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References
See, for example, P.I., p. 198.
Essay, pp. 8–9. See also ‘Of the Different Aspects of Moral Science’, Collection of Essays, No. 29, p. 251.
Institutes, p. 11. See also P.I., p. 5 and Barnes,’ sociology Before Comte’, p. 234.
P.I., p. 3.
P.I., p. 179. This was precisely Hutcheson’s approach. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, in Two Volumes, London: 1755, I: 1.
Essay, pp. 14–16. ‘To know human nature...we must avail ourselves not only of the consciousness...of a single mind, but, more at large also, of the varieties that are presented in the history of mankind’. P.I., p. 49.
‘The physical laws of nature may be collected from a sufficient number of particulars, which, though differing in circumstances, and diversified in their appearances, suggest a general fact common to many bodies’. P.I., p. 115. Or ‘[a] physical law of nature is a general state of what is uniform or common in the order of things, and is addressed to the powers of perception and sagacity’. P.I., pp. 159–60.
Institutes pp. 78–9. The same strict distinction is made elsewhere: ‘We are not now inquiring what men ought to do, but what is the ordinary tract in which they proceed’. P.I., p. 263.
Essay, p. 16.
P.I., p. 5.
P.I., pp. 116–117; Smith, ‘The History of Astronomy’, in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, I.S. Ross, (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 97–105. For Ferguson’s general aversion to ‘hypothesis and vain conjecture’ see also Joseph Black, p. 111.
Institutes, II. 2. passim.
Essay, pp. 30–1.
Essay, p. 8.
P.I., p. 160.
See P.I., pp. 213, pp. 166–7.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p. 111.
P.I., p. 118.
P.I., p. 218.
‘Principle of Moral Estimation’, Collection of Essays, No. 25, p. 204.
For example: ‘It is well known that external expressions, whether of moral sentiment or devotion, in the manners or religious observances of men, are, like the words of their language, mere arbitrary signs which custom accordingly may alter: But the sentiments themselves...retain their distinctive quality under all the variations of their external expression’. P.I., p. 223. See also P.II., p. 142.
Essay, p. 94. For Ferguson’s brief excursus on ethnocentrism see Essay, pp. 194–5.
Ferguson notes for example, that a universalisable ‘moral science’ is achieved by ‘abstracting from local forms and observances’. P.II., p. 113.
Dugald Stewart agreed that the foundation of theoretical history is the study of the progress of the human mind. Mary Fearnley-Sander, ‘Philosophical History and the Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 33(2), 1990, pp. 323–38, p. 325. For further discussion see Chapter Five.
This, at least, was how William Smellie defined it in his Encyclopaedia Britannica. F. Vidal, ‘Psychology in the Eighteenth Century: A View from Encyclopaedias’, History of the Human-Sciences, 1993, Vol. 6(1), pp. 89–119, pp. 95–6.
P.I., p. 49. P.I, p. 3–6. Not to be confused with Smith’s impartial spectator.
Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 20–1.
Institutes, pp. 8–9. The existence of a ‘moral sense’ is, for example, an ‘ultimate fact in the constitution of our nature’. It is a ‘law’ because ‘uniform’ in its ‘operations’ and ‘nature’ but is, at the same time, in ‘no way susceptible of explanation or proof’. In the same way, the ‘laws of gravitation, cohesion, magnetism, electricity, fluidity [and] elasticity’ are also ultimate facts.. P.II., p. 128.
Essay, p. 29.
P.I., pp. 75–76.
Ferguson does admit that’ scepticism’ is useful for ‘restraining credulity’ which is ‘one species of error’. Nevertheless, ‘carried to extreme [it] would discourage the search of truth, suspend the progress of knowledge, and become a species of palsy of all the mental powers’. P.I., p. 91.
P.I., p. 198.
Essay, pp. 36–7. P.I., p. 320.
