Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, first published in 1755, is now recognized to have played a fundamental, if paradoxical, role in the shaping of Scottish Enlightenment political thought. Not only did his critical genealogy of civilization problematize the Scots’ inquiries into the historical progress of society but, more fundamentally, his denial of human natural sociability posed a serious challenge to mainstream Scottish assumptions about the moral foundations of political society. For many Scottish thinkers writing between the 1750s and 1770s, Rousseau came to be known as an author who had denied the natural basis of society, resurrected the “selfish system” of morality, and “preferred a savage and solitary state of mankind, to the best civilized societies that ever were erected.”Footnote 1 Nevertheless, the Scots’ reaction to Rousseau was not straightforwardly hostile. His “hypothetical history” was an important stimulus for the Scottish philosophical histories of society published in the 1760s and 1770s, while his work prompted significant debate about the physical constitution of the human species; about the history of language, arts and sciences; and about the appropriate balance between conjecture and fact in the history of society. Furthermore, as recent scholarship has underlined, Rousseau's history of the modern personality influenced the analysis of pride, sympathy and deception contained in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, while Smith's own diagnosis of the moral deficiencies of commercial society was at least partly indebted to Rousseau's more thoroughgoing critique.Footnote 2
This article re-examines Rousseau's legacy in the Scottish Enlightenment by focusing on his place in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society. Ferguson's Essay, which was first published in 1767, is often characterized as an antimodernist polemic that offered a whole-scale critique of modern civilization. Understood in that way, the Essay is held up as a civic-republican alternative to Hume's and Smith's endorsements of commercial society, and is sometimes understood as a toned-down, Scottish variant of the critique of civilization set out by Rousseau. Although we no longer tend to think of either Ferguson or Rousseau as representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment, several scholars have discerned an affinity between the two writers, noting their common hostility to the Enlightened languages of politeness and moderation; their commitment to classical (Roman or Spartan) conceptions of republican citizenship; and their anxieties about the prospect of corruption among eighteenth-century Europe's large, civilized and powerful states.Footnote 3 There was a certain identity between Ferguson's dismissal of the idea that the moderns were the standard-bearers of “politeness and civilization” and Rousseau's underlying critique of civilization in both the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (the First Discourse) and the Second Discourse. Understood in this way, Ferguson appears as the Scottish writer who came closest to Rousseau's thinking about the progress of civilization, but proved reluctant to endorse the Genevan's more radical political conclusions.
While there is something to be said for this view—the relationship between the two thinkers is by no means straightforward—Ferguson's Essay contained a more substantial critique of the Second Discourse than is usually recognized. Scholars have frequently underlined Ferguson's pairing of Rousseau with Hobbes in the opening sections of the Essay, and have paid close attention to the ensuing intellectual onslaught against Rousseau's depiction of mankind's original condition in the state of nature.Footnote 4 Yet what has not been sufficiently appreciated is the more intricate and sustained dialogue with Rousseau which ran through Ferguson's philosophical “history of civil society” and his later writings. Not only did Ferguson offer one of the most substantial eighteenth-century refutations of the Genevan's thinking on sociability, nature, art and culture, he also provided an alternative to Rousseau's theoretical history of politics that, crucially, identified a different origin of “Subordination or Inequality” to that identified in the Second Discourse.Footnote 5 Equally significantly, Ferguson's assessment of the nature and consequences of inequality in modern commercial societies differed strikingly from the more critical perspective outlined in Rousseau's Second Discourse. The outcome was a significant late eighteenth-century alternative to the radical critique of civilization set out in the Discourse on Inequality.
Although the Essay on the History of Civil Society remains the best known of Ferguson's works among intellectual historians, this article locates that text in the broader context of Ferguson's thought as it developed between the 1760s and the early 1800s. Crucially, the Essay was merely one—albeit a highly significant—component of a larger inquiry into the characteristics of human nature, the history of human societies, and the prospects for preserving modern structures of political authority and government. This larger inquiry found expression in a major eighteenth-century narrative history, the 1783 History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, in Ferguson's lectures, both published and unpublished, and in several important unpublished essays of the early 1800s. There are at least two ways in which attention to this larger body of work provides a clearer perspective on Ferguson's critical appraisal of Rousseau in the Essay itself. Perhaps most importantly, the Edinburgh lectures on “Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy,” which provided the basis for his Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) and the Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), help us to recognize the coherence of Ferguson's ambition to establish genuinely scientific foundations for his moral philosophy in “pneumaticks” (the science of the human mind) and in the observed or “actual” history of human societies. The collision with Rousseau turned to a significant extent upon their competing conceptions of human physical and mental organization and, in particular, upon Ferguson's distinctive vision of man as nature's artist.Footnote 6 Second, the History of the Roman Republic provides essential insights into Ferguson's thinking about the foundations of political stability in large territorial states and his differences with Rousseau on the political consequences of inequality. While Rousseau was by no means a radical egalitarian, a central message of both his Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract concerned the need to prevent an “ever-widening inequality of fortunes” from undermining the foundations of the state.Footnote 7 Ferguson, by contrast, came to stress both the expediency and the naturalness of socio-economic inequalities in ways that clashed significantly with Rousseau's emphasis on narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. This, I conclude, points to a real difference in their respective evaluations of the legitimacy of modern civil societies.
