion by Christopher Finlay, who argues that Ferguson’s work represents a ‘marriage of natural history and civic mor-alism’ in which he uses natural history for rhetorical rather than logical persuasion. See C. Finlay, ‘Rhetoric and Citizenship in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society’, History of Political Th ought, 27:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 27–49, on pp. 36, 43.

57. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 19. See also Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 166: ‘By declining every duty, and every active engagement, they render life a burden, and complain that it is so. By preferring amusement to business, they reject what is fi tted to occupy them, and search in vain for something else to remove their languor.’

58. Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 276.59. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 52.60. Ferguson, Roman Republic (1856 edn; rpt Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,

2001), p. 179. See also Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 90; and An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 58. Ferguson extends this argument, regarding strenuous action and


pleasure, into his belief that warfare is invigorating for both individuals and nations. See Roman Republic (2001 edn), p. 42 and An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 47.

61. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, pp. 88–9.62. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 388.63. Ibid., vol. 2 p. 89.64. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 246. See also Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn),

p. 256.65. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 388. Note the dual meaning of the Latin nego-

tium as business or work, and as diffi culty, labour, pain or trouble.66. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 154–5.67. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 89.68. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 388–9.69. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 296.70. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 256.71. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 19.72. A tradition that feeds through the eighteenth century and into the language of needs

versus choice in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and which also lies at the heart of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s system.

73. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 43.74. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p.196. See also Merolle, ‘Ferguson’s Political Phi-

losophy’.75. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 54.76. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 113.77. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 165–6.78. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 365.79. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 139.80. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 334.81. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 188–9. Kettler refers to this as his ‘activist con-

ception of virtue’ in Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, p. 150.82. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 33.83. Merolle has argued that the moralizing in the Roman Republic is ‘implicit’ rather than

‘explicit’ (Merolle, ‘Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, p. xxi) and, although this may be true of the moral drawn from the history of the people as a whole, there can be little doubt that Ferguson, despite his stated intention to do otherwise, exercises specifi c moral as well as practical judgements of the main players in the history. While his assessments remain standard, and indeed draw on footnoted references to classical sources, they are nonetheless conducted in line with the specifi c criterion of active virtue. See also Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, p. 199.

84. Ferguson, Roman Republic (2001 edn), p. 320.85. Ibid., p. 404. Th is is not to say that the inevitability of the fall of the Republic leads

Ferguson to excuse those (Pompey, Caesar) whom he holds (in part) responsible for its ultimate destruction. As he puts it: ‘To state the diffi culty of preserving the republic in such hands, as an excuse for having destroyed it, were to off er the character of criminals as an excuse for their crimes’ (ibid., p. 406). It remains possible to pass moral judgement on individuals for their personal behaviour, but this in itself is not suffi cient to draw larger conclusions.

86. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 120.87. Ibid., vol. 1 p. 18.


88. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 119.89. Ibid., p. 121. Ferguson was objecting to inaccurate ancient legislator myths and also cau-

tioning against the widespread Enlightenment desire to act as constitutional legislators. See also C. J. Berry, Social Th eory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 37–9.

90. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 211.91. Merolle describes this as part of Ferguson’s position as a ‘meeting point’ between Enlight-

enment and historicism. See ‘Ferguson’s Political Philosophy’, p. xv.92. Ferguson, Roman Republic (2001 edn), p. 151.93. Ferguson, Institutes (1769 edn), p. 291.94. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 251.95. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 314.96. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 26.97. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 71.98. Ibid., p. 200. It is clear that Ferguson’s intellectual inspiration for this project is Mon-

tesquieu, in particular Considerations on the Causes, the 1734 precursor to Th e Spirit of the Laws. It should also be borne in mind that the term ‘spirit’ also had a distinct pneumatological or physiological application in the eighteenth century that underlies the metaphor of national health. Th is is a line of thought that leads, intellectually, to historicist judgements of eras and to the Hegelian notion of ‘Spirit’. See Oz-Salzberger Translating the Enlightenment, p. 136–9, for a discussion of Ferguson’s impact on Ger-man thought.

99. Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, pp. 197–215.100. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 197.101. Ibid., p. 114.102. Ibid., p. 115.103. Ferguson, Roman Republic (2001 edn), p. 405.104. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 209.105. Ibid., p. 210.106. Ibid., p. 220.107. Ibid., p. 203.108. Ibid., p. 199.109. Ibid., p. 212.110. Ibid., p. 200.111. Ibid., p. 204.112. Ibid., p. 239. See also Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, pp. 48, 77, 342. Th e best

discussion of the luxury debate in the Scottish Enlightenment remains Berry’s Th e Idea of Luxury.

113. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 238.114. Ibid., p. 226.115. Ibid., p. 236.116. See also Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, pp. 386–8. In the Roman Republic (2001

edn, p. 118) Ferguson discusses the ineff ectiveness of the Roman sumptuary laws that he also rejects in An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 151.