Ferguson admired Bacon profoundly. Institutes, p. xvii. By the 1730s Bacon’s science was an ‘integral part of the curriculum’ of all Scottish universities. Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man’, p. 90.
Forbes concludes: ‘It cannot be said of Vico, Mandeville, or Rousseau...nor can it be said of Hume’. ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xvi.
C. Fox, R. Porter and R. Wokler, Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 12. The story of Memmie la Blanche was made known in a book published in Edinburgh in 1762 (Account of a Savage Girl found in the Woods of Champagne, Edinburgh, 1762). Eriksson, ‘The First Formulation of Sociology’, p. 268. Ferguson was thus undoubtedly aware of the case.
Essay, p. 8. Montesquieu set the example for Ferguson here in his attempt to displace state of nature theories with the argument that principles of social order could only be deduced from social realities. Strasser, Normative Structure of Sociology, p. 42. Nevertheless his break with state of nature theories was never as decisive as Ferguson’s.
P.I., pp. 199. Hume also ridiculed the notion of a state of nature describing it as ‘a mere fiction, not unlike that of the golden age which poets have invented’. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Analytical Index by L.A. Selby-Bigge, Second Edition with Text Revised and Notes by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 3. 2. 2, p. 493.
P.I., p. 5.
Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, in Social Contract and Discourses, p. 70.
Essay, p. 9.
P.I., pp. 268–9.
Essay, p.23:’ send him to the desert alone, he is a plant torn from its roots: the form indeed may remain, but every faculty droops and withers; the human personage and the human character cease to exist’.
Ted Benton, ‘How Many Sociologies?’, Sociological Review, Vol. 26, 1978, pp. 217–36, p. 226.
Essay, pp. 12–14. Hume was in complete agreement on this point. See Treatise, 3.2.1, p. 484.
‘European, Samoide, Tartar, Hindoo, Negro and American’ are the six discrete ‘racial’ groups identified, though occasionally he seems to treat ‘Arab’ people as a distinct ‘racial’ group as well. Essay, pp. 106–18; Institutes, p. 20.
Essay, p. 9.
Lafitau is considered to be the ‘father of social anthropology’. Eriksson, ‘The First Formulation of Sociology’, p. 256.
Institutes, pp. 224–5. Humans are universally characterised as ‘being united in society, and concerned in what relates to their fellow-creatures’. They also ‘universally admire qualities which constitute or procure the good of mankind; as, wisdom, justice, courage and temperance’. Institutes, p. 38.
Essay, p. 10.
Bryson, Man and Society, p. 255.
Bryson, Man and Society, p. 51. Ferguson (over-generously) attributed to Montesquieu ‘the original of what I am now’. Essay, p. 66.
Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment, p. 95–6.
Montesquieu, Laws, 1. 1. 2., p. 6. Grotius also conceived human nature as the source of social laws and therefore order. ‘[T]he very nature of man’, he wrote, ‘is the mother of the law of nature’. Hugo Grotius, Prolegomena, to The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius, W.S.M. Knight, London: Sweet & Maxwell Ltd., 1925, Section 16.
Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Consideration of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, New York: David Lowenthal, 1969, Chapter xviii.
Salzberger, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xiii.
Lehman, Adam Ferguson, p. 237.
Essay, pp. 7, 10–11.
Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 35.
Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, p. 176.
Essay, pp. 80–105.
Even constitutions appropriate for the age are conceived teleologically: ‘The seeds of every form are lodged in human nature; they spring up and ripen with the season’. Essay, p. 120.
For a fuller discussion on the conjectural histories of other Scottish contemporaries see Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, pp. 61–70.
Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL D,’ I.S. Ross (ed.) in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 292–3.
J. C. Wilsher, ‘Power Follows Property — Social and Economic Interpretations in British Historical Writing in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 16, 1983, pp. 7–26, p. 10. In the absence of comparative data or direct evidence, reasonable conjecture is considered to be an acceptable substitute. This, at least, was Stewart’s view. Salim Rashid, The Myth of Adam Smith, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998, pp. 54–5.
