A self-described “war-like philosopher,” Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) was perhaps the most significant theorist of conflict in the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote 1 Commentators have often portrayed him as an uncomplicated supporter of political conflict.Footnote 2 It is also commonly claimed that Ferguson was a defender of party contest and even factions.Footnote 3 Politically, Ferguson has been described as a “constitutional Whig” and sometimes more anachronistically as a “conservative Whig,” whose practical politics were not too dissimilar from those of his friends and contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith.Footnote 4 It is true that Ferguson consciously belonged to a different philosophical camp from Hume and Smith, and was a much more passionate champion of the establishment of a national militia.Footnote 5 Nevertheless, his politics had a comparable Whig establishment orientation with defense of the Hanoverian settlement, the Act of Union, the mixed constitution, acceptance of commercial society, and emphasis on moderation and gradual change at the core.Footnote 6 Ferguson's alleged support for conflict, however, would seem to set him apart from many of his fellow Scots.Footnote 7
The role of political parties was a prominent theme in British political debate in the eighteenth century.Footnote 8 Internal division had traditionally been condemned in the history of Western political thought, until Machiavelli notoriously argued in Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (c.1513–17) that tumult and discord between different orders of the state had been beneficial for the Roman Republic.Footnote 9 This “Machiavellian” argument was repeated in many eighteenth-century treatments of Rome, including those of Montesquieu and Ferguson himself.Footnote 10 The argument in favor of disunion was generally contested in British eighteenth-century discourse, even though political parties had been at the heart of public life since the establishment of the Whig and Tory parties around the time of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81. Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), which unapologetically argued for the usefulness of political parties, was a pivotal text in giving a more positive meaning to the concept of the party.Footnote 11 Some of the groundwork preparing the way for a more balanced view had already been made by the French historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, who had claimed that equilibrium between Whig and Tory could help maintain the proper balance between the popular and monarchical parts of Britain's mixed constitution.Footnote 12 Also of significance was Bolingbroke, who had distinguished between party and faction, and made the case for the oppositional Country Party in the 1730s.Footnote 13 In the Scottish context, Hume has been described as a passionate enemy of party on the basis of his first batch of essays on British politics in the early 1740s.Footnote 14 However, Hume's nuanced views are arguably better summarized by his own paradoxical statement that while the British parties often threatened the total dissolution of the government, they were also “the real causes of its permanent life and vigour.”Footnote 15 Smith appears to have been more negative, having privately written that “tho’ a little faction now and then gives spirit to the nation the continuance of it obstructs all public business and puts it out of the power of [the] best Minister to do much good,” making explicit reference to Bolingbroke's opposition to Sir Robert Walpole's ministry.Footnote 16
The place of Ferguson in this eighteenth-century debate about party has not been properly explained.Footnote 17 While it is true that Ferguson's theory of human nature and sociability held division and partisanship to be inevitable, what tends to be forgotten when he is misleadingly portrayed as a simple promoter of party conflict is that he shared Smith's scornful attitude towards parties and party politicians motivated by private ambition. Like Hume, Ferguson only condoned party struggle with severe qualifications. However, unlike Hume, whose main worry was parties of principles, especially religious principles, as opposed to parties of interest,Footnote 18 Ferguson was especially concerned about the self-interested side of party politics. Ferguson did believe that parties in a loose sense had a role to play in a mixed constitution, such as the British, by protecting the interests of different orders in the state, provided they were kept within constitutional bounds and were restricted to the visible powers in the state, i.e. monarch, lords, and commons. As soon as such “parties” stepped outside the constitutional framework, they became an acute danger. More precisely, in the process of the present examination, we shall see that Ferguson was worried and warned about the rise of organized opposition parties, especially those appealing to popular discontent “out-of-doors” and intent on replacing the government. This will become particularly clear when Ferguson's views on the Rockingham Whigs are considered. He was convinced that such parties posed a threat to civil liberty rightly understood, i.e. to the peace and order of society. This article challenges the prevalent interpretation of Ferguson as an unequivocal advocate of conflict, and instead shows that he was more concerned with promoting security, stability, law, and order.Footnote 19 This outlook is fully compatible with his Calvinist worldview: nothing human could alter the divine plan, but disruption and strife could be seen as portents of God's disfavor.Footnote 20