117. Ibid., p. 242.118. Ibid., p.242.119. Ibid., p. 237.


120. Ibid., p. 245. What Gary L. McDowell has called Ferguson’s search for a ‘Commercial Republicanism’, McDowell ‘Commerce, Virtue, and Politics’, p. 536.

121. See Sher, ‘Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense’, p. 265. Th e language that Ferguson uses in Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia makes this abundantly clear. He argues that ‘We have indeed allowed Repose to steal our Minds, but the Spirit is not extinct’. Th e implication drawn is that our national spirit has been sapped and is in need of reinvigoration through active participation, Refl ections, p. 14.

122. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 204.123. Ibid., p. 201. Again, note the use of physiological language to describe the national

spirit.124. Schneider observes this line of argument in Ferguson’s Roman Republic and concludes

that in his view ‘the Romans are defeated by their very success’, L. Schneider, ‘Introduc-tion’, in A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. L. Schneider (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1980), pp. v–xxviii, on p. xvii.

125. Ferguson, Roman Republic (2001 edn), p. 259. Th is in no way excuses the personal role of the likes of Caesar in the fall of the Republic. Ferguson’s judgement of national char-acter does not provide an excuse for individual vice.

126. Ibid., p. 287.127. Ibid., p. 481.128. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 238.

11 Chen, ‘Providence and Progress’1. For instance, Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson; Lehmann,

Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology. Th ese works sparked the ren-aissance in the study of Ferguson’s philosophy. Hill’s recent publication, Th e Passionate Society, is arguably the fi rst systematic study of Ferguson’s views of progress, theology, teleology and related issues. Working from a diff erent approach, my own study comple-ments many of Hill’s insights.

2. Kettler, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Adam Ferguson, p. 131.3. Th e Stoics’ infl uence on Ferguson’s thought is conspicuous. See Ferguson’s Institutes, rpt

1769 edn (Bristol: Th oemmes Press, 1994), p. 137; Roman Republic (1783 edn), vol. 2, p. 115; Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, pp. 310–14; Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 41, 54, 57, 228 and passim.

4. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 171.5. Allan, Adam Ferguson, p. 2.6. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment; J.-G. S. Chen, ‘William

Lothian and Edinburgh Belle-Lettres Society: Learning to be a Luminary in Scotland’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27:2 (2004), pp. 173–87.

7. See, for example, sections X (‘Of Miracles’) and XI (‘Of a particular Providence and of a future State’) of Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 109–48.

8. Hume, Th e History of England, vol. 5, pp. 262, 307–9.9. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), ed. N. K. Smith (London: Th o-

mas Nelson & Sons, 1947), p. 134.10. T. Ahnert, ‘Th e Soul, Natural Religion and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlighten-

ment’, Eighteenth-Century Th ought, 2 (2004), pp. 233–53.


11. E. C. Mossner, Th e Life of David Hume, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 336–55.

12. Ibid., p. 339.13. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 74.14. Ibid., p. 78.15. ‘Sacred history gives suffi cient authority to presume, that public calamities are the eff ect

of public corruption …’, Ferguson, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language, p. 3.16. Ferguson, Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, f. 5.17. Ibid., f. 5.18. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 322.19. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 304–5.20. Th e Letters of David Hume, ed. Greig, vol. 2, p. 12.21. P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); E.

Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller and J. H. Randall, Jr (eds), Th e Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948); A. O. Lovejoy, Th e Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

22. F. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1755), vol. 1. pp. 168–72.

23. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 10.24. See, for example, ibid., pp. 57, 225–6.25. Ferguson, Institutes (1994 edn), p. 118.26. Th is statement is drawn from his Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, f. 121b.27. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 12.28. Ibid., p. 205.29. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 306.30. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305.31. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 12, 29, 89, 242. It is worth noting that in

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the much-acclaimed idea of ‘the invisible hand’ appears only once (IV.ii.9). Th e idea also appears once in Th e Th eory of Moral Sentiments (IV.I.10).

32. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 37, 63–4, 36, 137.33. Ferguson, Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, f. 24.34. Ibid., f. 23b.35. Not to mention Hume’s rejection of any knowledge of a deity or a fi nal cause, as seen in

his work published posthumously in 1779, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. See, in particular, D. Wootton, ‘Hume’s “Of Miracles”: Probability and Irreligion’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991), pp. 191–229, esp. p. 223; J. Robertson, Th e Case for the Enlight-enment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 302–8; K. Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 86; D. F. Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 205ff ; and J. Force, ‘Hume and the Relation of Science to Religion among certain Members of the Royal Society’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45:4 (1984); pp. 517–36.

36. Norton, David Hume, pp. 162–91.37. See S. Brown, ‘William Robertson (1721–1793) and the Scottish Enlightenment’, N.

Phillipson, ‘Providence and Progress: An Introduction to the Historical Th ought of


William Robertson’, and G. Carnell, ‘Robertson and Contemporary Images of India’, all in S. Brown (ed.) William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1997), pp. 7–35, 55–73, 210–30 respectively, see pp. 16, 68–9, 223 respectively.

