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References
Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd.; 2001, p. 5.
‘Ferguson’s admirers in France included D’Holbach and Voltaire in his time, and later Comte; in Germany, Herder and such literary figures as Schiller and Jacobi, along with nineteenth century German social thought in general; and in his lifetime he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Berlin’. A.G. Smith, The Political Philosophy of Adam Ferguson Considered as a Response to Rousseau: Political Development and Progressive Development, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Yale University, p. 9. Along with the rest of the’ scottish School’ John Stuart Mill esteemed Ferguson highly, naming his father, James Mill, as the last in the line of succession of ‘this great school’ of Hume, Kames, Smith and Ferguson. Letter to A. Comte, January 28, 1843 in J.S. Mill, Collected of John Stuart Mill, J. Robson, F. Mineka, N. Dwight, J. Stillinger, and A. Robson, (eds), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963, Vol. 13, p. 566.
As was ‘the fate of most Scots’ after 1800. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth Century Germany, Oxford: University Press, 1995, p. 130. Even closer to his own time Ferguson’s ‘popular success was greatly overshadowed by that of his successor to the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair, Dugald Stewart‘. N. Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in Porter, R and Teich, M. (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 37.
John Robertson has recently urged a greater awareness of ‘potential fault lines within Scottish moral philosophy’, drawing special attention to the eccentricity of Ferguson’s work. ‘The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment’, in The Scottish Enlightenment, Essays in Reinterpretation, Paul Wood (ed), Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000, pp. 47–8.
Duncan Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Ferguson, A, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Edited and With an Introduction by Duncan Forbes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967, p. xiii–iv. Here was a culture ‘in search of perfection, to place every branch of administration behind the counter, and come to employ, instead of the statesman and the warrior, the mere clerk and accountant’. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (hereafter cited as Essay), Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 214–16. Please note: The latter edition is used throughout this work.
To be explored in further chapters. See also John Varty, ‘Civil or Commercial?: Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society’, Democratisation, Vol. 4, 1997, pp. 29–48.
Hiroshi Mizuta, ‘Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies in Voltaire, Vol. 154, 1976, pp. 1459–64, p. 1459.
For example, Ernest Gellner, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Surprising Robustness of Civil Society’, in Liberalism in Modern Times: Essays in Honour of Jose G. Merquior, Ernest Gellner and Cesar Cansino (eds), London: CEU Press, 1996 and, by the same author, ‘Adam Ferguson’, in Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London: Penguin Books, 1994; M. Foley, and R. Edwards, ‘The Paradox of Civil Society’, Journal of Democracy, Vol, 7 (3) 1996, pp. 38–52 and Varty, ‘Civil or Commercial? Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society’.
As also noticed by John Brewer in his insightful work on Ferguson. J.D. Brewer, ‘Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Scotland: Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, in The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, D. McCrone, S. Kendrick and P. Straw (eds), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989 and, by the same author, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation’, The British Journal of Sociology, 37, 1986, pp.461–78.
Bjorn Eriksson, ‘The First Formulation of Sociology: A Discursive Innovation of the Eighteenth Century’, Archives-Europeennes-de-Sociologie; Vol. 34(2), 1993, pp. 251–76, p. 272. David Hume wrote to Edward Gibbon that Scotland had arguably been ‘the rudest...of all European nations; the most necessitous, the most turbulent and the most unsettled’. Letter to Edward Gibbon, March 18 1776, David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, edited by J.Y.T. Greig, in Two Volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, Vol. 2, p. 310.
Eriksson, ‘First Formulation of Sociology’, pp. 251–76; Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 21.
As Forbes puts it: ‘The Essay was the work of a man who knew intimately, and from the inside, the two civilisations...which divided eighteenth century Scotland: the Gemeinschaft of the clan, belonging to the past, the Gesellschaft of the “progressive”, commercial Lowlands’. Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, pp. xxxviii–ix.
Such as, for example, Rousseau’s belief in a state of nature, his attitude to great legislators and social contracts and also his perceived primitivism. Although Rousseau was not a strict primitivist, in Britain ‘he was continuously and usually unfavourably associated’ with it. James H. Warner, ‘The Reaction in Eighteenth-Century England to Rousseau’s Two Discourses’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 48(2) June, 1933, pp. 471–87, p. 480.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’, in J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, Translation and Introduction by G.D.H. Cole, London: Everyman Library, p. 8.
Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’, Social Contract and Discourses, p. 17.
Essay, p. 166.
H. Strasser, The Normative Structure of Sociology: Conservative and Emancipatory Themes in Social Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 225.
For example, Frederick Von Hayek explicitly cited his debt to Ferguson in expounding his theory of spontaneous order. F.A. Hayek, ‘The Results of Human Actions But Not of Human Design’, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, p. 97. The title of this essay is a direct quote from Ferguson and indicates how struck was Hayek by the former’s theory.
Nevertheless Comte described Condorcet, not Ferguson, as his’ spiritual father’ and regarded the former as second only to Montesquieu as a founder of sociology. Robert Bierstedt, ‘Sociological Thought in the Eighteenth Century’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis, London: Heinemann, 1979, p. 22.
W.C. Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1930, p. 240. Lehmann’s book represents the first systematic attempt to establish Ferguson as a founder of sociology.
On, among others, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, Isaak Iselin, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Christian Garve. For a complete discussion of Ferguson’s impact in Germany, see Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, especially Chapter 5. According to Robert Solomon, Ferguson exerted considerable influence over the work of both Schiller and Hegel. Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. See also Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 and Dushan Bresky,’ schiller’s Debt to Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 13 (3), 1961, pp. 239–53.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, With an Introduction by Frederick Engels, International Publishers: New York, 1969, pp. 129–30. According to Ronald Hamowy, Ferguson ‘can claim priority over Smith in offering, not an economic analysis of the question which was original with neither writer, but rather, the first methodological and penetrating sociological analysis, an analysis which was to have far-reaching consequences in intellectual history by contributing substantially to the sociological groundwork of Marxism’. R. Hamowy, ‘Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, Economica, Vol.35 (139), August, 1968, pp. 244–59, p. 259. Jack Barbalet identifies Ferguson as perhaps the most important precursor of ‘modern sociology in his explicit understanding of the social as distinct from the economic consequences of the division of labour and for his account of historic development’. J. M. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.11–12. Though Rousseau had pre-empted Ferguson by canvassing the theme of alienation in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the division of labour does not play as central a role in his account. Forbes, Introduction to Essay, p. xxxi.
Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of Civil Society, Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1988, pp, 137–41, 225–7.
Gumplowicz rated the Essay ‘the first natural history of society’. Strasser, Normative Structure of Sociology, p. 52. According to Ronald Meek ‘Adam Ferguson’s Essay....is undoubtedly one of the most notable works of the epoch. Original, subtle and provocatively complex, it is nowadays rightly regarded as one of the first important exercises in the field which modern sociologists have marked out as their own’. R. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 150. Similarly, Robert Bierstedt has described Ferguson’s sociological insights as a triumph ‘of major proportions’. Bierstedt,’ sociological Thought in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 29.
H. Barnes, ‘Sociology Before Comte: A Summary of Doctrines and an Introduction to the Literature’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 23, July 1917, pp. 174–247, p. 234.