FERGUSON, ROUSSEAU AND THE SCOTTISH SCIENCE OF MAN
Ferguson's encounter with Rousseau was a central and long-lived strand of his career as a moral philosopher and political thinker. While his most thorough assessment of Rousseau's premises appeared in the Essay itself, most of his writings engaged with Rousseau's account of the origins of government, with his depiction of mankind's natural characteristics and, more implicitly, with the model of republican government set out in the Social Contract. In both the Institutes of Moral Philosophy and the later Principles of Moral and Political Science, Ferguson rejected Rousseau's grounding of “the mutual duties of men in society” upon a social compact, claiming instead that conventions and contracts must follow, rather than precede, the establishment of society.Footnote 8 In his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783), he implicitly rejected the emphasis on consensus and unity that ran through Rousseau's Social Contract, insisting instead that republican government was compatible with a high degree of division, social rivalry and disorder.Footnote 9 But on some issues Ferguson was closer to the Swiss thinker. Like Rousseau, he rejected the assumption that modern societies were superior in all respects to their ancient and barbarous predecessors. Questions about the deleterious effects of the arts and sciences upon man, society and nature resounded throughout many of his later works.Footnote 10
The Essay itself was the product of a set of distinctive intellectual concerns in which Rousseau's thinking loomed large. As is often noted, the book probably began life as an unpublished “Treatise of Refinement” or “dissertation on the vicissitudes incident to human society” which circulated among Ferguson's Edinburgh circle in the late 1750s.Footnote 11 While this text is now lost, it does suggest that the Essay originated in, and may have been inspired by, broad questions about the progress, refinement and corruption of societies that dominated Rousseau's early Discourses. Similar concerns also featured prominently in the History of the Roman Republic, a work which underlined the “vicissitudes to which prosperous nations are exposed.”Footnote 12 Placed in that perspective, the Essay itself appears as one component of a broader investigation into the character and prospects of wealthy, civilized and commercial nations that had a substantial overlap with Rousseau's Second Discourse. The final section of Ferguson's book, entitled “The Progress and Termination of Despotism,” closely resembled the concluding pages of the Discourse of Inequality, with its projection of a “hideous despotism” establishing itself on the ruins of civil society after a period of revolutions. In both cases, aspects of the modern division of economic and political labour were identified as the most important causes of this potentially despotic future. Both talked about the substitution of force for law, and both invoked the history of the Roman republic in confirmation of this point.Footnote 13
Rousseau figured in a more problematic and challenging way in several connected preoccupations that ran through the Essay. Crucially, Ferguson's encounter with Rousseau needs to be seen within the context of the wider Scottish ambition to develop a “science of man,” which recent scholarship has identified as one of the major achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote 14 The starting point and major inspiration for this project is usually traced to Hume's call for a scientific approach to the study of human nature, which would, Hume suggested, constitute a firmer foundation for a complete system of sciences, including those of morals and politics.Footnote 15 An array of Scottish writers, including Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Ferguson himself, followed Hume's lead in appealing to experience and observation as the foundations of a reconstituted science of human nature and morality. Recent scholarship on the “science of man” has identified a number of linked preoccupations at the heart of the project. One concern was to ground the understanding of human nature, the affections, passions and moral sentiments, upon the evidence of common life. A second area of emphasis, as Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning have recently stressed, was on the formation of the moral self or character in the context of a process of socialization, a concern that achieved its most elaborate theoretical expression in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.Footnote 16 At the same time, the Scottish science of man was deeply historical and comparative in outlook. Following Montesquieu's enormously influential Spirit of the Laws, Scottish writers such as Kames and Ferguson were concerned to relate mankind's moral dispositions to a wide range of geographic, climatic, religious and moral “causes” and to situate their accounts of human nature in the context of a properly evolutionary understanding of the history of society. It is not too difficult to see how concerns of these sorts sat uneasily with the more speculative approach to human nature and the prehistory of society worked out by Rousseau in the Second Discourse.
Ferguson's own contribution to the Scottish science of man took the form of an embryonic “history of human nature.” Throughout all of his works, he underlined his ambition to produce a “natural history of man” which could serve as the cornerstone of a reformed and improved moral science.Footnote 17 Ferguson's approach to the science of man was marked by a sharp hostility towards hypothesis and conjecture as tools of the natural historian, and an insistence that the study of human nature be grounded on “particular facts” derived from observation.Footnote 18 In developing this programme, Ferguson drew eclectically from works dealing with mankind's physical constitution (from Pliny's Natural History to Buffon's Histoire naturelle), from the standard ancient sources on barbarous nations (Herodotus, Caesar, Tacitus), and from a massive array of more recent works dealing with the manners and customs of “rude” or “uncultivated” nations in Asia, Africa and the Americas.Footnote 19 His History of the Roman Republic, furthermore, was in part motivated by a keen interest in excavating the staggering extremes of which human nature had been capable in the past.Footnote 20 But much of the urgency behind the programme, in both the Essay and the other works, derived from Ferguson's recognition of the need to respond to the radically stripped-down picture of mankind's natural attributes contained in the Second Discourse. Ferguson's science of man was, at least in part, conceived as an answer to Rousseau's own conjectural anthropology.