PARTISANSHIP AND CONFLICT IN HUMAN NATURE
Ferguson spent most of his academic career as a professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University and regarded “human nature” as his main object of study.Footnote 21 He rose to literary fame after the success of the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). It is in Ferguson's theoretical works, in the Essay and his later Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), where we find his most positive evaluations of political conflict. This may explain why many of his readers have ended up with a fairly one-sided take on this topic. As we shall see, however, the Stoic element of Ferguson's ethics complicates to some extent the place of party and partisanship in his moral and political thought.Footnote 22 The Essay and the Principles are sometimes treated separately, and the latter, written after the French Revolution of which Ferguson strongly disapproved, is sometimes seen as a more moderate and cautious work.Footnote 23 On the subject of party, however, they are compatible and complementary. Ferguson never departed from his views expressed in the Essay. Having made fairly extensive alterations in 1768 and 1773, but no changes with direct impact on the present discussion, he wrote to his publisher that it “must remain in its original form” ahead of its sixth edition in 1793.Footnote 24
Ferguson considered human beings prone to both union and discord, to amity as well as enmity. “[I]n treating human affairs,” he said, “we would draw every consequence from a principle of union, or a principle of dissension.”Footnote 25 While he considered humans to be naturally prone to conflict, Ferguson's depiction of human nature was overtly anti-Hobbesian as he believed in natural sociability.Footnote 26 He also explicitly rejected Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unsocial view of the state of nature; indeed, he did not have time for the concept of a state of nature, viewing humans as social animals.Footnote 27 Man's natural sociability means that human beings will invariably be found in societies and political communities, but in separate communities rather than in one community of mankind. Our attachment to our own community is strengthened by animosity towards other communities.Footnote 28 The internal space itself is not a scene of absolute harmony, however, as people are naturally inclined to divide and form “sects” in opposition to others within the community. Our attachment to such a party “seems often to derive much of its force from an animosity conceived to an opposite one” as well as “from a desire to vindicate the rights of our party,” Ferguson wrote in the Essay.Footnote 29
Ferguson's analysis of human nature further entailed that man was disposed to active engagements and happy in active pursuits whilst unhappy in sloth, which is highly relevant for the present topic.Footnote 30 He was critical of thinkers who did not sufficiently consider the importance of activity, making “repose” the object of government.Footnote 31 His fear was that models that “prevent agitation and bustle . . . by the barriers they raise against the evil actions of men, would prevent them from acting at all.”Footnote 32 Association and public causes are important outlets for man's active nature. “In his relations to other men he has indefinite scope for the exercise of his active dispositions,” Ferguson argued.Footnote 33 Ferguson emphasized the importance of ambition: “The suppression . . . of ambition, of party-animosity, and of public envy, is probably, in every such case, not a reformation, but a symptom of weakness, and a prelude to more sordid pursuits, and ruinous amusements.”Footnote 34
As Richard Sher has pointed out, however, Ferguson was more interested in explaining what ought to be rather than simply what is, even if he believed that the former could only be ascertained on the basis of the latter.Footnote 35 Ferguson duly argued that in order to achieve happiness in accordance with human nature, “benevolent affections” and “just opinions” had to be appended to active engagements.Footnote 36 His view of human nature was explicitly Stoic in this regard as he saw himself as taking his cue particularly from Cicero among the ancient Stoics and from the Christian neo-Stoic and moral-sense philosopher Francis Hutcheson, while criticizing the modern Epicureanism, or the “selfish philosophy” of Mandeville, as well as the moral skepticism of Hume.Footnote 37 Notably, Hutcheson had stressed the importance of