Barnes, ‘Sociology before Comte‘, p. 235; D. Macrae, ‘Adam Ferguson; Sociologist’, New Society, Vol. 24, 1966, 792–94 and by the same author, ‘Adam Ferguson’ in T. Raison, (ed.) The Founding Fathers of Social Science, London: Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 27–35. See also N. Waszek, Man’s Social Nature: A Topic of the Scottish Enlightenment in its Historical Setting, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986, 141; Strasser, The Normative Structure of Sociology, p.52; A. Swingewood, ‘Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment’ The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 21, 1970, pp. 164–80; Lehmann, Adam Ferguson, passim
As there have of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers in general. The 1967 German Edition of John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks asserts on ‘its unnumbered terminal page’ that Millar, along with Smith and Ferguson, was ‘one of the three great Scots of the second half of the eighteenth century who founded sociology‘. Louis Schneider, ‘Tension in the Thought of John Millar’, The Grammar of Social Relations: The Major Essays of Louis Schneider, Jay Weinstein (ed) with an Epistolary Foreward by R.K. Merton, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984, p. 109, n.8. For a subtle account of Ferguson’s place in the history of sociology see Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’. Herta Jogland has noted that the importance of Ferguson’s contribution to modern sociology has been both under-and over-estimated by his various commentators. Herta Helena Jogland, Ursprunge und Grundlagen der Sociologie bei Adam Ferguson, Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1959, pp. 18–19. See also: D. Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson, Indiana: Ohio State University Press, 1965, pp. 8–9; Lehmann, Adam Ferguson; passim; Fania Oz Salszberger, Translating the Enlightenment, pp. 89–92; L. Hill, ‘Anticipations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Social Thought in the Work of Adam Ferguson’, European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 37 (1), 1996, pp. 203–28; Barnes,’ sociology before Comte‘, p. 235; F. Ferrarrotti, ‘Civil Society and State Structures in Creative Tension’, State, Culture and Society, Vol. 1, Fall 1984, pp. 3–25; R. Meek, Economics and Ideology and other Essays, London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1967, pp. 34–50; A. Ryan, ‘An Essay on the History of Civil Society’, New Society, Vol. 3, 1966, pp. 63–4. L. Schneider, The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967; A. Silver, ‘Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 95 ( 6), 1990, pp. 1474–1504, p.1479; R. L. Emerson, ‘Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers’ Historical Papers, Vol. 63, 1984, pp. 63–90; R. Pascal, ‘Herder and the Scottish Historical School’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, Vol.14, 1938–9, pp. 23–49 and by the same author, ‘Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century’ Modern Quarterly, Vol. 1, March, 1938, pp. 167–79; Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997; D. Forbes,’ scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’ Cambridge Journal, Vol. 6, 1954, pp. 643–70; Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation’; Swingewood, ‘Origins of Sociology’; G. Bryson,’ some Eighteenth Century Conceptions of Society’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 31, 1939, pp. 401–21, p. 403; R. Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987; H.M. Hopfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (2) 1978, pp. 19–40. Not all scholars have shown enthusiasm for Ferguson’s contribution to social science. For example, Bernard Barber asserts that [t]here is no great, undiscovered or startling new knowledge of society in Ferguson’. B. Barber, ‘An Essay on the History of Civil Society’, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 9, (2), March, 1980, pp. 258–9, p. 258. According to Ernest Mossner, Ferguson’s reputation during his own time as one of Edinburgh’s ‘most brilliant’ minds was ‘never fully justified’. He continues: ‘there was always something superficial in Ferguson’. Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Adam Ferguson’s “Dialogue on a Highland Jaunt” with Robert Adam, William Cleghorn, David Hume, and William Wilkie’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honour of Alan Dugald McKillop, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 297. We know that Hume was disappointed in the Essay, though for reasons unknown. Mossner suggests one possibility, namely, that Hume objected to Ferguson’s insistence that progress was inevitable. E. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1954, pp. 542–3.
Brewer ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, passim.
Forbes, Introduction to Essay, p.i; Ryan,’ Essay’, p. 63.
As noted by John Brewer,’ Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation’, p. 462.
S. Mason, ‘Ferguson and Montesquieu: Tacit Reproaches?’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 2(2), Autumn, 1988, pp. 193–203, pp. 194–5. Montesquieu’s insistence on the existence of a pre-social state is an important limit on his attempts at sociology. Charles-Louis Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Translated and Edited by A. M.Cohler B.C. Miller, H.M. Stone, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 1. 1. 2., p. 6.
Smith is excepted here for he does not seem to have been an atheist. For a discussion of his belief system see Lisa Hill ‘The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 8(1), Spring 2001, pp. 1–29.
‘The more we examine the universe, the more we find everything to be governed by general laws...In the case of man, and all the animals, the good of every individual is not separately consulted, but the good of the species of every kind is at the same time provided for; and if it were otherwise, there could be no general laws by which men or beasts could regulate the actions’. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science: Being Chiefly a Retrospect of Lectures Delivered in the College of Edinburgh, in Two Volumes, Edinburgh: Printed for A. Strahan and T. Cadell. London; and W. Creech, Edinburgh, 1792, (hereafter cited as P.I. or P.II.) p. 338.