38. Th us, his conception of providence is distinguished, for example, from that of either the Anglican physico-theologian Th omas Burnet or the English Presbyterian Samuel Chandler. Th ese writers asserted that ‘extraordinary’ or ‘special’ providence occurs when God intervenes in human aff airs or, more drastically, elects to destroy the Earth. See D. Spadafora, Th e Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 112, 121.

39. ‘Of Cause and Eff ect/Ends and Means/Order Combination and/Design’, in Th e Manu-scripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 123.

40. Ibid., pp. 124–5.41. ‘Of Good and Evil Perfection and Defect’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 196.

Th e theme of man’s duty to the Deity also fi gures prominently in Hutcheson’s outlook. See A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 168ff .

42. ‘What May be Affi rmed or Apprehended of the Supreme Creative Being’, in Th e Manu-scripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 15.

43. W. Cleghorn, ‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’, MS, Edinburgh University Library, Spe-cial Collections Division, Dc. 3. 3–6, in Dc. 3. 3, ff . 21–38; D. Nobbs, ‘Th e Political Ideas of William Cleghorn, Hume’s Academic Rival’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26:4 (1965), pp. 575–86; and J.-G. S. Chen, ‘William Cleghorn’s Idea of Friendship’, unpub-lished paper presented to Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, Williamsburg, Virginia, 30 April 2006.

44. Cleghorn, ‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’, Dc. 3. 4, f. 221–3.45. Ibid., Dc. 3. 3, f. 41.46. Ferguson, Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, ff . 153b–4. Another part of the

same manuscript reads, ‘Nature preserved by succession and Death a part in the order of Nature. Nature is continually perishing & reproduced. In one view [nature is] hastening to its end. In another view [it is] likely to be overstocked’ (f. 148b).

47. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 282. A similar opinion is found in An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 33.

48. Ibid., p. 119. On Ferguson and spontaneous order, see Forbes, ‘“Scientifi c” Whiggism’; Hamowy, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Th eory of Spontaneous Order; and Hill, Th e Passionate Society, pp. 101–21.

49. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 130.50. Ferguson, Institutes (1994 edn), pp. 236–7.51. ‘It is happy to have continually in view… that we are instruments in the hand of God for

the good of his creatures; that if we are ill members of society, or unwilling instruments in the hand of God, we do our utmost to counteract our nature, to quit our station, and to undo ourselves’, ibid., p. 169.

52. Cleghorn, ‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’, Dc. 3. 4, f. 237.53. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 15.54. Berry, Social Th eory and the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 94–102; Hont, Jealousy of Trade,

pp. 159–84.55. ‘Of the Separation of Departments Professions and Tasks resulting from the Progress of

Arts in Society’, in Th e Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, p. 144.56. Ferguson, Institutes (1994 edn), p. 37.


57. A. Ferguson, Th e Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously Considered (Edinburgh: n.p., 1757), p. 25.

58. Ibid., p. 24.59. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 63–4. See also Ferguson, A Sermon Preached

in the Ersh Language, p. 7.60. Cleghorn, ‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’, Dc. 3. 3, f. 77.61. R. Moss, Th e Providential Division of Men into Rich and Poor, and the Respective Duties

thus Arising (London: Richard Sare, 1708), p. 5.62. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 177.63. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 178–9.64. A.-N., Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human

Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1795). For a valuable analysis of Condorcet’s idea of progress, see R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (London: Heinemann, 1980), pp. 206–12.

65. Spadafora, Th e Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 214–25, 246ff .66. H. Home, Lord Kames, Historical Law-Tracts, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1776), pp.

90, 103–6. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 14–16. W. Robertson, ‘A View of the Progress of Society in Europe’, in W. Robertson, Th e History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 4 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1772). An exponent of social progress, Robert-son sometimes slipped into a cyclical view of history, as in his History of America when he contends that the way to understand the human being is to ‘follow him in his progress through the diff erent stages of society, as he gradually advances from the infant state of civil life towards its maturity and decline’, History of America, 3 vols (Bristol: Th oemmes, 1996), vol. 2, p. 50.

67. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 118, 172, 196, 234 and passim.68. Ibid., p. 235.69. Spadafora, Th e Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 15, 218; and J. G. A.

Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Shepherds: Th e Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall’, His-tory of European Ideas, 2 (1981), pp. 193–202, on pp. 195–6.

70. To name but a few, Pocock, Th e Machiavellian Moment; Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlight-enment and the Militia Issue; Geuna, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’.

71. Forbes, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxiv and xiv; E. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Allen Lane/Th e Penguin Press, 1994), ch. 8. Th e best bibliog-raphy of secondary literature on Ferguson’s views of progress and decline is in Hill, Th e Passionate Society, pp. 237–69.

72. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, pp. 47–8 (emphasis added).73. Berry, Social Th eory of the Scottish Enlightenment, ch. 5.74. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 12.75. Ibid., pp. 12–14.76. Ibid., p. 199.77. In the 1960s Jean Willke noticed this progressivism: ‘Th e Historical Th ought of Adam

Ferguson’ (PhD Dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1962). In the 1990s, Spadafora and Hill came independently to the same conclusion: Spadafora, Th e Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 302–4; Hill, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Para-dox of Progress and Decline’, p. 682.

78. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 191.


79. Humans as a collective species are destined to progress, particularly in the increasing power of the mind. As Cleghorn remarked: ‘By the Progression of the World, Mind’s Knowledge & Power are both Increased’, ‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’, Dc. 3. 3, f. 43.

80. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 314. Ferguson also remarks: ‘But every person, being principally interested in himself, is the absolute master of his own will, and for the choice he shall have made is alone responsible’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 202.

81. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 11.82. Ferguson, An Essay, ed. Oz-Salzberger, p. 202.83. Ferguson, Principles (1792 edn), vol. 1, p. 313. For a similar view see Ferguson, Institutes

(1994 edn), p. 169.


– 227 –

WORKS CITED

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A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s First Highland Regiment of Foot, Commanded by Lord John Murray, at their Cantonment at Camberwell, on the 18th Day of December 1745 (London: A. Millar, 1746).

Refl ections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756).

Th e Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously Considered (Edinburgh: n. p., 1757).

Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy. For the Use of Students in the College of Edin-burgh (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1766).

An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. F. Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also the edition ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-versity Press, 1966).

Institutes of Moral Philosophy. For the use of Students in the College of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1769; rpt Bristol: Th oemmes Press, 1994), 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London, 1773).

Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Richard Price, Intitled, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, &c., in a Letter fr om a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parlia-ment (London: T. Cadell, 1776).

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Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, MS, Papers of Professor Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections Division, Dc.1.84.

Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell; Edin-burgh, W. Creech, 1792; rpt New York: Garland, 1978; rpt, intro J. Hecht, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1995).

‘Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black, M.D.’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 5 (1805), pp. 101–17.

Biographical Sketch, Memoir, of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Ferguson (Edinburgh: John Moir, 1817).


Th e Unpublished Essays of Adam Ferguson, ed. W. Philip, 3 vols (Argyll: n.p., 1986).

Th e Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. V. Merolle, intro. J. B. Fagg, 2 vols (London: Picker-ing & Chatto, 1995).

Adam Ferguson: Collection of Essays, ed. Y. Amoh (Kyoto: Rinsen Book Company, 1996).

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– 245 –

active nature 5–6, 121–3, 148–53ambition and responsibility 159–60national character and 165–70providential order and 181–2unintended consequences 30, 155–9,

165–6virtue and 161–5

political virtue 147–55, 167see also human nature and society;

progressAdam, Robert 9–10Addison, Joseph 29Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh 27Ahnert, Th omas 173Alison, Archibald, Essays on the Nature and

Principles of Taste 40Allan, David 3, 8, 10, 17, 23American War of Independence 7, 49,

73–82Ammianus Marcellinus, History of the

Roman Emperors 45, 51, 54Anglo-American historians 133–6, 141Annual Register (December 1767) 20anthropology 136–7, 138, 144–5Appian 45, 50Arbuthnot, On Ancient Coins 44, 48, 50aristocractic forms of government 94Aristotle 54, 150Arriani, History of Alexander’s Expeditions

50art 112–13Asconius Pedianus 52, 54Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 44Augustus 119, 129Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 44, 53

Bacon, Francis 26, 43, 88, 103, 112Bagehot, Walter 31Barbault, Jean 53Barrington, Daines 46Bayle, Pierre, Dictionary 48Beattie, James 20Bedford, Duke of 71Berkeley, George, Treatise [concerning] the

Principles of Human Knowledge 42, 52Beveridge, Craig 21Bhagvat-Geeta 51Black Watch Regiment 10, 18, 65, 150Black, Joseph (cousin of AF) 54Blackstone, William, Commentaries 43, 45,

52Blackwell, Th omas, Memoirs of the Court of

Augustus 49Blair, Hugh 74, 172Blair, John 52Boccaccio 52Boece, Hector, Scororum historiae 26Boerhaave, Herman, Chemistry 54Bolingbroke, Viscount 183borough franchise system 100Bower, Walter 26Brewer, John 2–3, 7, 55Briet, Philippe 53Brotier, Gabriel, Tacitus 48Brown, John, Estimate of the Manners and

Principles of the Time 182Browne, Peter, Limits of Human

Understanding 43Bruce, James 54

Travels to fi nd the Source of the Nile 51, 52Buchan, Bruce 92

INDEX


Buchanan, George, Rerum Scoticarum historia 27

Buckle, Henry Th omas 135Budé, Guillaume, On the As and its Parts 43Buff on, Comte de, Histoire naturelle générale

et particulière 138Burckhardt, Sigurd 87Burke, Edmund 80Burke, Kenneth 87Burke, Peter 135Burton, John 16‘business’ 162–3

