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THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES

INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE OF IDEAS

191 THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY

The Social, Political and Moral Thought of

By Lisa Hill

Founding Directors: P. Dibon† (Paris) and R.H. Popkin† (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, ) Associate-Directors: J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: M.J.B. Allen (Los Angeles); J.R. Armogathe (Paris); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J. Henry (); J.D. North (Oxford); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) The Passionate Society

The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson

By Lisa Hill University of Adelaide, Australia A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 1-4020-3889-5 (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3889-1 (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-3890-9 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3890-7 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

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Printed in the Netherlands. CONTENTS

Legend vii Acknowledgements ix Dedication xi 1. Introduction: The Passionate Society 1 2. Reading Ferguson 29 3. Ferguson’s / 43 4. Method and Historiography 57 5. Ferguson’s Faculty and Moral Psychology 75 6. Ferguson’s “Invisible Hand” 101 7. Ferguson’s Early Conflict Theory 123 8. Habit 139 9. The Environment 149 10. Corruption and Problems of Modernity 161 11. and Decline 193 12. Ferguson’s Conservatism 215 13. Conclusion 233 Bibliography 237 INDEX 271 LEGEND

Essay: An Essay on the History of Civil Society. P.I. and P.II.: Principles of Moral and Political . Institutes: Institutes of Moral Philosophy. Analysis: Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy. History: History of the Progress and Termination of the . Correspondence: The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson. ‘Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language’: ‘A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s Highland Regiment of Foot’. Stage Plays: The of Stage Plays Seriously Considered. Reflections: Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. Remarks: Remarks on a Pamphlet lately Published by Dr. Price, intitled ‘Observations on the Nature of Civil ...’, in a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament. ‘Biographical Sketch’: ‘Biographical Sketch or Memoir of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Ferguson’. Sister Peg: History of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret Commonly called Peg, only Lawful Sister to John Bull, Esq. ‘‘: ‘Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black M.D’, Addressed to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their support in writing this book: The Australian Research Council for the generous funding that made its completion possible; Jonathan Louth, Luke Trenwith and Nicole Vincent for their able and untiring research assistance; Pauline Gerrans for carefully proofing an earlier draft; four anonymous readers commissioned by Springer for their learned and detailed recommendations; and my spouse, Philip Gerrans, for his loving friendship and support.

I also thank the respective journals for their kind permission to reprint substantial portions of the following articles: ‘Anticipations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Social Thought in the Work of Adam Ferguson’, European Journal of , 37 (1), 1996, pp. 203-228; ‘Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline’, History of Political Thought, 18, (4), 1997, pp. 677-706; ‘Ferguson and Smith on ‘ Nature’, ‘Interest’ and the Role of Beneficence in Market Society’, Journal of the History of Economic Ideas, 4 (1-2) 1996, pp. 353-399; ‘The Invisible Hand of Adam Ferguson’, The European Legacy, 3 (6), 1998 pp 42-65, http://www.tandf.co.uk and ‘Eighteenth Century Anticipations of a Sociology of Conflict’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2) April, 2001, pp. 281-299, The Johns Hopkins University Press. DEDICATION

To my parents, Ben and Charmaine Hill. CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY

The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) lived and wrote during the period of intense intellectual activity commonly referred to as the , a time that has been described as ‘one of the greatest…in the history of European culture’.1 A famous and highly esteemed figure in his day, Ferguson’s thought was original and distinctive. He held the prestigious and coveted Chair in Moral Philosophy at the (1764-1785) and exerted considerable intellectual influence, not only in Britain and Europe,2 where his publications were translated into all the principal languages, but also in America. Nevertheless his reputation has long been overshadowed by those of his more luminous contemporaries, and .3 Further, despite his disagreements with both of them, it is common to encounter readings in which his ideas and orientations are automatically conflated with theirs as well as with those of other members of the Scottish Enlightenment.4 Ferguson’s virtual disappearance from view in the nineteenth century has been attributed to his sustained attack on the ‘selfish system’ just as it had achieved a kind of muted respectability. As Duncan Forbes suggests, Ferguson’s sin consisted in his oracular ‘unmasking’ of a ‘second-rate sort of society, full of second rate citizens,

1 Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd.; 2001, p. 5. 2 ‘Ferguson’s admirers in France included D’Holbach and 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 in Berlin’. A.G. Smith, The 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’ esteemed Ferguson highly, naming his father, , 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 Works 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. 3 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, ‘. N. Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in Porter, R and Teich, M. (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 37. 4 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.