Gladys Bryson, ‘Some Eighteenth Century Conceptions of Society’, pp. 405–6. Ferguson’s own definition of moral philosophy is ‘the knowledge of what ought to be, or the application of rules that ought to determine the choice of voluntary agents’. Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy, New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1978, (hereafter cited as Institutes), p.11. William Lehmann agrees that Ferguson’s work is that of a moralist above all else. W.C. Lehmann, ‘Review of P. Salvucci’s’ Adam Ferguson: Sociologica e Filosofia Politica’, History and Theory, Vol. 13 (2), 1974, pp. 163–81, p. 173.
G.H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, Third Edition, London: George Harrop and Co. Ltd., 1964, pp. 422–4.
Bierstedt, ‘Sociological Thought in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 29.
D. Jary and J. Jary (eds) Collins Dictionary of Sociology, Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1991. pp.ix, 603.
As John Brewer has observed ‘Ferguson, much more thoroughly than other Scots’ discusses ‘a range of social structural variables which are given explanatory status, visualising the social structure as an integrated unit with causal relations existing between its parts’. Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, p. 27.
Anthony Giddens, Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., MacMillan Education, London, 1986, p. 9; G. Marshall, (ed) Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 629–30.
MacRae, ‘Adam Ferguson, Sociologist’, p. 793.
Institutes, pp. 243–44
J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 147.
Oz-Salzberger, Introduction to Essay, p. ix. ‘[W]hen James VI of Scotland became also James I of England’. Broadie, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 7.
Ferguson describes ‘political situation’ as ‘a school of intellectual and moral improvement, in which [people] are destined to advance in knowledge, wisdom, and all the eligible habits of life’. P.I., p. 263.
According to Phillipson, ‘[w]hat they sought was a language responsive to the economic, social and historical experience of provincial communities and realised that the virtue of a provincial citizen class was more likely to be released by economic and cultural institutions than by a national parliament remote from the provincial citizen’s world. And they warned that a polity that did not respect the independence of its provinces could not possibly be said to be free’. Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 21–6.
Hume, Letters of David Hume, p. 255.
Oz-Salzberger, Introduction to Essay, p. viii; Smith, The Political Philosophy of Adam Ferguson, pp. 19–20
Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, p.32.
William Robertson, History of Scotland in Two Volumes, London: 1759, 2, p. 254.
Essay, p. 215.
Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989, pp. 43–4.
According to Colin Kidd, Scotland’s Celtic identity had already been dealt a number of damaging ‘intellectual blows from which it never fully recovered’, among them, scholarly discreditations (since the mid sixteenth century) of its ‘ancient Dalriadic mythistoire’ and challenges to ‘the dating and authenticity of the regnal lists upon which the high antiquity of the Fergusian monarchy was based’. Colin Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 109 (434) November 1994, pp. 1197–214, p. 1206.
Though, by Ferguson’s own account, he was not a true Highlander since Athole was on the Highland border, ‘barely within the limits at which Gaelic begins to be [the] vulgar tongue and where the mythology and tradition of the highlands were likely to be more faint than in the interior parts’. Letter to Henry Mackenzie, March 26, 1798, Adam Ferguson, The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, Edited by V. Merolle with an Introduction by J.B. Fagg, in Three Volumes, London: William Pickering, 1995 (hereafter cited as Correspondence), No. 337, II. p. 430. In addition, while still a young boy he had been sent away to school. Jane Fagg, Biographical Introduction, Correspondence, I. pp. lxviii, lxxii. For more on Ferguson’s provincial identity see: Michael Kugler, ‘Provincial Intellectuals: Identity, Patriotism, and Enlightened Peripheries’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 37, 1996, pp. 156–73.
