Social Institutions

Abstract

The approach of these Scottish writers to the study of social institutions combined assumptions about human nature, derived from the study of moral philosophy, with the principles of ‘natural history’ illustrated in the last chapter. Each of the writers represented here, David Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and John Millar, held their own views about ‘the constant and universal principles of human nature’, the universal elements in human psychology; yet this belief in an underlying uniformity did not necessarily prevent the application of the idea of four stages of human progress, or the illustration of the range and complexity of human institutions over time and place. These writers aimed, however, not only at illustrating this range, but at charting the laws which governed the growth and progress of social institutions.