Rousseau also figured centrally in the “history of civil society” which gave the Essay its title. The Essay, with its focus on the progress of society, is usually understood as a distinctive contribution to what Dugald Stewart later called “theoretical or conjectural history,” an endeavour which Stewart associated with Smith's four-stages theory and his conjectural history of language.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, the term “conjectural history” is a misleading one for an intellectual programme that was so self-consciously grounded on an appeal to fact, experience and observation, and it makes more sense to describe the idiom as a distinctive blend of natural and philosophical history which centred upon mankind's progress through a sequence of developmental stages.Footnote 22 In its Scottish guise, this form of history was the product of a distinctive set of concerns among thinkers writing in the 1740s and 1750s—notably Hume, Kames, John Dalrymple, and Smith—who had sought to track the emergence and development of modern systems of government, property and law. We are used to thinking of this kind of philosophical history as a way of tracking the progressive refinement, specialization and progress of modern society, but it is important to recognize that it was simultaneously a contribution to earlier debates about the foundations of political authority, the history of property, and the origins of the state itself.Footnote 23 Ferguson's Essay, like other works of the 1760s, shared the central preoccupation of these authors in constructing an account of mankind's progress from “the most rude to the most polished state of society.” Nevertheless, once again Rousseau's Second Discourse was a major target. In the central sections of the Essay, Ferguson effectively offered an alternative to Rousseau's hypothetical history of politics, with its notorious claim that political government and civil society were outcomes of a non-natural trajectory that had undermined the possibility of establishing legitimate political societies. Emphasizing the natural origins and development of political authority, Ferguson was providing an antidote and rival to Rousseau's more conjectural genealogy of the modern state.
One further issue which impinged upon Ferguson's reading of Rousseau's Second Discourse was that of religion and, more precisely, the question of the religious foundations of sociability and morality. While Rousseau was clearly not a sceptic in the manner of David Hume, the Genevan's denial of natural sociability, and his apparent rejection of any providential direction within mankind's history, raised serious questions for those Scottish moralists who connected mankind's capacity for sociability, morality and conscience to a providential order underpinned by a benevolent Christian deity.Footnote 24 The early reaction to the Second Discourse among the Scottish moderates was coloured by these themes, and at least one writer, the clergyman Robert Wallace, implied that Rousseau's positive depiction of the state of nature represented an irreligious denial of mankind's providential destiny.Footnote 25 By the 1770s, the moral philosopher James Beattie was able to combine admiration for Rousseau's philosophical and rhetorical gifts as a moralist with the observation that the Swiss thinker had come dangerously close to offering a purely rational “scheme of natural religion.”Footnote 26 Ferguson's own thinking about mankind's moral capacities was certainly intertwined with the strand of Christian providentialism that surfaced occasionally throughout his writings. In the opening section of the Essay, he linked his critique of the state of nature with an argument for God's providential role as the “author of nature,” and criticized the sceptical excesses of those who would deny the “proofs of design.” He also underlined the positive historical effects of Christianity, which he depicted as a religion of mildness with salutary consequences for the correcting of barbarism and superstition.Footnote 27 The arguments for providence and God's intelligent design of the natural order were developed in a more sustained way in the Principles of Moral and Political Science.Footnote 28 Even though these issues remained in the background of the Essay itself, the emphasis on natural teleology and a benevolent providential order clearly differentiated his thinking about the progress of society and mankind's moral development from the emphasis on contingency that was one of the main features of Rousseau's Second Discourse.
Contemporary readers of Ferguson's writings readily identified his works as parts of a coherent strategy designed to undercut Rousseau's hypothetical history of politics. For these readers, Ferguson had recovered a genuinely empirical history of human society and had thus invalidated the unsubstantiated assumptions about human history that characterized the Second Discourse. This view comes out particularly clearly in the “Avant-Propos” to the first French translation of the Essay, first published in 1782. According to the French writer of that piece (probably Alexandre-Joseph Meunier, who collaborated with Claude-François Bergier on the translation), Rousseau's “brilliant hypotheses” were expressions of a “dangerous Pyrrhonism” that threatened the “progress of reason and morality.” Ferguson's Essay, by contrast, contained “true materials” for a history of mankind, repudiated the “spirit of system,” and provided a more accurate portrayal of mankind's progress from conditions of savagery to civilization.Footnote 29 Similar claims were common among Ferguson's German-speaking readership. The Göttingen philosophical historian Christoph Meiners cited the Essay as an authority in his own attack on Rousseau's depiction of the state of nature.Footnote 30 Johannes von Müller, one of Ferguson's most attentive Swiss readers, drew extensively from Ferguson's history of rude nations in the notes collected under the title Observations on the History, Laws, and Interests of Mankind.Footnote 31 Müller, who reacted not only to Rousseau's idea of the state of nature but also to his “chimerical” vision of democratic equality, adumbrated a brief theoretical history of political rule (Herrschaft) and its interaction with the rise of property. This history, although fragmentary, drew substantially upon the history of barbarous peoples contained in Ferguson's Essay.Footnote 32 Like many contemporaries, Müller discerned intellectual resources in Ferguson's work that could strengthen his own attack on Rousseau's politics.