Luke Gibbons, ‘Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism’ in Terence Brown (ed) Celticism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, p. 284. But as Forbes rightly notes, ‘[t]here is no direct mention of the Highland clan in the Essay...The Highland inspiration is clothed in the fashionable garb; admiration of Sparta, the contrast between classical public spirit and modern selfishness, the appeal to the classics of modern anthropology, the manners of the American Indian, and so on’. Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xxxix. Ferguson’s avoidance of references to Highland culture is likely traceable to a desire to forestall any interpretation of his nostalgia as harbouring Jacobite sympathies. For a general discussion of the historicity of Ossian see K.L. Haugan, ‘Ossian and the Invention of Textual History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 58 (2) 1998, pp. 309–27. According to Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Ossian was the creation of a young, unscrupulous man, James Macpherson, who was sent to the highlanders by Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson and their friends to discover the epic by a Celtic Homer that they were sure must exist. No such epic existed, but Macpherson was perfectly content to construct one out of the fragments of Celtic verse he had been able to find. His patrons provided him with money, a publisher and editorial assistance, and Hugh Blair wrote a brilliant, subtle and influential essay on Ossian which was to present the fictitious bard in the guise in which he was to appear to his readers on the Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world for the next century’. Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 34. For Ferguson’s denial of any involvement in a ‘cheat’ regarding the authorship of the material see Letter to John Douglas July 21, 1781, Correspondence, No. 198, II. p. 288.
Gibbons, ‘Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism’, p. 284
John Dwyer, ‘The Melancholy Savage’ in Howard Gaskill (ed), Ossian Revisted, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1991, pp. 170–1.
‘The moral sentiments led to goodness as well as civility....though the moral sentiments were thought to be natural to all, Scottish moralists were impressed by the degree to which they would be cultivated through education’. John Dwyer, ‘Introduction-A Peculiar Blessing: Social Converse in Scotland from Hutcheson to Burns’, in J. Dwyer and R.B. Sher (eds), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth Century Scotland, Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 1993, pp. 6–7.
Fiona Stafford has suggested that Ferguson was not only Macpherson’s patron, but may also have exerted a direct influence on him. Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988, pp. 157–8. On the other hand, according to Jane Fagg, there is no evidence that Ferguson took any part in the alleged cheat over the authenticity of the poems. Fagg, Biographical Introduction, lxxi.
For a fuller discussion of the idea of commercial’ strangership’ see L. Hill and P. McCarthy, ‘Hume, Smith and Ferguson: Friendship in Commercial Society’, in Preston King and Heather Devere, (eds) The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity, London: Frank Cass, 2000.
Dwyer, ‘The Melancholy Savage’, pp. 170–1
Oz-Salzberger, Introduction to Essay, p. x.
Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 34.
Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity’, p. 1205.
Jack Barbalet has noticed, for example, how important is emotion to ‘making sense’ of Ferguson’s social theory. Ferguson’s detailed account of the human constitution ‘forms the methodological and theoretical basis of what follows, and is largely concerned with the emotional dispositions associated with social and political relations and organisation’. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure, p. 12.
P.I., p. 125.
‘The explanatory value of emotions categories can also be located in the major sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave Le Bon, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Ferdinand Tonnies and Georg Simmel are some of the more notable European sociologists who...regarded emotions categories as important explanatory variables. During this same period American sociology, in the works of such figures as Albion Small, William Graham Sumner, and Lester Frank Ward, as well as Edward Ross and Charles Horton Cooley, found explanatory roles for emotions categories’. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 11–13.
Late modern interests as identified by Peggy Thoits. Peggy A. Thoits, ‘The Sociology of Emotions’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 15, 1989, pp. 317–42, pp. 327, 317.
P.I., p. vii.
Essay, p. 8.
P.I., p. 68.
Adam Ferguson, Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, For the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1766 (hereafter cited as Analysis), p.7.
For an indication of Ferguson’s awareness of this separation see P.I. pp. 252–3. For an excellent discussion of the distinctiveness of the Scottish variant of the civic tradition see John Robertson: ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’ in I. Hont, and M. Ignatieff, and by the same author,’ scottish Political Economy Beyond the Civic Tradition; Government and Economic Development in the Wealth of Nations’, History of Political Thought, Vol 4 (3), Winter 1983, pp. 451–82.
Smith disparaged all forms of conflict and social disharmony; in fact ‘[t]he peace and order of society, is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable’. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Edited and with an Introduction by D.D. Raphael and A. Macfie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 (hereafter cited as TMS), VI. ii.1.20, p. 226. Hume welcomed the fact that people became more temperate and pacific with progress. Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, Essays, pp. 273–4. See also Richard Boyd, ‘Reappraising the Scottish Moralists and Civil Society’, Polity, Vol. 33, Fall 2000, pp.101–25, p. 113.
Kettler, Adam Ferguson, p.7; Essay, pp.169–71.
P.I., p.4.
