Abstract
In the early years after the war, when I was a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at Glasgow University, I became very interested in the work of the members of the so-called Scottish Historical School, which Roy Pascal had rescued from oblivion in his remarkable article of 1938.2 I was impressed in particular by John Millar, whose work was pervaded by a theory of history and society which seemed to me to be a kind of preview of the materialist conception of history upon which I had been brought up in my revolutionary youth. I was interested also, of course, in the work of the other members of the School — notably that of Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Adam Smith; but these three seemed to be rather shadowy, peripheral figures in the face of the gigantic presence of the great John Millar.
This essay owes its origin to a lecture given under the same title at a History of Economic Thought Conference at Sheffield University on 3 January 1970. In its first published version (History of Political Economy, 3, 1971) some of the arguments of the lecture were extended and a number of references were added, but I made no real attempt to transform what was originally an informal talk into a formal paper. The same goes for the present version, in which I have allowed most of the colloquialisms and bits of autobiography to remain. I have, however, ventured to add a few footnote references to some more recent work of my own in this field. In addition, I have taken this opportunity to make two or three additional entries in the ‘calendar’ described in Section II; to remove a paragraph in which I had wrongly adduced two fragments of Smith’s on the division of labour as evidence for the back-dating of the four stages theory to the Edinburgh period; and, most important of all, to rewrite a number of passages in which I had seriously underestimated the part played by Montesquieu in the development of the four stages theory. It was Andrew Skinner who finally convinced me that I was wrong about the dating of the fragments; and it was a former student of mine, David Allen, who drew my attention to the importance of Book XVIII of the Spirit of Laws.
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Reference
Roy Pascal, ‘Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Quarterly, 1, 1938.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (6th edn., London, 1793), p. 205.
William Robertson, Works (Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh, 1890), Vol. II, p. 104.
Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (edited by E. Cannan, Oxford University Press, 1896 ), p. 8.
See Ronald L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and other Essays ( Chapman and Hall, London, 1967 ), pp. 47–8.
See R. L. Meek, Economics of Physiocracy ( Allen and Unwin, London, 1962 ), pp. 43–71.
I am editing these notes jointly with Professor D. D. Raphael and Professor P. G. Stein for the Glasgow bicentennial edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith. The views expressed in the present essay, however, are mine alone, and neither of my two collaborators should be held responsible for them.
See R. L. Meek, Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1973 ). I should perhaps make it clear at this point that the present essay is not meant as a contribution to the so-called Turgot—Smith controversy. It is true that I shall be impliedly claiming that the Turgot—Smith controversialists have tended to overlook one of the most important of the new ideas developed and held in common by Turgot and Smith. But the idea in question was more ‘sociological’ than ‘economic’ in character, and in any event the two men almost certainly developed it quite independently of one another — two facts which take what I have to say right outside the orbit of the traditional controversy. ( I reserve the right, however, to prove incontrovertibly in a subsequent essay that Smith was the author of the famous translation of Turgot’s Six Edicts into Sanskrit. )
Some of the key passages are reproduced in R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge University Press, 1976 ), pp. 116–26.
Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith ( Kelley reprint, New York, 1966 ), p. 12.
See Dùncan Forbes, “‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar ” (Cambridge Journal, 7, 1954 ), p. 646.
John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (London, 1787), p. 528. The full quotation, which appears in a footnote, reads as follows: ‘I am happy to acknowledge the obligations I feel myself under to this illustrious philosopher [Adam Smith], by having, at an early period of life, had the benefit of hearing his lectures on the History of Civil Society, and of enjoying his unreserved conversation on the same subject.— The great Montesquieu pointed out the road. He was the Lord Bacon in this branch of philosophy. Dr. Smith is the Newton.’
See Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, pp. 61–118.
I would have got on to this a great deal earlier if I had treated with the respect they deserved a number of inspired hints in the early pages of the article by Duncan Forbes which is referred to in 14.
The results of a later and more sustained effort to discover the antecedents of the theory are recorded in Chapter 1 of Social Science and the Ignoble Savage.
The reasons for my view on this point are spelt out in detail in Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, pp. 76–91.
In a letter to Rousseau written about ten years afterwards. See Economics of Physiocracy, pp. 16–18.
was also the year in which the Italian economist Antonio Genovesi put forward, in an essay entitled Digressioni Economiche, a theory of stadial development containing several of the elements of the four stages theory. I owe this reference to Dr Enzo Pesciarelli, the author of an article (which it is hoped will shortly be published) on the Italian contribution to the four stages theory.
Although not published until 1758, it seems probable that Kames’s book was started, and parts of it finished, several years earlier. Cf. A. F. Tytler, Memoirs of Kames ( 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1814 ), Vol. I, p. 299.
Kames, Historical Law-Tracts (Edinburgh, 1758), Vol. I, pp. 77–80.
See Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p. 106.
Robertson’s History of Scotland had already appeared in 1759.
The most important piece of evidence on these points is John Craig’s account of Millar’s early contacts with Smith at Glasgow. See the Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar, Esq. prefixed to the 4th edn. of Millar’s book, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Edinburgh, 1806), pp. iv—v. If one reads this in conjunction with the description of Smith’s lectures given by Millar to Stewart, and with the acknowledgement of his obligation to Smith made by Millar in his Historical View of the English Government (see 15), it is difficult not to reach the conclusion stated in the text.