disinterested virtue and “Love of Benevolence.”Footnote 38 While often described as a quintessentially cosmopolitan philosophy, Cicero had been clear that Stoicism did not preclude partial associations, states, and patriotism, although the universe was “virtually a single city.”Footnote 39 Moreover, Stoicism of the Roman kind promoted by Cicero was by no means averse to the active life. On the contrary, Cicero's De officiis celebrated public life as superior to any other way of life.Footnote 40 This also appears to have been a common perception of Stoicism in the eighteenth century; David Hume referred to “the Stoic” as “the man of action or virtue.”Footnote 41 Ferguson defined the Stoic as the person who “enlisted himself, as a willing instrument in the hand of God, for the good of his fellow-creatures.”Footnote 42
In the context of his discussion of Stoicism, meanwhile, Ferguson expressed a strong dislike of many aspects of party competition. He argued that “habits of jealousy and envy, of fear and malice” were not only “hostile to the welfare of mankind” but also “destructible of our own enjoyments.”Footnote 43 It would accordingly be a mistake, he claimed, to “think our felicity is placed in subjects for which our fellow-creatures are rivals and competitors.”Footnote 44 Moreover, Ferguson wrote that judgments of right and wrong are, in “rude minds,” often “disturbed by violent passions, whether of partial attachment, jealousy, and cruel revenge.”Footnote 45 Party contest, while providing an outlet for man's active nature, thus appears as a source of corruption, unhappiness, and injustice, according to Ferguson. In short, he believed that “[t]he ingenuous differ from the malicious; the first conceiving mankind as copartners and friends, the other in conceiving them as rivals and enemies.”Footnote 46 This prominent Stoic strand in Ferguson makes him come across as a much less straightforward champion of competition and conflict—and by extension political parties, whose modus operandi consisted of such activities. All this should not lead us to conclude that Ferguson's thought is contradictory or lacks coherence, a route taken by earlier readers of Ferguson.Footnote 47 Rather, Ferguson intentionally stressed that man's nature itself is contradictory, or double, with its propensity for discord as well as union, war as well as peace. What is more, Ferguson saw the principles of union and dissension as mutually reinforcing, and argued that great acts of benevolence could be realized in conflictual situations.Footnote 48
Ferguson also stressed that the Stoic ideal was not attainable for everyone. He thought that it was desirable to seek “to instil into the breast of private men sentiments of candour toward their fellow-creatures, and a disposition to humanity and justice.”Footnote 49 At the same time, he was clear that “it is vain to expect that we can give to the multitude of a people a sense of union among themselves, without admitting hostility to those who oppose them.”Footnote 50 The moral is straightforward: Stoicism is for elites; for the masses, partisanship is a much more reliable principle of cohesion and cooperation. Although party conflict was inevitable, Ferguson believed that its worst effects could be mitigated: “The pacific may do what they can to allay the animosities, and to reconcile the opinions, of men; and it will be happy if they can succeed in repressing their crimes, and in calming the worst of their passions.”Footnote 51 He stressed, however, that this mitigation of party animosity must not turn into suppression, as “[n]othing . . . but corruption or slavery can suppress the debates that subsist among men of integrity.”Footnote 52 This article will now turn to the political implications of the present discussion.
PARTY AND PARTICIPATION IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
The argument that parties are unavoidable because of the human propensity to partisanship and ambition was an upshot of Ferguson's theory of human nature. More controversial was his view that conflict between parties could produce political benefits in mixed governments, although it was probably an argument with which his favorite author, Montesquieu, would have gone along. Montesquieu's importance for Ferguson and his generation of Scottish thinkers can hardly be exaggerated.Footnote 53 Ferguson drew on “President Montesquieu” for many of his political positions and the chapter heading entitled “Of Political Law” in the otherwise scarcely footnoted Institutes (1769) has a footnote referring to De l'esprit des loix (1748).Footnote 54 There are important differences between Montesquieu and Ferguson in their respective descriptions of party division in Britain, however. Whereas Montesquieu had focused on the parties of the executive and legislative, corresponding roughly to government and opposition, Ferguson's treatment concentrated on parties representing different orders in the state. Moreover, as we shall see in the following section, Ferguson was much more alarmed than Montesquieu about the pernicious potential of mob violence and demagogues in Britain.