Frederick J. Teggert, Theory of History, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925, p. 89, cited in Hamowy, Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson, p. 127.
Essay, p. 80.
Essay, p. 21. For John Brewer, Ferguson’s use of conjectural historiography represents a constraint on ‘his anticipation of nineteenth century sociology’ because ‘it led to a concern with the prospects of civil society which easily encouraged the use of civic humanist discourse’. Although I would argue that Ferguson’s concern with corruption inspired his most profoundly sociological observations, there is also merit in Brewer’s suggestion that ‘this alternative discourse pulls Ferguson back from expanding and developing’ them to their fullest potential. Brewer, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, pp. 22–3.
Essay, pp. 78–80. As noted by K.E. Bock, ‘The Comparative Method of Anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 8, 1965–6, pp. 269–280, p. 271.
Essay, p. 23.
R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London: Heinemann, 1980, p. 149.
Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, in Social Contract and Discourses, p. 91.
‘Our method, notwithstanding, too frequently is to rest the whole on conjecture; to impute every advantage of our own nature to those arts which we ourselves possess; and to imagine, that a mere negation of all our virtues is a sufficient description of man in his original state. We are ourselves the supposed standards of politeness and civilisation; and where our own features do not appear, we apprehend, that there is nothing which deserves to be known. But it is probable that here, as in many other cases, we are ill qualified, from our supposed knowledge of causes, to prognosticate effects, or to determine what must have been the properties and operations, even of our own nature, in the absence of those circumstances in which we have seen it engaged’. Essay, p. 75.
Whether there was to be a fourth stage is an open question. David Kettler’s assertion (Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson, p. 229) that Ferguson conceives ‘despotism’ as the fourth stage of history is questioned. Taxonomically speaking, despotism is not a developmental social stage, but a type of political constitution. Analysis, pp. 54–5. Ferguson outlines no fourth stage of history but this does not mean that he expected none, only that he avoided ‘vain conjecture.’ This misunderstanding may have arisen from the fact that Montesquieu (a key Fergusonian source) identified despotic rule as both a type of constitution and a developmental stage.
D. MacRae, ‘Adam Ferguson: Sociologist’, New Society, Vol. 24, 1966, pp. 792–4. For a further discussion of the stadial thesis see H. Hellenbrand, ‘Not to Destroy But to Fulfil: Jefferson, Indians and Republican Dispensation’, Seventeenth Century Studies, Vol. 18 (4), 1985, pp. 523–48; Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p.154 and by the same author; ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, pp. 34–45 and K.G. Ballestrem,’ sources of the Materialist Conception of History in the History of Ideas, Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. 26 (1), 1983, pp. 3–9.
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 499.
See P.I., p. 252 where Ferguson makes explicit that his categories are not strictly economic.
For a short treatment of this discussion see: J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, Vol. 2, pp. 335–7.
‘The evolutionary assumption is explicit in the works of other Scottish colleagues of Ferguson — such as James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780) and John Logan’s Elements of the Philosophy of History (1781) — who treat of violence as the antithesis of civil society and assume, optimistically, that it is on the wane in modern civil societies’. Keane, Civil Society. Old Images, p. 119.
Pascal, ‘Property and Society’, p. 178; Hamowy, Spontaneous Order, p. 22; R. Meek,’ smith, Turgot and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory’, History of Political Economy, Vol. 1, 1971, pp. 9–27 and by the same author, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, pp. 34–50; Swingewood, ‘Origins of Sociology’, p. 171.
Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xxv.
For example, ‘[t]here is a principle of subordination in the difference of natural talents’ as well as in the adventitious ‘[mal]distribution of property, power and dependence’.’ separation of Departments’, Collection of Essays, No. 6, p. 143.