Some additional evidence to this effect, which has only very recently come to light, is surveyed in the fourth essay in this volume. See in particular pp. 80–1 below.
Stewart, Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith, p. 66. In a long note to this section written in 1810 (pp. 88–95) Stewart states that when his memoir was first written he ‘was not fully aware to what an extent the French Economists had been anticipated in some of their most important conclusions by writers (chiefly British) of a much earlier date’. He still defends Smith’s originality, however; and it is perhaps significant that at the very end of the note the following sentence appears: ‘Mr. Smith’s Lectures, it must be remembered (to the fame of which he owed his appointment at Glasgow), were read at Edinburgh as early as 1748.’
There is an interesting — and perhaps deliberate — link between this ‘opinion’ and the one ascribed to Smith earlier in Stewart’s narrative (p. 36) in the course of his discussion of Smith’s excursions into the field of ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’.
See Stewart’s ‘Memoir of Robertson’, reprinted in the Kelley edition of Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith, pp. 198–9.
The reference here is to the account given (at second hand) by John Callander of Craigforth (Edinburgh University MSS., La. II, 451(2)). The ‘first vol.’ referred to is clearly the long introductory section entitled A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, together with the even longer set of notes appended to it under the title Proofs and Illustrations. The sixth note is of particular importance, and will be referred to again below (see 44).
It seems probable on a number of grounds that Robertson attended, but I know of no definite evidence to this effect. Scott, it is true, in his Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Jackson, Son and Co., Glasgow, 1937) includes him in the list of definite attenders (p. 63). But this seems to be based on a gross misquotation from the Callander document (ibid., pp. 54–5), in which it is made to appear that the word ‘here’ in the phrase ‘which he here gave’ must necessarily refer to Edinburgh. When read in the full context it seems much more likely to refer to Glasgow. The Callander document cannot in fact be used as evidence either for or against Robertson’s attendance at the Edinburgh lectures.
The Edinburgh Review for the Year 1755 (2nd edn., 1818), pp. 103–5.
See the first note to Stewart’s Memoir of Robertson, pp. 203–5. Another possibility, of an equally conjectural kind, is that one of the people from whom Smith in 1755 apprehended ‘rival claims’ was none other than Lord Kames — who, as we have already seen, was to produce the four stages theory out of the blue in his Historical Law-Tracts in 1758. It is true that Smith later referred to Kames (in a letter to him) as ‘so old and so good a friend’; and it is possibly true that Smith on another occasion said that ‘we must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our master’ (Tytler, Memoirs of Kames, Vol. I, pp. 271 and 218). It is also true, however — at any rate if we are to believe Boswell — that Smith on yet another occasion wholeheartedly endorsed Hume’s description of Kames as ‘the most arrogant Man in the world’. See The Private Papers of James Boswell (edited by Scott and Pottle), Vol. 15 (1934), p. 12.
Sidney Pollard has emphasized this in a very interesting way in his book The Idea of Progress (Watts, London, 1968).
Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et pentium libri octo (translated by C. H. and W. A. Oldfather, Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 551. The whole of Chapter 4, ‘Of the Origin of Dominion’, is interesting in this connection. See in particular pp. 539–40, 550–1, and 554.
The quotation is from a passage near the beginning of Book 4 of Robertson’s History of America, in which the view concerned is spelt out very explicitly. Cf. also the sixth note in the Proofs and Illustrations appended to his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V.
So far as Smith is concerned, we know at any rate that he approved of a work on the philosophy of history in which this reaction was strongly expressed. I refer to John Logan’s Elements of the Philosophy of History (Edinburgh, 1781), which is a kind of short sketch or analysis of a course of lectures given by Logan in Edinburgh in 1779–81 under the patronage of Robertson, Blair, and others. ‘Similar situations produce similar appearances’, wrote Logan, ‘and, where the state of society is the same, nations will resemble one another. The want of attention to this hath filled the world with infinite volumes. The most remote resemblances in language, customs, or manners, has suggested the idea of deriving one nation from another’ (pp. 16–17). Smith’s favourable opinion of Logan’s historical work is contained in a letter dated 29 September 1783, which John Rae published on pp. 396–7 of his Life of Adam Smith (Macmillan, London, 1895). Logan’s Elements contains quite a number of other interesting ‘materialist’ statements — as also does his later book A View of Antient History, Vol. I (London, 1788) and Vol. II (London, 1791), which he published under the curious pseudonym of William Rutherford, D. D., and for which he solicited Smith’s contribution (see Adam Smith as Student and Professor, p. 304). The question of Logan’s connection with Smith — and with the Scottish Enlightenment in general — has not yet been sufficiently explored. It is a subject which would make a good Ph.D. thesis, and possibly something rather more.
Dr Pesciarelli, in the article referred to in 24, has shown that the versions of the four stages theory put forward by Genovesi were influenced also by another stream of thought — that associated with what Dr Pesciarelli calls ‘the Bruno—Vico tradition’.
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Meek, R.L. (1977). Smith, Turgot, and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory. In: Smith, Marx, & After. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7303-0_2
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