NATURE AND ART IN FERGUSON'S SCIENCE OF MAN
One of the central features of the Second Discourse was its insistence on the radical disjunction between nature and artifice, and between nature and society. In the “Preface” to the work, Rousseau declared that his strategy was to “disentangle what is original from what is artificial” in human nature, and claimed that any foundational “science” of natural right depended upon a correct understanding of man's “fundamental principles.” According to Rousseau, this required scraping away the distortions that history had layered upon man's original nature: as he highlighted on the frontispiece of the work, quoting Aristotle's Politics, “What is natural has to be investigated not in beings that are depraved, but in those that are good according to nature.”Footnote 33 The outcome was a genealogy of civil society in which sociability itself, as well as language, property and government, were conceived as purely artificial products of an intricate historical sequence which had led mankind further and further from its natural state. Not only was the political state an artificial invention of the rich and powerful but, more fundamentally, civilized society itself was simply “an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions which are the product of all these new relationships, and have no true foundation in Nature.”Footnote 34
Ferguson confronted these claims in the opening part of the Essay, entitled “On the Characteristics of Human Nature.” On the very first page of the book, he rejected the key idea of Rousseau's conjectural genealogy, which was that “the most common establishments of human society are to be classed among the incroachments which fraud, oppression, or a busy invention, have made upon the reign of nature.” His broader strategy was to collapse the distinction between nature and artifice, and between nature and culture, upon which Rousseau's (as well as Hobbes's) account rested. Ferguson insisted that the “highest refinements of political and moral apprehension, are not more artificial in their kind, than the first operations of sentiment and reason.” Art and culture were themselves natural, as was demonstrated by mankind's early capacity for craft, song and literary invention.Footnote 35 What followed was an affirmation of human natural sociability and a corresponding insistence on mankind's inbuilt capacity for reason, speech, invention and discernment. Humans were not solely driven by perpetual “competition for dominion and interest,” as Hobbes had claimed, but nor were they “possessed of mere animal sensibility,” lacking reason, language and all but the most minimal of moral sentiments, as Rousseau had argued. As Ferguson later pointed out, Rousseau's natural man, without reason or moral judgement, would be a “monster too odious for nature to endure,” and not the peaceful creature of Rousseau's imagination.Footnote 36 Mankind's natural condition was neither a Hobbesian war of all against all, nor a Rousseauian state of independence and isolation. Rather, mankind were to be “taken in groupes, as they have always subsisted.” Without reducing sociability to the “herding instinct” seen among certain species of animal (here he followed Aristotle's account of the origin of the polis), he maintained that “society appears to be as old as the individual, and the use of the tongue as universal as that of the hand or foot.”Footnote 37
Ferguson's delineation of mankind's natural characteristics had several further features which distinguished it sharply from Rousseau's. Perhaps most importantly, he identified within mankind a “mixed disposition” towards friendship and enmity, love and fear, affection and animosity. In direct contrast with Rousseau's view that enmity, competition and war were products of property and politics, Ferguson insisted that the principles of dissension, antagonism, rivalry and competition were built into human nature from the very beginning.Footnote 38 At the same time, Ferguson insisted firmly on the natural foundations of moral sentiment, claiming that mankind's capacity for admiration and censure, praise and blame, derived immediately from its benevolent disposition. Moral sensibility, and a capacity to discern justice, were original with the species.Footnote 39 Further, Ferguson laid special emphasis on mankind's distinctive capacity for invention, contrivance, ingenuity and artistry. These faculties, he argued, were the source of mankind's astonishing flexibility and progress in the scientific, mechanical and literary arts. They also underpinned mankind's distinctive capacity for self-authorship, for being the “arbiter of his own rank in nature” and the “artificer of his own frame.”Footnote 40 Finally, there was a significant difference between Rousseau's notoriously double-edged conception of perfectibility—the latent faculty which caused man's “enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues” to bloom—and Ferguson's more cautious understanding of mankind's motivation towards “perfection.”Footnote 41 Like Rousseau, Ferguson recognized the striving for perfection as one source of the progress of society (and, indeed, something that made humans a genuinely historical species). But Ferguson's “desire of perfection” was close to a simple love of virtue, and had little of the paradoxical character of Rousseau's own unusual notion of perfectibilité.