Caesar’s Commentaries 45, 50, 51, 52Calvinism 20, 28, 29, 172Campbell, Archibald, Original of Moral

Virtue 42Campbell, John Fletcher 50Carlisle Commission 7, 49, 74, 77–82, 91

‘Manifesto and Proclamation’ 79–80, 81Carlisle, Frederick Earl of 78Carlyle, Alexander 7, 9, 11, 16, 34, 74, 172

AF’s letters to 41, 80Carthage 126Cato 165, 166, 171Cato’s Letters 118Catrou and Rouillé, Roman History since the

Foundation 50causality 29–30

unintended consequences and 30–1, 155–6, 165–6

Chastellux, Chevalier de 120Chen, Jeng-Guo S. 6, 171Chenier, Louis de 52Cicero 47, 48, 50, 52, 149

De Finibus 45, 154Letters to Friends 44On the Republic 44Orationes ex recensione 43

civil liberty see libertycivil society see Essay on the History of Civil

Society, An; human nature and societyClarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, History

47Cleghorne, William 172, 181

‘Lectures of Moral Philosophy’ 177–8, 179–80

Code of Gentoo Laws, Th e 40

Condorcet, Marquis de 182‘conjectural history’ 134–5, 140, 141Cook, James, Voyages 51, 52corruption of society 121, 167–8, 182‘counterrevolution’ 135Creech, William 41Crevier, J. B. L. 51Cudworth, Ralph, True Intellectual System of

the Universe, Th e 43

Dalrymple, David 52Annals of Scotland 49

Dalrymple, Sir John 16, 25Davie, George 87Démeunier, Jean Nicholas 82democracy 94, 127–9

see also republicanismDescarte, René 142despotism 95, 101, 107–8, 110

see also military governmentDiderot, Denis 120Dillthey, Wilhelm 133Dio Cassius 5, 43, 50

Roman History 42, 44, 48Diodorus Siculus Historical Library 48, 50,

52Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers

48Dionysius Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities

45, 50, 52‘division of labour’ 32, 181Douglas, Bishop 16Droysen, Johan Gustav 135

Eden, William 78Edinburgh Review 97Edinburgh University Library 39, 41–54

list of AF’s borrowings 57–64education, political, AF’s ‘Lectures on Moral

Philosophy’ examined 90–114empiricism 21–2, 134, 173

hermeneutics 140Encyclopédie 121Enfant, Jacques L’ 51Epicurianism 90epistolary form 13–19

sociological use of 11–13

Index 247

Essay on the History of Civil Society, An 2, 19, 27, 29, 42, 47, 85, 88, 103, 121, 150

active nature in 157, 164motivating power 151–6political participation 75–6, 148–9,

167causes of social structure 4, 30–1‘Corruption and Political Slavery’ 121military government in 121–5military service in 33–4, 117parliamentary monarchy in 35–6progress in 30–6, 155–6, 160, 183–6religion in 173, 175–6, 179, 180, 181republicanism in 153Scottish context examined 19–22, 24–5,

32–3AF’s international approach 36–8

systematic approach 37, 142–3virtue in 114, 183see also Ferguson, Adam

Essay on the Law of Nations, An 40European polity 115–25Eusebius 50

Fabretti, Raff aele 46Fagg, Jane 3, 8, 17, 39Fanon, Frantz 21Ferguson, Adam

as army chaplain 9–10as Carlisle Commission secretary 7, 49,

74, 77–82, 91as historian 131–2, 136, 138–43, 150–1

his ‘three stages’ 182–3reputation and concerns 1–6

as Scotsman 7–11, 18–19as teacher 103epistolary self 13–20political views 18–19, 21, 34–5, 82–6private life

character 16death 54family background 10–11ill heath 111marriage and family life 14–15, 50, 53religious convictions 15, 17, 172

reading and researchfor natural history classes 47

foreign customs and travels 51–2, 53, 54

list from Edinburgh University Library 57–64

literary 55on chemistry 54on Rome 42, 43–5, 48–50personal library 40–1

works‘Historical Chart’ 49Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral

Philosophy 178‘Manifesto and Proclamation’ 79–80,

81‘Minutes of the Life and Character of

Joseph Black, MD’ 54Morality of Stage Plays Seriously

Considered, Th e 172, 181‘Of Statesmen and Warriors’ 83‘Of the French Revolution’ 84‘Of the Principle of Moral Estimation’

155Principles of Moral and Political

Science (1792) 37, 83–4, 173Refl ections Previous to the

Establishment of a Militia 66–7, 69–72, 117

Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price 48, 75–7, 117

‘Treatise on Refi nement’ 27see also Essay on the History of Civil

Society, An; History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic; ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’

Ferguson, Sir Adam (son of AF) 15Ferguson, Katharine (wife of AF) 14, 53Ferguson, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick 54Festus 46Finlayson, C. P. 41Fletcher, Andrew 117Florus, Lucius Annaeus 45, 50Folard, Jean-Charles de, Commentaries on