Sir John Dalrymple noted that, whereas other intellectuals had devoted themselves to writing ‘great books by which they have gotten wealth and fame, [Ferguson] has often unsolicited and unknown, thrown out pamphlets that have sometimes been of real use to the Government’. Cited in Fagg, Biographical Introduction, xlix.
Such as his acting as secretary of the Carlisle Commission, membership of the Poker Club, role in the Douglas affair, interest in parliamentary reform and involvement in Presbytery affairs and election campaigning. Fagg, Biographical Introduction, passim.
P.I., p. 9.
P.II., pp. 411–12.
See, for example, Essay, p. 244. Happiness is also an effect of acting justly. Essay, p. 200.
Institutes, p. 80.
After all, participation in civic life is where ‘mankind find the exercise of their best talents’. Essay, p.149.
For Ferguson’s broader definition of liberty see P.II., p. 465.
P.I., p. 206.
For a fuller discussion of Ferguson’s relationship to Montesquieu see Mason, ‘Ferguson and Montesquieu’, passim.
S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 17
See, for example, Institutes, p. 261.
Collini et al, That Noble Science of Politics, p. 29. ‘This concern with machinery that would check and balance interests was, of course, to become the keynote of the deliberations of the American founding fathers when they set about the task of constructing a constitution for a federal republic that had to survive in a continent of a “wide extent” and among a people that could no longer be regarded as “virtuous” in either the ancient or the technical sense defined by Montesquieu‘. Ibid., p. 19.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p.110.
Institutes, p. 261
Institutes, p. 266.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p. 111.
Essay, p. 251.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, pp. 118–9. For example, Ferguson seems to be referring (critically) to Smith’s restrained concept of government and his negative and commutative theory of justice when he says: ‘If to any people it be the avowed object of policy, in all its internal refinements, to secure the person and the property of the subject, without any regard to his political character, the constitution indeed may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it. The effects of such a constitution may be to immerse all orders of men in their separate pursuits of pleasure, which they may now enjoy with little disturbance; or of gain, which they may preserve without any attention to the commonwealth.’. Essay, p. 210.
Essay, p. 160
Essay, p. 210.
Adam Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia, London; R and J. Dodsley, 1756 (hereafter cited as Reflections), p. 3.
Essay, p. 141. See also A. Kalyvas, and I. Katznelson, ‘Adam Ferguson Returns: Liberalism Through a Glass, Darkly’, Political Theory, Vol. 26 (2), April, 1998, pp. 173–97, pp. 175–6.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p. 113.
As also noted by Richard Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce’, in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776, David Wootton, (ed), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, pp. 394–5. Gellner also notes, rightly I think, that Ferguson never convinces himself completely that the wealth/virtue opposition is, in fact, a mistaken one. Gellner, ‘Adam Ferguson’, p. 68.
Darien was a’ scheme to establish a Scottish colony in the Isthmus of Panama, a failure that cost Scotland approximately a quarter of the country’s liquid capital’. Broadie, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 7. In his recent examination of the Act of Union Paul Henderson Scott has criticised historians for exaggerating the ‘impoverishment and political turmoil of pre-Union Scotland’, suggesting that it is ‘probably deliberately concocted propaganda’. P. H. Scott, The Boasted Refinements: The Consequences of the Union of 1707, Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 1999, p. 1.
David Kettler, ‘The Political Vision of Adam Ferguson’, Studies in Burke and His Time, Vol. 9(1) No. 30, 1967, pp. 763–78, pp. 775–6
For example, P.II., p. 291.
P.II., p. 290. For Hume on authority and custom see David Hume, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays Moral Political and Literary (hereafter cited as Essays), Eugene F. Miller (ed), Indiana: Liberty Classics, 1987, p. 512.
P.I., p. 257.
P.II.., p. 291.
Kettler, ‘Ferguson’s Principles’, p. 214.
P.II., p. 412.
Two other Scottish thinkers (David Fordyce and Thomas Reid) adopted this same principle. Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p. 104.
These ‘original rights’ are basically derived from the natural laws of self preservation and society combined and are reducible to the right to self-defence and freedom from harm. Institutes, pp.172–4. See also Institutes, p. 168. He also alludes to a natural right to dispose of ‘natural talents’. Essay, p. 63.