Essay, pp. 63–4. See also Forbes, Introduction to Essay, p. xxv. William Robertson also took the view that ‘there can be no Society, where there is no Subordination’. Cited in Daniele Francesconi, ‘William Robertson on Historical Causation and Unintended Consequences’, Cromohs, Vol. 4, 1999, pp. 1–18, p. 8. Note, incidentally, how Ferguson disagrees with Smith that people are born with equal talents. For Smith’s views here see An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R.H. Campbell, and A.S. Skinner, (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 (hereafter cited as WN), I.ii.4., p. 28.
Ferguson adds that it is only in the ‘Vices’ of sellers and hirers of labour that he finds cause for criticism. These vices are: ‘Envy and Rapacity on the part of the Poor, Arrogance and Licentiousness on the part of the rich’. ‘Of the Separation of Departments’, Collection of Essays, No. 15, p. 165.
Essay, p. 81.
As first noted by Duncan Forbes. ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xxv.
Essay, pp. 81–2.
Essay, p. 164.
D. Winch, ‘Adam Smith’s ‘Enduring Particular Result’’, in I. Hont, and M. Ignatieff, (eds), Wealth and Virtue, p. 259. For a further discussion of this debate see A. Skinner, ‘A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, I. Bradly, and M. Howard, (eds), Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Ronald L. Meek, London: 1982, pp. 79–114 and Chapter 10 of this book.
Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960, p. 12.
J. T. Valauri, ‘Social Order and the Limits of Law’, Duke Law Journal, Vol. 3(3), June, 1981, pp. 607–18, p. 610.
Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xxiv. Millar also subscribed to this view. John Millar, The Origins of the Distinctions of Ranks, reprinted in W.C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1733–1801, London: Cambridge University Press, 1960, pp. 177–8.
Essay, p. 162.
Essay, p. 168.
Essay, p. 165.
P.I., pp. 283, 42.
Essay, pp. 162. Hume argues along similar lines in one of his essays that real advances are social products while ‘what depends upon a few persons is, in great measure, to be ascribed to chance’. Moreover, socially produced changes are always the more sensible and are better suited to existing conditions whereas the innovations of’ single persons...are more influenced by whim, folly, or caprice than by general passions or interests’. Hume, ‘The Rise of Arts and Sciences’, Essays, p. 112.
Essay, pp. 162–3.
Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Essay, p. xxiv. James Burnett (Lord Monboddo) was also a proponent of this view. J. Gascoigne, ‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians’, in S. Gaukroger, ed., The Uses of Antiquity, p. 204. So was Rousseau. ‘Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’, p. 8 and ‘Discourse on Inequality’, pp. 61–2, in Social Contract and Discourses.
Many eighteenth century Deists also held to the diffusionist thesis. R. Emerson, ‘Peter Gay and the Heavenly City’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28,(3), 1967, pp. 383–402, p. 391. For further discussion see M. Bernal, Black Athena, London: Free Association Books, 1987, Vol. 1, pp. 121–60.
Essay, p. 121.
Smith, WN. I. IV. v.b.43. p. 540.
Montesquieu, Laws, 3. 19. 5. p. 310.
See, for example, F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, edited by W.W. Bartley, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 84–5.
Essay, p. 120.
Smith, TMS, p. 234. Hume likewise rejected all large-scale ‘plans of government’ such as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia as ‘plainly imaginary’. But he made an exception in the case of Harrington’s ‘Commonwealth of Oceana’, which he described as ‘the only valuable model of a commonwealth, that has yet been offered to the public’. Hume,‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays, p. 514.
John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Accession of the House of Stuart, Four Volumes, Glasgow: 1787–1803, III., p. 329.
Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, Edinburgh: Bell and Murray, 1778, pp. 54–5.
Hume, Treatise, II. iii, p. 486.
P.II., pp. 511–12.
As also noted by Lehmann, Adam Ferguson, pp. 247–8.
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(2006). Method and Historiography. 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_4
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