Polybius 45Fontenoy, Battle of 9Forbes, Duncan 158Fordun, John, Scotichronicon 26, 27


France 78Revolution 82–6, 117–18, 130Seven Years War 65–6, 117

Fraser, James 46Freeden, Michael 87freedom see libertyFresne, Charles du 44Frontinus 50, 53

Game Laws 68Gellner, Ernest 23Gentleman’s Magazine (1756) 69George II 68Gerard, Alexander, Essay on Genius 30German historians 132–3Germanic peoples 122Gesner, Johann Matthias 45, 48

Th esaurus 42, 43Gibbon, Edward 43

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Th e 40, 53, 182

Goltz, Herbert, Th esaurus 45Goodall, Walter 27Gordon, Sir Robert, Genealogical History of

the Earldom of Sutherland 28, 29Gottfried, Johann 132government, forms of 94–6

autarchy 103, 109–11mixed and simple class 95, 101–2, 115see also military government

Graevius, John George, Th esaurus 45, 51Gray, Th omas 20Gronovius, Jakob 50, 52

Habeas Corpus 156Hamilton, William, On the Phlegraean Plain

53happiness 105–6, 155, 161–3Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor 66, 68–70Hastings, Warren 40Hauristius, Benno Caspar 45Hawkesworth, John 52Hayek, Friedrich 23, 94Henry, Robert 25hermeneutics 140Highlands of Scotland 10, 18–19, 69Hill, John 28–9Hill, Lisa 54, 55

‘historicism’ 132–3, 135historiography see history of historiography;

Scotland, historiographical traditionhistory, AF’s three stages of 182–3history of historiography 132–6

Hume’s ‘science of man’ 136–8mankind as object of history 143–5, 148methodology 141–3natural history 138–43see also Scotland, historiographical

tradition; sociologyHistory of the Progress and Termination of the

Roman RepublicAF’s purpose behind 115–18, 144, 148intellectual background 118–25military government in 125–9national character in 157–8, 164–70republicanism in 153–4revolution in 108sources

fi rst edition 42, 43–5, 48–50, 55revised edition 52–4

see also Ferguson, AdamHobbes, Th omas 93

Opera 43, 52Home, John 34, 172

Douglas 74Hook, Nathaniel, Roman History 49Horace 50Howe, Richard and William 78human nature and society

action and moral responsibility 159–61as second cause 177causes of social structure 29–31

unintended consequences and 30–1, 155–6, 165–6

happiness 155, 161–3intellect 111–13, 175providence and 174–6rationality 159–60universalism and 36–8women’s position 150see also active nature; inequality;

‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’; liberty; natural history; progress

humanism, Christian 174Hume, David 15, 16, 20, 26, 87, 95, 116

AF’s Essay and 174

Index 249

AF’s letters to 17religion and 171, 172–3‘science of man’ 136–8, 143, 154–5works

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 173

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 30

Essays 140History of England 24, 29, 122, 173Natural History of Religion 138, 143‘Of National Characters’ 167Treatise of Human Nature, A 136,

151–2, 158Hume, David, of Godscroft 29, 31

History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus 28

Hutcheson, Francis 174–5An Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas

of Beauty and Virtue 42–3

imperialist expansion 91–2, 118–19, 121, 124–5

Rome’s transition to military state 126–9India 92, 125industrialization 33inequality

as benefi cial distinction 122, 127–8discussed in AF’s lectures 96–100providential order and 177, 180–2virtue and vice 98–9see also human nature and society

Institutes of Moral Philosophy for the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh 43, 47, 148, 149, 160, 162

see also Ferguson, Adamintellect 111–13, 175

Jacobites 8, 18, 34, 68Johnson, Samuel

Dictionary 46, 50Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland 53

Johnston, George 78Josephus 48, 54Julian Obsequens 50Julian, the Apostate 49

Kalyvas, Andreas 92Kames, Lord 25, 138

Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion 176

Katznelson, Ira 92Kettler, David 24, 87Knox, John, History of Scotland 28, 49Knox, Vicesimus, Essays 51Kraus, Christian Jakob 140Kugler, Michael 7

Laing, Malcolm, History of Scotland 54‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’

explanation of society 90–1emulation, interest and love 93force and hostility 91–2happiness and security 105–6inequality 96–100virtue of mind 112–13

government, forms of 93–6as adapted to character of the people,

106–7, 113constitutions and conquest 101–2

voting rights 100see also Ferguson, Adam; human nature

and society; moral philosophy; political theories

Lee, Dr John 40letters see epistolary formliberty 104

democratic politics and 127–8Habeas Corpus 156honour as condition of 121Rome’s transition to military state 126–9separation of state and military and