The continued resonance of Rousseau to Ferguson's delineation of human nature is further demonstrated by the latter's moral philosophy course at Edinburgh University. In the section of his lectures dealing with the “history of man,” he refined his attack on the distinction between nature and art, and implicitly criticized Rousseau's suggestion that civilized man was “now vested with habits & manners altogether adventitious to his Nature.” He repeated his claim that the state of nature was “altogether irrational and subversive of History and Science,” and noted that the latest step in the development of society was “as natural as the first.”Footnote 42 He also underlined mankind's moral and aesthetic capacities in much earlier stages of history, noting that a love of beauty, the arts and the “noblest qualities of human Nature” were among the original propensities of man.Footnote 43 Yet perhaps the most prominent theme which preoccupied Ferguson in this part of his lecture course concerned the distinctiveness of mankind vis-à-vis the animals. In the Essay, Ferguson had already opposed what he took to be Rousseau's blurring of the line separating humans and animals, and instead followed Buffon in emphasizing the range of faculties (notably speech) that distinguished mankind from other creatures.Footnote 44 He returned to this debate repeatedly throughout his lecture course, a debate which in its Scottish context involved Kames, John Gregory and, later, Lord Monboddo.Footnote 45 Although his argument in the lectures was directed against Helvétius's suggestion that mankind's distinctiveness could be reduced to the possession of a prehensile thumb, his broad position was clearly continuous with his earlier criticism of Rousseau's (ostensible) conflation of mankind with the apes. In notes for a lecture dated 25 November 1783, Ferguson explicitly rejected the fashionable linkage between mankind and the orang-utan. As he reiterated, mankind's special place within the order of nature derived not from his body but from his mind. His possession of the faculties of invention, ingenuity, versatility, art and choice placed him on an entirely different level from other animals: “While the other Animals have their Limits on the Earth, Man is the inhabitant of all.”Footnote 46
Ferguson revisited the themes of nature and art in a later, unpublished essay entitled “Of Nature and Art.”Footnote 47 Although this piece was not explicitly targeted against Rousseau, it does shed some additional light on his hostility to Rousseau's definition of nature. In the essay, Ferguson analysed more precisely the range of possible meanings of both “nature” (unpolished; actual; imperfect; unchanged) and “art” (invention; ingenuity; imposition).Footnote 48 He assessed the ways in which nature served as a standard of excellence in the imitative arts, arguing that nature should be a model and standard even if the creation of supernatural heroes (like Achilles) was permissible.Footnote 49 He reiterated his claim that art, industry and skill were themselves natural, and repeated his description of man as nature's artist, “who instead of taking the Actual State of things for his Model is continually reversing the State in which he found them, Changing the woodland into Corn Field or covering the bare Mountain with woods.”Footnote 50 The main thrust of the essay, however, was fundamentally Stoic: to live according to nature was to be virtuous and happy.Footnote 51 According to Ferguson, nature served as a standard of moral, as well as aesthetic, excellence; in that sense, man was a kind of moral artist, who could turn to nature as a guide. Nature served as a source of indirect moral guidance to the virtuous individual, constituting a rule of choice and a “standard of estimation and merit.”Footnote 52 These claims were not aimed directly against Rousseau. But the Stoic-inspired vision of the intimate dependence of virtue on nature makes it easier to see why Ferguson wished to resist Rousseau's demarcation of nature and art.
AUTHORITY AND INEQUALITY IN FERGUSON'S HISTORY OF THE STATE
Ferguson's account of mankind's natural sociability provided a theoretical foundation for the history of civil society set out in the central parts of the Essay. In these sections of the work, he provided a wide-ranging discussion of the “history of rude nations” and the origins of government, subordination and “civil society” itself. Rousseau remained a persistent and paradoxical presence in these parts of the text. On the one hand, Ferguson explicitly borrowed an insight about the progress of the arts from Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse), and he appeared to endorse Rousseau's view that the emergence of private property was the key to the “foundation of civil laws and political establishments.” He also echoed Rousseau's assessment of the impact of property and wealth among nascent societies, claiming that the admiration of property led to corruption, social breakdown and political slavery among primitive barbarous peoples.Footnote 53 On the other hand, Ferguson's philosophical history differed from Rousseau's in two crucial respects. First, in highlighting the wide range of social, moral and political virtues exhibited among savage societies, Ferguson was continuing his onslaught against Rousseau's hypothetical genealogy of morality, with its disturbing implication that sociability and morality were late, artificial developments in the history of the human mind. Second, and more significantly still, Ferguson rejected Rousseau's depiction of the state as a contractual artifice which cemented pre-existing inequalities and gave rise to permanent enslavement. Against this narrative, Ferguson tracked the natural foundations and emergence of political authority, and distinctions of ranks, among primitive peoples, claiming that a distinction of ranks preceded both the establishment of property and civil society itself.Footnote 54
This story began with an extraordinarily positive depiction of the moral and political capacities of savage peoples (i.e. peoples without property). Primitive man's recognition of the rules of morality and justice sprang from his recognition of the equality of individuals. This “happy principle” gave the savage mind its sense of independence and left it open to sentiments of generosity and kindness.Footnote 55 Furthermore, Ferguson challenged Rousseau's view (but also the views of Scottish contemporaries like Kames or William Robertson) that a “mere negation of our virtues is a description of man in his original state.” Rather, “the love of society, friendship, and public affection, penetration, eloquence, and courage, appear its [i.e. human nature's] original properties, not the subsequent effects of device or invention.”Footnote 56 The moral capacity of savages was matched by their ability to defend themselves, to forge alliances and make treaties, and to live sociably together in security and order. “Without police or compulsory laws, their domestic society is conducted with order, and the absence of vicious dispositions, is a better security than any public establishment for the suppression of crimes.” Moreover, savage societies displayed a range of virtues which more polished societies were in danger of losing. The savage acted with courage, generosity and fortitude, naturally deploying “his talents in the highest station which human society can offer, that of the counsellor, and the soldier of his country.” They displayed “an elevation, and a stateliness of carriage, which the pride of nobility, where it is most revered by polished nations, seldom bestows.”Footnote 57
