Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature

Eugene Heath, Eugene Heath, Vincenzo Merolle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317315360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains essays that range across all of Ferguson's works to investigate his engagement with contemporary events and his contributions to our understanding of history and human action.

1 FERGUSON’S EPISTOLARY SELF

John D. Brewer

The renaissance of interest in Adam Ferguson lies mostly in the contemporary importance of civil society as a process to manage the growth of governmental and state power and smooth the vagaries of the economic market, and thus rests on Ferguson’s 1767 exposition of civil society in his famous An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Ferguson is thus associated by generations of new devotees with ideas of active citizenship in the form of engagement by people in civic affairs, ‘small government’, which has the state interfering as little as possible in people’s lives to preserve their freedom, and individual liberty and autonomy, the release of which allows individuals’ inherently benevolent natures to create economic growth, social harmony and personal enjoyment. This view neglects more long-standing interpretations of Ferguson as a civic humanist¹ and critic of classical liberalism,² and renders him an essentially American writer, speaking to themes that were redolent to the founders of the US constitution and which still strike the hearts of the American public.³ It is ironic, therefore, that Ferguson vehemently opposed the American War of Independence. He insisted on the necessity of the Americans submitting to lawful authority and his hawkishness intensified after visiting the colonies in the course of the war as secretary to the Carlisle Commission, which briefly brought him into contact with George Washington. ‘As for America’, he wrote in a letter to his friend Sir John Macpherson in 1779, ‘I thought our cause there was good and might be brought to a favourable issue’;⁴ he was more tolerant of the French and Irish Republicans than of the American revolutionaries.

This attempt to Americanize Ferguson is deeply paradoxical for it runs counter to another long-standing and popular representation of him as a very Scottish writer, to the extent that Michael Kugler describes him as provincial in his identity and concerns.⁵ Ferguson much loved his native land, and never wanted to be away from it for long. In one of his letters from London in 1779, Ferguson writes to his great friend Alexander Carlyle, ‘you may tell that I pant after Scotland as the hart panteth after the water brooks and I have always thought myself within ten days or a fortnight of it’.⁶

However, there are three senses in which Ferguson was a Scottish writer over and above the obvious point that he lived there and had strong and warm feelings towards it.

First, as both moralist and political philosopher, Ferguson engaged in longstanding intellectual debates within Scotland about morality, human nature and virtue, and with a plethora of other Scottish writers, amongst others.⁷ Second, as a precursor of sociology, Ferguson’s work was influenced by social change in Scotland at the time of his writing. Political stability and economic growth in Scotland, especially after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion,⁸ the development of an urban and commercial society and a civic culture that integrated commerce, industry, the universities and the intellectual social networks around the gentlemen’s clubs, coffee houses and literary and scientific societies,⁹ all helped to shape Ferguson’s intellectual agenda. New social and political problems arose, which Ferguson was chief in addressing, such as the alienating effects of the social division of labour, the difficulties of adjusting to the collapse of traditional mores, and the increasing risk of political instability and national decline. The popular claim amongst generations of sociologists that Ferguson was a founder of the discipline revolves around these concerns, such as his anticipation of the social functions of conflict,¹⁰ the stress laid on the negative consequences of the social division of labour,¹¹ in particular the emergence of class conflict and exploitation,¹² and the role accorded private property in social development,¹³ which is said to be proto-Marxist.¹⁴ The whole intellectual effervescence in social and political thought throughout eighteenth-century Scotland has been explained in a similar way as reflecting peculiarly Scottish circumstances.¹⁵

The third sense in which Ferguson is thought of as essentially Scottish is in his background as a Scotsman, in particular as a Highlander. This is the common assessment of Ferguson as a person and is deployed extensively in the secondary literature to explain his work. Biographers allude to his Highland roots, the most well-informed and dedicated of which, Jane Fagg, points to the significance of him being the only one of the Scottish literati born there.¹⁶ David Allan makes the main conclusion of his new exposition of Ferguson’s life and work that he was a Highlander from a Gaelic-speaking community personally acquainted with the subjects he wrote about.¹⁷ One purpose of this essay therefore is to reassess the impact of Ferguson’s Scottish background on his work and to suggest that the conventional view is in serious need of revision. The main evidence used is Ferguson’s correspondence, usefully collated into two volumes by Vincenzo Merolle.¹⁸ Attention is focused on the ‘epistolary self’ that this correspondence displays – the self that is written about in the letters – and a second purpose behind the essay is thus to establish the usefulness of this approach for examining the connection between a writer’s life and work. I argue that Ferguson did not narrate a Highland Scots identity and makes no connection himself between his life and work. First it is necessary to show how popular is the contrary view that locates his thought in the context of his biography.

Ferguson in Scotland and Scotland in Ferguson

There are three issues worth separating when addressing the image of Ferguson as a Highlander whose biography supposedly shaped his work: the first is the way others routinely perceive Ferguson to be a Highlander and attach significance to this background in explaining his work; the second is whether these origins genuinely affected Ferguson’s own self-image to make him avowedly Highland in his sense of identity; the third is whether Ferguson narrates a self-image that makes its own connections between his life and work. In this section, I intend to deal with the first issue, pointing to its reasonableness as a possible interpretation of Ferguson the person and as an explanation of his thought, after which Ferguson’s letters are used to dispute these claims and to analyse the epistolary self they actually disclose.

With respect to the image of Ferguson in the secondary literature, it is very fashionable to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I. Life and Works
• II. In History
• III. On History
• IV. Human Nature, Action and Progress
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index