117–19‘vigour’ and security 75–7, 166see also human nature and society

Lipsius, Opera 49Literary Miscellany (1768–9) 45Livy 47, 49, 50Locke, John 108

Essay Concerning Human Understanding 42, 43

Logan, John 40Logierait, Scotland 10, 18Lorimer, James 17Lowthrop, John 43


Lucanus 47, 50luxury, concept of 168

McDaniel, Iain 115Machiavelli 158–9, 183Mackenzie, Henry 18Mackintosh, James 130Macpherson, James, History of Great Britain

40Macpherson, Sir John 7, 10, 16, 18, 40

AF’s letters to 75, 77–8, 81, 82Macrobius 50Madison, James 74Mair, John, Historia maioris Brtanniae 26–7Manchester 19Mandeville, Bernard 31, 171

Fable of the Bees, Th e 158Mannheim, Karl 87Mariti, Giovanni 52Marlianus, Raimundus 49Marxism 8, 23, 87Mary, Queen of Scots 27–8Meinecke, Freidrich 133Melmoth, William 45Melville, Lord 14mercantilism 80–1, 91, 103–4, 124, 158mercenary troops 65–6, 126Merolle, Vincenzo 1, 8, 19Meyer, Annette 131Middleton, Conyers, Life of Cicero 42militia debate 65–72, 116–19, 122–9, 152

see also militarism; military government; military service

militarism, imperialist expansion and 118–19

see also militia debate; military government; military service

military government 95, 101in An Essay on the History of Civil Society

121–5Montesquieu on 118–20popular abuse of liberty and 117–18Rome’s transition into 126–9see also despotism; government, forms

of; militia debate; militarism; military service

military servicehonour of 71, 83–4

in AF’s historigraphy 33–4standing armies 117–18theme of defence 108–9, 113–14see also militia debate; militarism;

military governmentMill, John Stuart, Logic 90Millar, John 138

On Government 53Milton, Lord 14, 15mixed government 35–6, 95, 101–2, 115modernity 31–6monarchy

as form of government 94–5, 100–1, 106autarchy 103, 109–11civil liberty and 121–2parliamentary monarchy 35–6use of troops and 118–20

Mongault, Nicholas H. 45Montesquieu 31, 48, 93

military debate 118–25, 130Considerations on the Greatness of the

Romans and their Decline 118–19Persian Letters 112Spirit of the Laws 119–20, 121

Montfaucon, Bernard de, Antiquitys 46, 49Monthly Review 26, 51moral law 142, 158, 171, 174, 177moral philosophy 26, 29, 111–13, 149,

159–60, 176see also ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’

Mossner, E. C. 173Muratori, L. A. 52Murdoch, A. 21

Napoleon Bonaparte 84–5, 130national character 165–70natural history 4, 31–6, 143–5

AF’s epistemological foundation 138–43see also human nature and society

Nepos, Cornelius, Vitae Exellentium Imperatorum 48

Newcastle, Duke of 68Newton, Isaac 26, 142Niebuhr, Georg 133North, Frederick Lord 78

Orme, Robert 49Ovid 47

Index 251

Oz-Salzberger, Fania 5, 147

Paine, Th omas 80Paley, William, Principles of Moral and

Political Philosophy 51Panvinio, Onofrio 45, 48Park, Mungo 53Parliamentary History of England 45parliamentary monarchy 35–6Peardon, Th omas Preston 133–4Percival, Robert, Out of Ceylon 54Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon 50Phillips, Th omas, Voyages 53physical law 142Pighius, S. V. 52Pinkerton, John, History of Scotland 53Plato 52Playfair, John 51Pliny, Historia Naturalis 44, 48Plutarch, Parallel Lives 42, 43, 48, 52Pocock, J. G. A. 158political education, AF’s ‘Lectures on Moral

Philosophy’ examined 90–114political theories 34–6

AF’s politics of action 147–55national spirit and 165–70unintended consequences and 155–6

political economy 23, 103–4, 152Wealth of Nations, Th e 24, 40, 73, 77

‘political ideology’ 87universal franchise and 83see also ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’

Polybius 48, 53History 47, 115

Pope, Alexander 111Potter, John, Antiquities 50Presbyterian Church 17, 28, 172–4Price, Richard, Observations on the Nature of

Civil Liberty 75–7, 91, 117Priestley, Joseph, On Electricity 47Principles of Moral and Political Science, Th e

(1792) 37, 52, 165on human activity 147, 148, 151, 159–

60, 162–4on providence and progress 179, 181,

184, 185progress 31–2, 95–6, 99, 113, 143

cyclical nature of 169, 182

free will and 184–6providence and 175–80, 181, 184, 185stadial theory and virtue 182–4see also active nature; human nature and

societyproperty law 180–1providence 29, 171–6

free will and 184–6social inequality and 180–2universal progress 176–80

Prussia 84Pufendorf, Samuel 49, 118, 180

rationality 159–60Raynal, Abbé, Histoire Politique et

Philosophique des Deux Indes 120, 125Raynor, David 65Reid, Th omas 87

Essays on the Active Powers of Man 159religion

atheism 84capitalism and 20Christian humanism 174–5eschatological historiography 29–30providence and progress 171–86, 184–6

civil society and 174–6free will and 184–6inequality and 180–2

religious moderation, Scottish 172–4, 176

republicanism 7, 127, 183AF’s active political virtue and 153–6,

185American democratic 73–82, 117French 82–6, 117–18see also democracy; History of the Progress

and Termination of the Roman RepublicRetz, Cardinal de 158–9, 166revolution 73–86, 110–11, 114Robertson, James 41Robertson, John 116Robertson, William 17, 19, 38, 41, 74, 172,