The second distinctive feature of Ferguson's philosophical history was an emphasis on the natural, as opposed to conventional or contractual, origins of political authority. Drawing mainly from the accounts of North American peoples contained in works by Joseph-François Lafitau, Pierre François-Xavier Charlevoix and Cadwallader Colden, Ferguson traced the origins of political authority to the exercise of natural authority by the brave and the wise. Here he was following insights contained in Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, a work of 1727 in which Colden had described the faint outlines of republican government among the Iroquois and had argued that the origins of political authority lay in the esteem that primitive peoples had for courage and wisdom.Footnote 58 In subsequent sections of his account, Ferguson emphasized the military origins of leadership within barbarous societies, and traced the effects of the emergence of wealth and property upon the structures of authority which sustained primitive societies. The appearance of private property, however, meant that the veneration originally attached to military heroism was soon extended to “the distinctions of fortune and those of birth.” Citing Tacitus’ Germania, Ferguson depicted a system of roughly graded pre-eminences and honours, revolving around loyalty to a pre-eminent chieftain, although this was not to be confused with “that establishment which is known in after ages by the name of monarchy.” The secondary chieftains retained a degree of independence from their leader, who remained a “common bond of connection” rather than a “common master.” This was approximately the structure of authority that had existed among the ancient Germans, the Homeric Greeks and the nomadic peoples of Scythia and Tartary. At this point the broad picture was very similar to that drawn by Smith in his Glasgow Lectures, who had also referred to the shepherding societies of Central Asia, ancient Germany and pre-republican Greece as the first significant cases where wealth and birth became sources of political authority.Footnote 59
The crucial point here is that Ferguson was developing his own account of the origins of civil society that could serve as a direct antidote to Rousseau's thesis about the artificial and conventional foundations of government. It was an account that stressed the natural basis of rule, government, and authority; as Ferguson noted, “the establishments of men, like those of every animal, are suggested by nature.”Footnote 60 As he wrote in the Principles, there was a kind of “instinctive” species of government, implicit within human sociability itself, which held societies together before the formal establishment of political institutions.Footnote 61 The language in the Essay was that of esteem, admiration, prestige and honour, which naturally attached to fortitude and other virtues. Continuing this theme, Ferguson underlined the natural origins of the mixed systems of republican government that, conventionally, were associated with mythic legislators like Lycurgus and Romulus. In this view, the mixed institutions and assemblies that characterized the city states of Greece, Italy and Europe were continuous with the earlier, prototypical forms of government found among barbarous societies: “we may venture to say, that we have found the origin of the senate, the executive power, and the assembly of the people; institutions for which ancient legislators have been so much renowned.”Footnote 62 A similar view of the natural origins of mixed government appeared in the History of the Roman Republic. Rejecting divine inspiration, usurpation or contract as the source of Rome's political institutions, Ferguson maintained that Rome's origins were no different from those of the ancient societies of Germany, or any other “assemblage of herdsmen or warriors.” The rough division between executive and legislative functions was a natural consequence of Rome's position as a rude nation, while the division between patrician and plebeian that marked out Rome's subsequent history was a consequence of the natural relations of counsel, protection and allegiance between the various ranks into which primitive societies were inevitably divided.Footnote 63
A final feature of Ferguson's history of mankind which separated it from Rousseau's Second Discourse was its positive evaluation of distinctions of ranks. This theme was a product of his sustained interest in “subordination” (it is worth noting that the chapter of the Essay entitled “Of the History of Political Establishments” was, in the earliest editions, named “Of the history of Subordination”). As he wrote in his short Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, his 1766 prospectus for his Edinburgh lecture course, political government was grounded on subordination. Subordination could be either “casual” or “institutional.” Institutional subordination encompassed the relationships between magistrate and citizen as well as those between the legislative, judicial and executive powers of the state. Casual subordination, by contrast, referred to informal distinctions of ranks, founded on either “fortune, character, [or] birth.”Footnote 64 One of the significant claims developed in the Essay was that an unequal distinction of ranks was a prerequisite for civil government itself. As Ferguson underlined, before the invention of government or jurisdiction, “men must be accustomed to the distinction of ranks; and before they are sensible that subordination is a matter of choice, must arrive at unequal conditions by chance.” Moreover, an unequal distinction of ranks was compatible with mankind's original equality of rights and with a kind of natural order:
It is a common observation, That mankind were originally equal. They have indeed by nature equal rights to their preservation, and to the use of their talents; but they are fitted for different stations; and when they are classed by a rule taken from this circumstance, they suffer no injustice on the side of their natural rights. It is obvious, that some mode of subordination is as necessary to men as society itself; and this, not only to attain the ends of government, but to comply with an order established by nature.Footnote 65
This theme sharply separated Ferguson's history of mankind from Rousseau's more critical history of inequality. As he described it in the Essay, the progress of society gave rise to forms of social hierarchy that were compatible both with disinterested political leadership and with mankind's original moral equality. The “progress of mankind” gave rise to “changes of condition, and of manners,” that created “a nobility, and a variety of ranks, who have, in a subordinate degree, their claim to distinction.” Although the distinction of ranks, based on birth or property, was independent of formal constitutional arrangements, it was this structure that “bestows unequal degrees of influence, gives the state its tone, and fixes its character.”Footnote 66 This perspective also had strong implications for Ferguson's assessment of modern European societies. He believed that an elaborate distinction of ranks was not just inseparable from the progress of society, but was also, more positively, among the foundations of political stability. This positive endorsement of the distinction of ranks represents a major difference from Rousseau's account of the foundations of government and the origins of inequality.