Like that of Montesquieu, Ferguson's discussion of politics hinged on the political character of a people and the belief that different characters had different governmental needs, and vice versa.Footnote 55 That is why Ferguson thought it would be vain to search for the best form of government: “One people is unfit to govern, or be governed, in the same manner with another,” as he put it.Footnote 56 Republican and monarchical governments required different political character; in short, “The republican must be popular, and the courtier polite.”Footnote 57 The spirit of party was much more menacing in a republican than in a monarchical one: “The spirit of faction that in republics constituted corruption, in monarchies tends to prevent a greater corruption, servility to those in power.”Footnote 58 In short, the “influence of the crown” represented in a simple monarchy what the “faction of the people” did in a republic: the major threat to the constitution.Footnote 59 Neither case, however, was strictly applicable to the mixed monarchy of Britain.
Montesquieu had written about the British constitution in two long chapters of his De l'esprit des loix (1748). Having described the British constitution (or the English constitution, as he called it) in Book 11 of his chef-d’œuvre, Montesquieu proceeded in the final chapter of Book 19 to adumbrate how Britain was perpetually divided into two “parties,” one inclining to the executive and the other to the legislative power, the two visible powers in the state.Footnote 60 With the power of patronage, “all those who would obtain something from [the executive] would be inclined to move to that side, and it could be attacked by all those who could expect nothing from it.”Footnote 61 The competition will generate “hatred, envy, jealousy, and the ardor for enriching and distinguishing oneself . . . to the full extent.”Footnote 62 However, since liberty is the principle of the British constitution, “if this were otherwise, the state would be like a man who, laid low by disease, has no passions because he has no strength.”Footnote 63 Besides, the hatred between the two parties would be “powerless,” Montesquieu claimed: “As these parties are made up of free men, if one party gained too much, the effect of liberty would be to lower it while the citizens would come and raise the other party like hands rescuing the body.”Footnote 64 As the citizens would be afraid to lose their free constitution, they “would believe themselves to be in danger even at the safest of moments.”Footnote 65 Those in opposition to the executive would be unable to admit their self-interested motives and desire for office, and would instead seek to enflame the public fear. This would have the good effect of making the people attentive to avoid “the real perils to which they might sometimes be exposed.”Footnote 66 Finally, as the representatives of the legislative body are more enlightened than the people, they could calm down stormy sentiments and commotion.Footnote 67
Ferguson appears to have agreed with Montesquieu, and indeed Hume,Footnote 68 that party division in mixed governments provided politics with life and vigor. Unbridled party strife was not to Ferguson's taste, but nor did he think that the British could afford to be politically supine. The British possessed the right to partake in legislation, and “[p]olitical rights, when neglected, are always invaded.”Footnote 69 Ferguson's main discussion of parties, however, was not overtly about government and opposition parties but rather about “parties” representing different orders in the state. The reason why the British enjoyed more security than any other people at any time in history, as Ferguson wrote in a pamphlet published in response to Richard Price in 1776, was that their constitution gave “to all the different orders of the state a power to reject or amend every law that is likely to be grievous on themselves.”Footnote 70 “Amidst the contentions of party” in such a mixed constitution, Ferguson conceded, “the interests of the public, even the maxims of justice and candour, are sometimes forgotten.”Footnote 71 His larger point, however, was a different one:
The public interest is often secure, not because individuals are disposed to regard it as the end of their conduct, but because each, in his place, is determined to preserve his own. Liberty is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government. In free states [often equivalent with mixed governments in the eighteenth century], therefore, the wisest laws are never, perhaps, dictated by the interest and spirit of any order of men: they are moved, they are opposed, or amended, by different hands; and come at last to express that medium and composition which contending parties have forced one another to adopt.Footnote 72