176History of Scotland 25, 27, 29

Robison, John, Proofs of a Conspiracy 41Rollin, Charles 48–9


Roman republicanism see History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 21, 141, 180, 210Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 37,

97Ruddiman, Th omas 27Rumford, Count, Essays Political,

Economical, and Philosophical 41Russel, James (AF’s cousin) 47

s’Gravesande, Willem, System of Natural Philosophy 47

Saint-Lambert, Marquis de 121Salmasius, Claudius 45Sandys, Lord 71Saratoga (1777) 77–8Schmitt, Carl 92Schreiner, Olive 12‘science of man’ 136–8, 143, 154–5Scotland

AF’s feelings for 7–11, 18–19, 34–5AF’s treatment of 24–5, 31–3, 36Edinburgh University Library 39, 41–54Highlands 10, 18–19, 69religious moderation 172–4Treaty of Union 31, 34–6

Scotland, historiographical traditionassimilationist attitudes 21, 35–6causality 29–30in early historical writing 26–8in Enlightenment writing 24–6military service debate and 33–4see also history of historiography

Scots Magazine (March 1767) 20Scott, Andrew and John, booksellers, 40Scott, Sir Walter 9Seneca 54Seven Years War 65–6, 117, 125Shaft esbury, third Earl of 29, 112Shelburne, Earl of 77Sher, Richard 74, 116Sheringham, Robert 43–4, 45, 50Silius Italicus 47Simpson, S. M. 41Smith, Adam 14, 38, 93, 103, 116, 134

jurisprudence lectures 117Wealth of Nations, Th e 24, 40, 73, 77

Smith, Craig 5, 157Smollett, Tobias 52society and human nature see human nature

and society ; ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’

Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language 18

sociology 8, 133AF’s empiricism 21–2, 36–7AF’s focus on ‘mankind’ 143–5use of epistolary form 11–12see also history of historiography

Solinus 53Polyhistoria 46

Spadafora, David 182Spanheim, Ezechiel, Antiques 48Sparrman, Anders, Voyage to the Cape of

Good Hope 51Spon, Jacob 52‘spontaneous order’ 165–6, 179Stanhope, Philip, fi ft h Earl of Chesterfi eld

47–8Stanley, Liz 11, 12–13Stanley, Th omas, Th e History of Philosophy

42Stephano, H. E. 48Stewart, David, Sketches of the Character,

Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland 9

Stewart, Dugald 23, 108, 134, 141–2Stoicism 90, 151, 163, 171Strabo, Geography 43, 48, 53Strahan, William 115Stuart, Andrew 19

AF’s letters to 25Genealogical History of the Stuarts 41

Stuart, Gilbert 51Suetonius, Opera 46Sullivan, Richard J. 52Swinburne, Henry, Travels in the Two Sicilies

53

Tacitus 46, 50, 51, 52, 116Tavernier, J. B., Travels 51Terence 52Terrasson, Antoine, History of Roman

Jurisprudence 45Th oulier, Pierre Joseph, Cicero 63

Index 253

Townshend, George 65–6, 68–70travel reports 137Treaty of Union 31, 34–6Treaty of Utrecht 118Turenne 52Turnbull, George 29, 176Turnbull, Ronald 21Tytler, Alexander 29, 134Tytler, William, Inquiry, Historical and

Critical into the Evidence Against Mary, Queen of Scots 27

unintended consequences 30–1, 155–6, 165–6

universalism 36–8

Varro 50Opera 46

virtueaction and 161–5active political 153–6art and 112–13elevation of the mind 111–13, 175government and 98–9, 114

civil and military functions 123democractic 105, 107–8, 109monarchical 109–10, 121

military service and 71, 83–4progress, stadial theory and 182–4

Voltaire 46voting rights 100

Walker, Obadiah, Greek and Roman History Illustrated by Coins 43

Wallace, Robert, Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind 42

Walpole, Horace 66Washington, George 79Weber, Max 20Wheeler, Sir George 52Whitlocke, Bulstrode, Memorials 47Wight, Alexander, On Elections 49Withers, Charles 21Witherspoon, John 73–4Wodrow, Robert, History of the Suff erings of

the Church of Scotland, Th e 28women 150Woodhouselee, Lord 134, 135Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel, History of France

fr om the Accession of Henry the Th ird 40–1

Wynne, John 43Wyvill, Christopher 81, 100

Yorkshire Association 81, 100