THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TEE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ADAM FERGUSON A COMMENTARY CN HIS ESSAY CK THE HISTORY OF CIVIL SOCIETY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE COMMITTEE CN SOCIAL THOUGHT BY RONALD HAMOWY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST, 1969 PREFACE Because the structure of this dissertation takes an unusual form, a word of explanation is in order. I have used as the starting point for this essay on the social and moral philosophy of Adam Ferguson his most important work, The Essay on the History of Civil Society. The thesis is organized— with the exception of the Introduction and two appendixes—as a commentary on Ferguson's Essay and is designed to accompany the text of this work, a copy of which has been bound in, with my notes. The Essay (referred to throughout the thesis as HCS) is divided into six "Parts." Each xeroxed Part is followed by my notes to that Part, each note keyed to the particular page and line number of the Essay. Thus, "Page 121, line 26 [p. 146]" refers to page 121, line 26 of the Forbes edition of the Essay, which falls on 2 page 146 of this volume. There are several reasons why the inclusion of Ferguson's Essay struck me as the best course to take, rather than the more conventional one of simply offering an analysis of Ferguson's thought. Most reader are un- familiar with the writings of the lesser known figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and this provides an occasion for them to read first hand one of its more important works. This method makes needless any extensive "The edition which has been used is that edited by Duncan Forbes and published by the University of Edinburgh Press in 1966. It is a reprinting of the first edition of the work published in 1767. I should like to thank the University of Edinburgh Press and the Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, for their permission to xerox the Forbes edition for use in this dissertation, This same method is also used in Appendix II, which concerns itself with Ferguson's citations. ii quotation from the Essay which, otherwise would have been required and, as a result, allows more room for quotations from other writers and from Ferguson's earlier and later writings for purposes of comparison. Secondly, Ferguson's thought as a whole is only very loosely struc- tured and occasionally is inconsistent, which makes the task of tying his theories together at times close to impossible. Using the Essay as the basis of a commentary provides a ready-made structure in which to work. Finally, I felt it important not to duplicate the work already done in several studies which have recently been published and which already provide the interested reader with a general analysis of Ferguson's views. I should like to add a word about Ferguson's subject matter. Adam Ferguson was a moral philosopher, which means that the subjects with which he deals in his writings are as broad as the interests of the whole range of the modern social sciences. At one point or another Ferguson touches on questions which today are dealt with in disciplines as disparate as sociology, ethics, economics, political theory, history, and—to a lesser extent—epistemology, jurisprudence, psychology, and geography. I make no pretense to having gone into a thorough, examination of his views in all these areas. What I have tried to accomplish is to suggest the bare outlines of Ferguson's thought as manifested in his most brilliant work, The Essay bri the History of Civil Society, and to offer some comparisons with the thinking of his contemporaries, with later writers, and with earlier writers who seem most strongly to have influenced him. To the extent I have succeeded, I trust that the readers of Ferguson's Essay will find in it, as I have, the perceptiveness and insight Tierta Helena Jogland, Ursprurige und Gruridlagen der Sdzidldgie bei Adam Ferguson CBerlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1959), and David Kettier, The S ocial and Polit ical Thought of Adam Fergus on (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1965). iii for which the Scottish En light enment can justly be considered as the water- shed of modern intellectual thought. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE ii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I. OF THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN NATURE 35 Xerox of the Essay Commentary II. OF THE HISTORY OF RUDE NATIONS 108 Xerox of the Essay Commentary III. OF THE HISTORY OF POLICY AND ARTS . . . . 