1 2 THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY pursuing comparatively worthless objects’.5 For Ferguson, civil society could not be reduced to market society. Worse than that, the market may itself contain the seeds of despotism.6 Whereas the Scottish Enlightenment has been characterised (principally in the figure of Smith) as an attempt ‘to legitimise bourgeois civilisation at an early stage of its growth’,7 Ferguson stood apart as a figure that frequently acted to subvert and de-legitimise it. He was rescued from obscurity in the first part of the twentieth century by those interested in the origins of sociology and early critiques of modernity. He continues to be rediscovered, more recently by scholars looking for early sources on the nature and preservation of civil society.8 Like other members of the Scottish Enlightenment (among them David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, John Millar, Dugald Stewart and Lord Kames) Ferguson was motivated to apply himself to the study of society by the intense social and material changes he saw around him. The purpose of the exercise was not simply to describe and enumerate laws (to develop a kind of science of morals). His social science was inextricably linked to a normative critique of these changes, particularly in their effects upon , community and the affective content of social life. It is sometimes suggested that Ferguson’s concern with political corruption led him to anticipate much of nineteenth-century sociology in disclosing the causal status of such social structural variables as mechanisation, the , bureaucratisation, commercialisation, apathy and over-extension. There is much truth to this claim though he finds his initial inspiration in the civic humanist concerns of citizenship and virtue.9 It should also be remembered that he did not work alone but developed his ideas alongside and together with other Scots like

5 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. 6 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. 7 Hiroshi Mizuta, ‘Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies in Voltaire, Vol. 154, 1976, pp. 1459-64, p. 1459. 8 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 , Vol, 7 (3) 1996, pp. 38-52 and Varty, ‘Civil or Commercial? Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society’. 9 As also noticed by John Brewer in his insightful work on Ferguson. J.D. Brewer, ‘, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth Century : 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. INTRODUCTION 3

Smith, Hume, Robertson and Millar and they are certain to have influenced and aided one another. Ferguson was well placed to notice the full force of social change brought on by modernisation. As Bjorn Eriksson has noted, in Ferguson’s time Scotland was ‘a living sociological museum of stages or modes of existence’. [T]he highland clans could without much ado be characterised as belonging to the shepherd stage. The stage of agriculture was still vivid in mind even if farming was in a process of transformation into a capitalistic, market-oriented production; and the stage of commerce was rapidly gaining in the second half of the eighteenth century when the Scottish lowlands were the economic wonder region of Europe.10 It was hardly surprising that the Scots were the first to articulate an early form of sociology.11 Ferguson was particularly sensitive to this singular set of circumstances. As a highlander and a speaker of Gaelic he was unique among his contemporaries within the Scottish Enlightenment.12 Part of this uniqueness lay in his agreement with Rousseau that modernity had disagreeable social, moral and emotional costs, costs that many his contemporaries seemed less willing to acknowledge. Although there are many points of disagreement,13 Ferguson could not help but wonder if Rousseau had been right when he declared that ‘our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved.’14 Against the rationalisation, individualism, hedonism and self-interestedness which he perceived as increasingly dominating social and commercial life, Ferguson wanted to rediscover community and the animating principles that governed it, namely the passions, and therefore, by implication not , or at least, not reason exclusively. He endorses Rousseau’s suspicion of those who ‘smile contemptuously at such old names as patriotism and religion’15 by lauding the ‘simple passions’ of ‘friendship, resentment, and love’.16

10 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 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. 11 Eriksson, ‘First Formulation of Sociology’, pp. 251-76; Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 21. 12 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. 13 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. 14 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. 15 Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’, Social Contract and Discourses, p. 17. 16 Essay, p. 166. 4 THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY

The result is a defence of non-cognitive processes mounted on two fronts. The first is moral and emotional, couched within the framework of a civic humanist interest in corruption and the solidary and focused on the importance of spontaneous affection. The second is social scientific. In the course of defending the passions as the source of social order, Ferguson devises an extremely well developed theory of , thereby signposting and aiding the emergence of social science proper. Here his main target is the type of a priori reasoning associated with rational constructivism and contractarianism, including any over-reliance on the principle of instrumental to explain the maintenance of social life. Ferguson’s alternative is a non-cognitive, irrationalist theory of history and society, one that presages structural-functionalist explanations of the development and maintenance of social patterns, institutions and mores. Rationality, explicit contract and long term planning are given second place to passions and sub-rational drives as the real generators, not only of our complex social structures, but also of historical progress and the general equilibrium of society.

1. THE FIRST SOCIOLOGIST?

Though it is generally the case that sociologists place the birth of their discipline ‘in the first half of the nineteenth century’17 Ferguson is sometimes identified as ‘the first sociologist’ or ‘Father of Modern Sociology’. He influenced or anticipated, among others, Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, Elias, and Hayek.18 Comte recognised his contribution to the development of positivism19 while Spencer read him and may well have been influenced by his work in the development of his own ideas on the ‘division of labour…social differentiation and individuation and integration’.20 Ferguson’s work was well known in Germany where it exerted some influence.21

17 H. Strasser, The Normative Structure of Sociology: Conservative and Emancipatory Themes in Social Thought, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 225. 18 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. 19 Nevertheless Comte described Condorcet, not Ferguson, as his ‘spiritual father’ and regarded the former as second only to 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. 20 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. 21 On, among others, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, Isaak Iselin, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and . 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.

INTRODUCTION 5 ‘ He influenced Marx22 and seems sure to have informed Hegel s views on needs, civil society and the effects of the division of labour.23 Ludwig Gumplowicz and Werner Sombart have both traced the origins of sociology back to him24 while Harry Barnes once claimed that ‘[i]f anyone before Saint-Simon and Comte has the right to be designated as the “ father of sociology” it is...Ferguson’. 25 In the first half of the twentieth century it was commonplace to encounter identical claims.26 Though such claims are sometimes either exaggerated or taken out of context, nevertheless they should be taken seriously. There have been many allusions to Ferguson’s contribution to modern social science27 including suggestions that his work represents the first sustained critique of

22 , The Poverty of Philosophy, With an Introduction by Frederick Engels, International Publishers: New York, 1969, pp. 129-30. According to , 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, 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. 23 Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel‘s Account of Civil Society, Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1988, pp, 137-41, 225-7. 24 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. 25 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. 26 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; 27 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 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, 6 THE PASSIONATE SOCIETY and market society based on the detection of nascent alienation and anomie effects, the destruction of social intimacy and a theory of class exploitation. His conjectural history and detailed exposition of the social effects of the division of labour have also been hailed as major contributions to modern sociological method and thought.28

It is certainly true that Ferguson’s work foreshadowed a good deal of nineteenth and twentieth century‘ social thought but the question of whether he merits the title ‘Father of Sociology is a controversial one, not least because he appeared to have been forgotten for the duration of the century in which Anglo-American sociology began to emerge and define itself as a discrete discipline. What the public could not see during this time, though, was the way in which his influence had been funnelled into the discipline via important figures like Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Herbert Spencer and Ludwig Gumplowicz. Obviously, the discipline of sociology had not yet separated itself out from moral philosophy29 but it would be perverse to use this as a reason for disqualifying Ferguson as the first sociologist. At the same time, to attach the title ‘Father of Sociology‘ to any one thinker is to deny the polygenesis of the discipline.30 And if 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 ’ 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 , , 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 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.

28 Brewer ‘Adam Ferguson and the Division’ of Labour’, passim. 29 Forbes, Introduction to Essay, p.i; Ryan, Essay’, p. 63. 30 As noted by John Brewer,’Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation’, p. 462.