This clash between different orders of the state neither represented the Tory and Whig parties in Britain, nor different Whig factions, all of which had representatives among the Commons as well as the Lords.Footnote 73 It is also doubtful whether it could be said to have neatly represented the Court and Country party division, since, as Thomas Reid remarked, the interest of the Lords was “not so considerable as to form a third Party but divides in to the other two [Court and Country].”Footnote 74 In contrast to Montesquieu,Footnote 75 Ferguson's discussion of “parties” in this context seems very divorced from anything resembling the actual party conflict in Britain. Accordingly, on closer inspection, Ferguson's alleged positive views on party conflict look like praise of the theoretical workings of the mixed constitution. In other words, this is simply a eulogy of the checks and balances inherent in a mixed system of government rather than of party conflict as such.Footnote 76 Besides, the context of the passage suggests that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive.Footnote 77 We also have to remind ourselves that party, then as now, carried more than one meaning, and it is at least possible that Ferguson was here using the word in the more general sense of one side engaged against another in a conflict, with little reference to intra-parliamentary party strife in Britain.Footnote 78
It remains clear, however, that Ferguson did defend a form of political conflict, which was intrinsic to the workings of a mixed constitution. The danger was that modern peoples of commercial states such as the British, while their “constitution indeed may be free . . . its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it.”Footnote 79 This is not to say that Ferguson meant that there was a constant need to oppose government to protect political liberty, as he took radicals as Richard Price to argue. The way that Ferguson understood political or civil liberty—defining it as “the operation of just government, and the exemption from injury of any sort”—meant that he would have had a starkly different conception of what constituted legitimate oppositional practice.Footnote 80 From a mistaken notion of liberty, confusing it with independence and exemption from restraint as well as self-government, “the vulgar conceive a zeal for liberty to consist in opposition to government; take part with every refractory subject; and seem to think that whatever impairs the power of the magistrate must enlarge the freedom of the people.”Footnote 81 By contrast, for Ferguson, “the establishment of a just and effectual government for the repression of crimes, is of all circumstances in civil society, the most essential to freedom.”Footnote 82 This did not imply that government should have unbridled power and that opposition was never warranted, as Ferguson underlined that “every one is justly said to be free in proportion as the government under which he resides is sufficiently powerful to protect him, at the same time that it is sufficiently restrained and limited to prevent the abuse of its power.”Footnote 83
Ferguson was clear, however, that the possession of liberty necessarily entailed agitation. Accordingly, it would be wrong to “estimate the felicity of ages and nations by the seeming tranquillity and peace they enjoy.”Footnote 84 Legislative assemblies, whether collective or representative, “may be censured as exposing men to all the inconveniences of faction or party division.”Footnote 85 However, “if these inconveniences are to be dreaded,” Ferguson continued, “they necessarily may be fairly hazarded, for the sake of the end to be obtained in free governments, the safety of the people, and the scope which is given to all the respectable faculties of the human mind.”Footnote 86
Moreover, in the final pages of the second volume of the Principles, Ferguson connected the argument in favor of allowing the inconveniences of party division with the active nature of man: “If we have not mistaken the interests of human nature, they consist more in the exercises of freedom . . . than in the possession of mere tranquillity.”Footnote 87 The “collisions of free society,” i.e. deliberation and debate in assemblies with parties, were “trials of ability.”Footnote 88 In the first volume of the same work, Ferguson had argued that
the attainment of a just political order otherwise so necessary to the welfare of mankind, is to be considered also as an occasion on which the principal steps of man's progress are made, or in which a scene is opened that gives scope to his active disposition, and is fitted, like other parts of his lot, to improve his faculties by rendering the exercise of them necessary to his preservation and well-being.Footnote 89
Ferguson ridiculed those who were “checked in the[ir] commendation of free constitutions of government, by an observation that party divisions are most flagrant in such instances, and the turbulence of free states is contrasted with the seeming tranquility of despotical government.”Footnote 90 For Ferguson, despotism “consists of injury all of one side, and which is followed by the denial of redress or impossibility of resistance.”Footnote 91 Besides, despotic governments were only seemingly peaceful and in actuality in a constant state of war between oppressors and oppressed, Ferguson argued.Footnote 92 Party struggle was thus a reasonable price to pay for freedom of participation, since “multitude of council is really in itself a greater public advantage than the talents of any single person, however great, can otherwise procure for his country.”Footnote 93 The error that resulted from the freedom of one person was best corrected by collective wisdom over time, Ferguson concluded.Footnote 94