ROUSSEAU, FERGUSON, AND THE PROSPECTS OF COMMERCIAL SOCIETIES
The final three parts of the Essay contained a detailed examination of the prospects facing Europe's “Polished and Commercial Nations.” In these sections, which are usually recognized as among the most incisive of eighteenth-century criticisms of commercial society, Ferguson confronted many of the questions that had been central to Rousseau's evolving indictment of modernity. One issue which had featured centrally in the First Discourse revolved around the arts and sciences and their consequences for virtue and wisdom. A second concern was with the division of labour and the high levels of inequality that accompanied commercial progress. Finally, Ferguson addressed the broader prospects for stability among European states and considered their capacity to avoid the revolutions that Rousseau had identified as inevitable.Footnote 67 His discussion of each of these issues was inflected with Rousseauian undertones, but his conclusions about the prospects for modern politics were substantially different.
Ferguson's analysis of the moral and political character of commercial society certainly had a number of similarities with that of Rousseau. Like Rousseau, he attacked the theatricality, duplicity and hypocrisy in modern politeness and refinement, and condemned the desire for applause and approbation in “great and opulent cities, where men vie with one another in equipage, dress, and the reputation of fortune.”Footnote 68 His account of the moral distortions unleashed by the pursuit of wealth, property and distinctions overlapped significantly with Rousseau's analysis of amour-propre. He devoted a large portion of his lectures in moral philosophy to explaining the disastrous effects of the love of wealth and distinction upon the human capacity to discern true merit and demerit, even quoting a passage from Lucretius—posterius res inventast aurumque repertum quod facile et validis et pulchris dempsit honorem—“thereafter property was invented and gold found, which easily robbed the strong and the beautiful of honour.”Footnote 69 In these respects, Ferguson clearly shared much of the substance of Rousseau's critique of the “masterpiece of policy in our century,” and his central message that competitive self-interest would easily overwhelm Enlightened politeness and moderation.Footnote 70
Similarly, Ferguson's evaluation of the “Separation of Arts and Professions” bore a resemblance to Rousseau's earlier critique of the arts and sciences and the progress of the division of labour. Although he claimed that progress in the arts and sciences was theoretically limitless, he was sensitive to the possibility that human ingenuity and inventiveness would degenerate into thoughtless mechanical repetition. Echoing Rousseau's First Discourse, he feared that we “become students and admirers, instead of rivals; and substitute the knowledge of books, instead of the acquisitive or animated spirit in which they were written.”Footnote 71 The division of labour itself had the capacity to transform society into a machine that lacked cohesion, patriotism and spirit:
Under the distinction of callings, by which the members of polished society are separated from each other, every individual is supposed to possess his species of talent, or his peculiar skill, in which the others are confessedly ignorant; and society is made to consist of parts, of which none is animated with the spirit of society itself.Footnote 72
Ferguson's conclusions about the progress of the division of labour and manufactures within commercial societies clearly paralleled the projection of revolution set out at the end of the Second Discourse. He wrote that the increasingly elaborate separation of professions in modern states (and particularly the division between statesman and warrior) could either promote a Roman-style military government or, equally alarmingly, transform modern commercial states into something resembling the despotic monarchy of China.Footnote 73
Nevertheless, Ferguson's conclusions about the progress of commercial society were ultimately less pessimistic than those of Rousseau in the Second Discourse. First of all, he rejected the claim that prosperity and commercial advancement were equivalent with a state of corruption. As he argued in the section “Of the Corruption incident to Polished Nations,” the “vices of men are not proportioned to their fortunes,” while “the habits of avarice, or of sensuality, are not founded on any certain measures of wealth, or determinate kind of enjoyment.”Footnote 74 Here Ferguson was driving a wedge between the legitimate acquisition, use, and exchange of goods and the “abuse” of commercial arts. As the record of human history suggested, primitive or barbarous societies were not less vulnerable to wealth-driven corruption than the polished societies of the eighteenth century. The contrast between barbarism and civilization did not map neatly onto the distinction between virtue and corruption. Corruption was “not peculiar to nations in their decline, or in the result of signal prosperity, and great advances in the art of commerce,” while a servile passion for wealth was compatible with a very low level of commercial development. The outcome was a clean break between commerce and corruption. Corruption “does not arise from the abuse of commercial arts alone; it requires the aid of a political situation.”Footnote 75
A second difference from Rousseau lay in Ferguson's assessment of the politics of inequality, the major theme of both the First and the Second Discourse. Like Rousseau and many other contemporary thinkers, Ferguson described modern commerce as an engine for the creation of inequality. But his assessment of inequality was mitigated both by his greater acceptance of distinctions of rank and by his commitment to the more comparative science of politics contained in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, which had shown how different political regimes were compatible with varying levels of inequality, hierarchy and luxury. This perspective led Ferguson to a more positive endorsement of both luxury and inequality as compatible with most large eighteenth-century states. In this view, luxury could be seen as “an innocent consequence of the unequal distribution of wealth,” and “a method by which different ranks are rendered mutually dependent, and mutually useful.”Footnote 76 This point was accompanied by a clear endorsement of social inequality that differed sharply from Rousseau's more critical verdict on the distinction between rich and poor.Footnote 77 In the Essay, Ferguson noted that we “are obliged to tolerate certain orders of men, who are above the necessity of labour, in order that, in their condition, there may be an object of ambition, and a rank to which the busy aspire.”Footnote 78 But in his later writings his acceptance of significant social stratification was even more striking. In his Institutes of Moral Philosophy, Ferguson cautioned against tampering with distinctions of ranks, and instead advocated changing the political structure of government so that it corresponded with the underlying distribution of property.Footnote 79 In his History of the Roman Republic, he condemned radical reformers, like the Gracchi, who wanted to undermine “the subordination of ranks” and hence bring about the “subversion of government.”Footnote 80 But perhaps the best example of his thinking on the topic is contained in the Principles, which explicitly linked inequality with the maintenance of political order and the progress of civilization itself:
It is impossible to restrain the influence of superior ability, of property, of education, or the habits of station. It is impossible to prevent these from becoming in some degree hereditary; and of consequence it is impossible, without violating the principles of human nature, to prevent some permanent distinction of ranks: And, if this were possible, it is far from expedient in the circumstances of human life. In these inequalities we find the first germe of subordination and government so necessary to the safety of individuals and the peace of mankind; and in these also we find the continued incentive to labour and the practice of lucrative arts.Footnote 81
One final difference between Ferguson and Rousseau stems from their verdicts about the inevitability of corruption and collapse among modern states. Although Rousseau himself was not straightforwardly fatalist, the Second Discourse held out little promise for escaping the cycle of revolutions that, he claimed, would lead to the collapse of existing regimes and the establishment of post-revolutionary despotic states. For Ferguson, by contrast, the prospects for modern commercial societies were more open-ended. In later passages of the Essay, he gave extensive consideration to the question whether the decline of prosperous states was inevitable, and assessed whether political bodies, like human bodies, were locked into a natural cycle of growth, advancement and death.Footnote 82 His answer to both these questions was negative. As we have already seen, Ferguson believed that mankind's ingenuity, industry and inventiveness were never “entirely exhausted,” and could even be stimulated, rather than stultified, by the progress of commercial society.Footnote 83 More centrally, human beings had a greater capacity for virtuous self-correction than Rousseau had acknowledged. There were degrees of corruption “under which men still possess the vigour and the resolution to correct themselves.”Footnote 84 Laws might not be a symptom of corruption, but rather of a “desire to find a remedy that may cure, perhaps, some inveterate evil which has long afflicted the state.”Footnote 85 Here Ferguson was giving voice to the Stoic-inspired view that political virtue, and by extension the vitality and strength of states, were ultimately matters of individual choice, responsibility and self-control. In this view, vigilant individuals, like Cato or Brutus, could actually do quite a lot to preserve the independence of states.Footnote 86 The decline of states was the result not “of any incurable distemper in the nature of mankind,” but rather “of their voluntary neglects and corruptions.” And as he underlined in the final paragraph of the work, the duration of states “is not fixed to any limited period; and no nation ever suffered internal decay but from the vice of its members.”Footnote 87 Here the target was not Rousseau, but Polybius, whose own view of the rise, decline and fall of states appeared to Ferguson as far too deterministic. But the strand of Stoic voluntarism that ran through the Essay implicitly set his own account in tension with the Second Discourse.
CONCLUSION
Ferguson's Essay is often thought of as the Scottish work which came closest to Rousseau's more radical critique of modern civilization. But his own philosophical history of politics was the expression of a substantially different political theory from that of Rousseau. Grounded on an explicitly empirical depiction of mankind's natural characteristics, Ferguson's Essay directly challenged Rousseau's radical denial of mankind's sociable inclinations with a strong statement of human natural sociability. He provided the most thorough eighteenth-century refutation of Rousseau's separation of the realms of nature and art, reworking the distinction so that artistic, cultural and scientific inventiveness were repositioned at the core of human “nature” itself.Footnote 88 Simultaneously, he provided a clear alternative to Rousseau's conventionalist genealogy of property and the state, presenting an elaborate natural history of politics which underlined the natural foundations of authority and civil society. All of this added up to an important eighteenth-century alternative to Rousseau's conception of the modern state as an “artificial person.” In the Social Contract, Rousseau had provided yet another sharp distinction between the realms of nature and art, noting that the “constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the State is the work of art.”Footnote 89 In sharp contrast, Ferguson remained well within the contours of a rival—and ultimately ancient—view which saw the societas civilis as a natural expression of human sociability. The picture was not that of a division between natural and political society, but rather of their inextricable interdependence. Sociability and government went hand in hand.Footnote 90
The comparison between the two thinkers also brings into focus the precise character of Ferguson's critique of commercial society. The central argument of Rousseau's Second Discourse was that commerce gave rise to extreme inequalities that undermined the legitimacy and stability of modern states. It is usually assumed that Ferguson shared this view, and that the Essay, with its idealized picture of egalitarian ancient republics, offered a similar intellectual onslaught against inequality. Clearly, Ferguson was acutely anxious about the contamination of virtuous politics by wealth and property, and he certainly feared that Europe's commercial states, with an extensive division of labour, might meet a similar fate to that sketched out in the final pages of the Second Discourse. But Ferguson's acceptance of a significant distinction of ranks, and his insistence that hierarchy and inequality would be significant sources of stability, dynamism and progress, combined to give his verdict on modern politics a substantially different character from that of Rousseau. One increasingly visible feature of Ferguson's writings in the years following the publication of the Essay was a claim about the expediency, and even the naturalness, of the distinctions, disparities and subordinations that characterized large and prosperous states. This endorsement of inequality as an inevitable feature of commercial modernity ultimately made his political theory quite distinct from that of Rousseau.