139 Xerox of the Essay Commentary IV. OF CONSEQUENCES THAT RESULT FROM THE ADVANCEMENT OF CIVIL AND COMMERCIAL ARTS 210 Xerox of the Essay Commentary V. OF THE DECLINE OF NATIONS 231 Xerox of the Essay Commentary VI. OF CORRUPTION AND POLITICAL SLAVERY 265 Xerox of the Essay Commentary vi TABLE OF CCNTENTS—Continued Page APPENDIXES I. ADAM SMITH, ADAM FERGUSON AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR 295 II. FERGUSONS SOURCES 313 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 338 vii INTRODUCTION Adam Ferguson was born on the twentieth of June, 1723, at Logierait, Perthshire, the youngest son of the minister of the parish at Logierait. He received his early education both at the parish school and at the grammar school in Perth. In 1738, at the age of sixteen, he was sent to the University of St. Andrews, where he read classics; and, in 1742, Ferguson entered the Divinity Hall of that University. By 1745 he had obtained his license to preach and, at that point, was offered the deputy chaplaincy of the Black Watch Regiment because of his knowledge of Gaelic. He joined the Regiment in Flanders and quickly rose to the rank of principal chaplain, having accompanied it at the Battle of Fontenoy. With the help of his friend David Hume, he was appointed to the position of Keeper of the Advocates1 Library in Edinburgh, succeeding Hume in that office. This position he resigned two years later, in 1759, to become Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. In 1764 he took the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University, which he held until 1785. Because of ill health he retired from this post at the age of sixty-two and was transferred to the Chair of Mathematics as a sinecure. Ferguson died on the twenty-second of February, 1816, in his ninety-third year, at St. Andrews, Scotland, and was buried in the Cathedral there. I Fundamental to Ferguson's social theory is the conviction that there^ is no period in the history of the human race which could properly be charac- terized as pre-societal, that is, that society is coeval with man. The indi- vidual appears as the bearer of social dispositions and these dispositions are an essential part of his nature. Thus, he remarks in the Essay on the History of Civil Society; Mankind are to be taken in groupes, as they have always subsisted. The history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species: and every experiment relative to this subject should be made with entire societies, not with single men.l Quoting Montesquieu's dictum that man is born in society and there he remains, Ferguson goes on to insist that it is more, than mere convenience which keeps men together in social groups. By far the strongest motives are based on a set of natural—one might almost say instinctive—drives towards social intercourse. On this he writes: We may reckon the parental affection, which, instead of deserting the adult, as among the brutes, embraces more close, as it becomes mixed with esteem, and the memory of its early effects; together with a propensity common to man and other animals, to mix with the herd, and, without reflection, to follow the croud of his species. What this propensity was in the first moment of its operation we know now; . .. Sadness and melancholy are connected with solitude; gladness and pleasure with the concourse of ^ Ferguson rejects the social contract theory with much the same argu- 3 ments earlier offered by Hume. The establishment of a formal set of rules governing society and the construction of a political apparatus results, according to him, not from a desire to create a stronger union, but to restrain the abuses which resulted from the weakening of already unformulated •^CS, p. 4. 2Ibid., pp. 16-17. A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (2 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878), II, 265-66. rales of behavior. "Man must have been accustomed to political action before they concerted together," writes Ferguson, for a people "never adopted a re- finement for which they had not discovered some use." A system of political organization was gradually shaped to meet the developing needs of a society grown more complex. It is a useless analytical tool, claims Ferguson, to posit the idea of universal consent to what was, in fact, the gradual emergence of formalized rules of action which took their origin in earlier modes of behavior. What is perhaps most immediately significant in Ferguson's rejection of the idea of social contract is its implications for a thoroughly new methodology of the social sciences. It follows, for Ferguson, that if aprioristic notions of man's nature—like the social contract theory—are to be rejected as not truly indicative of the way in which man functions, both as an individual and in conjunction with other people, then the only adequate method of gaining information about man is by studying him within the context of his history. Ferguson does not deny that man has a nature; what he re- jects is that this nature can be uncovered by any but an empirical method. It is because of this sharp and strikingly important break with the previously common methodology of investigating social phenomena which pervades Ferguson's Ess ay, that he has been suggested as the father of the science of sociology. As Theodor Suddeberg has pointed out, the problems with which sociology deals could only have been posed after the destruction of the ilarry E. Barnes, "Sociology before Comte," The American Journal of Sociology, XXIII, No. 2 (September, 1917),. 234; see also Theodor Buddeberg, "Ferguson als Soziologe," Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik, CXXIII (1925), 609-612; and Werner Sonbart, "Die Angange der Soziologie," in Hauptprobleme der Soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe fur Max Weber, ed. Melchior Palyi (2 vols.; Munich and Leipzig: Duncker undHumblot, 1923), I, 9.