Even if political participation was an important principle for Ferguson, he stressed the extreme danger of “confound[ing] this advantage with Civil and Political Liberty; for it may happen, that to extend the participation of power, is to destroy Liberty.”Footnote 95 The main example was Rome, where the emasculation of the senate and the increase of popular power led to the fall of the republic.Footnote 96 Political participation should accordingly not be confused with either democracy or equality, according to Ferguson.Footnote 97 He agreed with Montesquieu that democracy of the ancient, participatory kind was only practicable in small states.Footnote 98 He also argued repeatedly that social inequality was inevitable and perfectly just, and that a political hierarchy, or “ranks,” to use eighteenth-century parlance, was essential in all states.Footnote 99 In the Essay, Ferguson had argued that those who confine their views to their own subsistence or preservation could not be entrusted with the conduct of nations, as “[s]uch men, when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted.”Footnote 100 Unsurprisingly, he disagreed with Price over the importance of extending the franchise. In Britain's mixed constitution, “It is less material who elects, than who may be elected,” he concluded.Footnote 101
While Ferguson consistently stressed the importance of participation and the need to avoid making politics a separate profession,Footnote 102 extra-parliamentary discontent of the popular kind scared the living daylights out of him. His fears were connected with the potential of factional leaders to abuse a giddy populace and the danger of mob violence escalating into mob rule and eventually military government and despotism. The next section will explore Ferguson's reactions to the popular discontent and the new type of party strife that emerged in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s, in order to shed further light on Ferguson's views on the topic of party conflict.
FERGUSON VERSUS WILKES AND THE ROCKINGHAM WHIGS
Unlike Hume,Footnote 103 Ferguson never used the British party appellations—Whig and Tory—in his published writings.Footnote 104 This does not mean, however, that he should be regarded as a strictly theoretical thinker uninterested in the nitty-gritty of politics. On the contrary, he said that he “believe[d] what is done for today has more Effect than books that look big in the Shelve.”Footnote 105 Ferguson was involved in church party politics in Scotland as a member of the moderate party.Footnote 106 He also served the British state when called upon, for example, as member of a commission which negotiated with the Americans in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War. As noted, prior to his academic career, Ferguson had been chaplain to the Black Watch, a highland regiment with which he served in Flanders and Brittany. Moreover, he was, as we shall see, an active pamphleteer and corresponded with members of the British parliament. The only reason why he did not write more pamphlets was that he, as an Edinburgh professor, felt too far removed from the political scene in London and the City of Westminster. His remoteness did not make him doubt the soundness of his political convictions but he simply thought that he would be unable to keep abreast with new publications and consequently not quick enough to respond to attacks.Footnote 107
The Middlesex election dispute of 1768–70 furnishes a case study of Ferguson's views on popular tumult, party politics and the British constitution in practice.Footnote 108 Having been arrested for seditious libel after criticizing the king's speech in 1763 and declared an outlaw the following year, John Wilkes fled to France to avoid imprisonment both on these grounds and for the publication of the pornographic Essay on Woman. In 1768 he was compelled to return to England due to his financial situation and sought election to Parliament in an attempt to obtain legal immunity. The Grafton ministry expelled him from Parliament, but Wilkes was repeatedly re-elected and thrown out as a member of Parliament for Middlesex in a series of by-elections, while himself being locked up in the King's Bench prison. The whole episode led to significant unrest and mob violence in London. The question whether a majority of the House of Commons could rightfully disqualify a representative elected by the people raised constitutional questions, and commentators from all corners were eager to voice their opinions, from Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Footnote 109 In supporting expulsion, Ferguson's position was closer to that of the Tory Johnson than to that of the Whig Burke.