T.M. Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 29(3), 1986, pp. 601–22, pp. 605–7. There were three strands of conservative thought: ‘utilitarianism, contract and natural law’ (ibid).
Institutes, p. 174.
Kettler, ‘The Political Vision of Adam Ferguson’, pp. 775–6
P.I., p. 266.
Edward Shils, ‘The Virtue of Civil Society’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 26(1) Winter 1991, pp. 3–20, p. 5.
Varty, ‘Civil or Commercial?’, pp. 30–1.
‘The fact that Hegel read and used Ferguson’s work, and that it was Ferguson’s Essay in its German translation which helped to make the notion of ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ fashionable in German scholarly circles, is one of the ironies pervading the history of ideas’. Oz-Salzberger, Introduction to Essay, p. xix..
As John Keane has argued in relation to thinkers of the eighteenth century generally. John Keane (ed) Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, London: Verso, 1988, p. 65.
Varty, ‘Civil or Commercial?’, pp. 30–1. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 194.
Krishan Kumar, ‘Civil Society: An Inquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term’, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44(3) September 1993, pp. 375–95, p. 377. Essay, p. 28.
Thus, as Oz-Salzberger notes, ‘Ferguson would not subscribe to Rousseau’s famous dictum in his Discours sur l’inegalite (1755) that the first appropriator of land was “the real founder of civil society”’. Introduction to Essay, xviii.
Gellner, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Surprising Robustness of Civil Society’, p. 121.
Barbarous societies are more virtuous, intimate and cohesive but they are also more prone to ‘religious superstition’ and its accompanying ‘cruelty and malicious effect towards mankind’. P.I., p. 305. Although the’ savage is personally free’ and equal with others, s/he lacks the ‘liberty’ that can only come with ‘good policy’ and a ‘regular administration of justice’. Essay, p. 247.
Ferguson seems to hold to a fairly uncontroversial (not to mention vague) definition of ‘nation’ as denoting a group of people within a given territory. For a discussion of the meaning of the term ‘nation’ in the eighteenth century see Christopher Berry, ‘Nations and Norms’, The Review of Politics, Vol. 43, 1981, pp. 74–87, p. 77.
P.I., p. 252.
See Essay, editors note Z, p. 213, where it is indicated that Ferguson uses the terms interchangeably.
Even so, Oz-Salzberger draws our attention to the fact that Ferguson obviously struggled with these categories. In the first edition of the Essay he noted: ‘The term polished, if we may judge from its etymology, originally referred to the state of nations in respect to their laws and government’. In the 1768 edition he added: ‘and men civilised were men practiced in the duty of citizens’. To the sentence which follows there is an addition: ‘and men civilised are scholars, men of fashion and traders’. Essay, p. 195 and Editor’s note.
This attempt was first noticed by John Brewer who wrote: ‘Ferguson marks the point where sociological discourse on the structure of society begins to emerge out of the discourse of civic humanism’. Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, p. 26. Brewer also observes the tension between Ferguson’s civic humanism on the one hand, and his proto-sociology on the other, in his excellent article ‘Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation’, pp. 461–478. John Pocock has described the Scottish fusion in general as ‘commercial humanism’ (Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 194) though, in Ferguson’s case the fusion is less integrated.
Though he occasionally refers to Scotland as ‘North Britain’ in private correspondence This was not uncommon after 1707. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, p. 58.
Kettler, ‘The Political Vision of Adam Ferguson’, pp. 777–8.
But to put his situation in context it should be noted that, although these tensions are striking to today’s reader, it is doubtful that Ferguson himself would have felt them as acutely since party labels in the eighteenth-century were ‘notoriously ambiguous’. Addison Ward, ‘The Tory View of Roman History’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol, 4(3), 1964, pp. 413–56.
Kettler, ‘The Political Vision of Adam Ferguson’, pp. 776–7.
As Broadie notes, the Scottish literati treated thinking as a’ social activity’; they were ‘writers who committed their writings to the public domain [and who] discussed and disputed with each other in public’. The Scottish Enlightenment, p. 20.
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(2006). Introduction: The Passionate Society. In: The Passionate Society. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol 191. Springer, Dordrecht . https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3890-9_1
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