Ferguson did not write a pamphlet on the subject but spoke his mind in a series of letters to his friend the Scottish MP William (Johnstone) Pulteney,Footnote 110 who voted with the opposition against expulsion of Wilkes. Like Burke, Ferguson purported to defend the integrity of Britain's mixed constitution, but whereas Burke believed that the democratic element of the constitution was under attack from royal influence, Ferguson held that liberty was threatened by the populace, or, to be more precise, by party politicians in opposition who used the mob as a tool to further their own private ambitions. The most coherent opposition party at this time, the Rockingham Whig connection, was cooperating with the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights in London, which supported the “Wilkite” cause.Footnote 111 According to Ferguson, the episode was a typical example of Montesquieu's description of an opposition party being unable to admit their self-interested motives and instead having to “increase even more the terrors of the people,” who were not in real danger.Footnote 112 Ferguson singled out Burke's patron Charles Watson Wentworth, the second Marquis of Rockingham, as a culprit in his correspondence with Pulteney.Footnote 113
Ferguson was in good company in supporting the expulsion of the MP for Middlesex. Not only was Johnson appalled by the Wilkes unrest. Ferguson's compatriot David Hume was equally dismayed; indeed Hume referred to the London mob as “insolent Rascals.”Footnote 114 The Scottish literati's animosity towards Wilkes is often explained by the anti-Scottish tone of Wilkes's attacks on Lord Bute—a Scottish politician closely associated with George III and leader of the government in 1762–3—in issue forty-five of his publication the North Briton in 1763.Footnote 115 Ferguson, who had been employed as tutor to Lord Bute's sons in the late 1750s, believed that “[i]f the Populace of England Espoused his [Wilkes's] Cause for his virulence to Scotland I think the Populace of Scotland do right in wishing to have him dissgraced.”Footnote 116 However, his fear of Wilkes and the London mob had more to do with their capacity to upset the delicate balance of Britain's mixed constitution. “Our Constitution knows of no Authority but that of King Lords & Commons,” he wrote, “but we are now fostering a fourth Power in the State, That of the Populace of London, and at the time in which they are become most Corrupted we are inviting them to a share in the Government.”Footnote 117 Ferguson's distinction between the commons and the populace of London may have run along similar lines as John Brown's separation between the “people of the kingdom” and the “populace of the cities,” the former being “Those who send Representatives for the Counties to Parliament,”Footnote 118 and the latter being essentially an uneducated and poor mob.Footnote 119 Ferguson explicitly stressed that his beloved Montesquieu had underestimated the threat posed by the populace to the British constitution: “Our Government is said by Mr Montesquieu and others to be perfect. They only think of the dangers to Liberty that come from The Crown. They do not consider the dangers to Liberty that come from the Populace.”Footnote 120
The Wilkes affair and Ferguson's dismay at the popular discontent in London are important for our present enquiry as Ferguson in effect argued against concerted opposition activity in his letters to Pulteney. “I shoud not have regreted most assuredly your Opposing the Measures of a Minister on any Particular occasion,” he said,
But if I understand the Term opposition, it is joining with a Party who are engaged in distressing the Government in all Possible ways, who will allow no body to differ from them in any point whatever Nor to serve the Public in any office but in Conjunction with themselves. With this meaning in my head if I had been at London I shoud have prostrated myself at your feet to have hindered you forming any such Connection.Footnote 121
By the aid of concerted opposition activity, “Gamblers for Power” sought to “rise upon the shoulders of the Mob,” Ferguson argued.Footnote 122 He would much rather have seen “a Netural [sic] Interest . . . formed by men of Property & Family to Ward off the Evils with which the Constitution is threatened in the Ishue [sic] of a Contest between Mobs & Military Power.”Footnote 123 The Rockingham Whig party in opposition was pernicious because it was a “Party that wish[ed] for confusion & trouble” in order to further its own interest, Ferguson warned.Footnote 124 “Let your Virtuous opposition Speak. I know what they will chuse when it is their option to hurt administration without doing good to the Public or to do good to the Public without hurting Administration,” he said.Footnote 125
Ferguson continued his attack on the Rockinghamite opposition party six years later in his pamphlet in defense of Lord North's policy in the American Revolutionary War. In brief, the Rockingham Whigs opposed the government's war and advocated conciliation.Footnote 126 Ferguson conceded that the contest of parties was “undoubtedly one principle of life in our constitution,” but with the contest between the prerogative of the king and the privilege of Parliament long settled, “In the contest of our times, the parties are the pretenders of office and the holders office.”Footnote 127 In the pamphlet—a response to Richard Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776)—Ferguson described party struggle in the 1770s as a “noble contest, though an ignoble cause.”Footnote 128 The Rockingham Whigs were still the fulcrum of the opposition, and Ferguson complained that “[t]he Americans may flatter themselves, that if the party that now opposes Government, were in power, they would obtain every favour and every concession,” yet adding that this was a vain hope.Footnote 129
Ferguson thus accepted that party contest was an important principle of the British constitution, as “[i]t leads one party to watch the motions of administration; and the other to be on their guard because they are watched.”Footnote 130 At the same time, however, Ferguson was very unhappy with the nature of opposition activity of the 1770s: “As the matter now stands, indeed, it is more the interest of opposition to stop the ordinary movement of government, than to prevent its abuses,” he complained.Footnote 131 In other words, Ferguson appears to have propagated the old Country principle of “not men, but measures,” which was only practicable if opposition politicians were not seeking office in the manner of the Rockinghamites.Footnote 132 “If they [the opposition] can stop the ordinary course of government, the minister must withdraw to make way for themselves: but in preventing abuses, they only oblige him to change ill measures for good, and by this means to take a firmer hold of his power,” Ferguson wrote.Footnote 133
The American Revolutionary War soon escalated, with France and Spain entering the war on the side of the Americans in 1778 and 1779 respectively. The North ministry's policy changed from confrontation to negotiation. William Eden (later Lord Auckland), MP for Woodstock, stressed in his Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle (1779) that the entry of France and Spain into the war was a game-changer. Eden, along with Ferguson, had been part of a commission led by Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle, which had unsuccessfully negotiated with the American rebels in 1778.Footnote 134 After its failure, the commission made the case for peace negotiations public in a “Manifesto and Proclamation.”Footnote 135 Eden's main intention in publishing his Letters to Carlisle may have been to defend the policy of negotiation, but, interestingly for our present purposes, he also tackled “party spirit” as he appealed to national unity.Footnote 136 With the aid of borrowed phrases from both Hume and Bolingbroke, Eden sought to show that party struggle was particularly pernicious at a time of war.Footnote 137 Ferguson wrote a letter to Eden, in which he appears to have agreed with the main points put forward in the first letter to Carlisle, applauding Eden for seeking to “rescue the Subject of Politics out of the Hands of Anonymous Party Writers.”Footnote 138 Ferguson emphasized that “our Constitution has Always engendered such Partys & Multiplyed such Descriptions” and “[w]hile the Constitution is safe; Ambition & Faction will be Vigorous & Free, & we may owe to them very great & Material Favours.”Footnote 139 Yet Ferguson was not prepared “to justify Faction in any Single Instance in which it made a Sacrifice of the Public Safety to Private Ambition or Interest.”Footnote 140 He continued,
I have heard People talk as if it were understood that because Faction is a Physical appendage of in [sic] our Constitution, that therefore every degree of Faction is to be morally Licensed, & that we are so far to forget the Distinction of Right and wrong as to hold, that to be streight in Politics, which we hold to be crooked in Private Life. I mean Evading & Dissfiguring the Truth of Serving the Ennemys of our Countrey in order to hurt our Rivals in Power.Footnote 141
In his letter to Eden, Ferguson applauded his friend George Dempster of Dunnichen, Scottish MP and a member of the Poker Club,Footnote 142 for abandoning the Rockingham Whigs to join the government side, while “[c]ondemn[ing] Others for Persisting in Opposition to the very Brink of National Destruction.”Footnote 143 In other words, Ferguson was not arguing against all types of opposition activity, but against the particular activities and form of organization of the Rockinghamite opposition party.Footnote 144 It is important to stress that Ferguson was “angry” with the new type of party connection embodied by the Rockingham Whigs and defended by their spokesperson Edmund Burke, i.e. the party connection that saw individuals and measures as interlinked rather than separate.Footnote 145 Neither in private nor in public did Ferguson advocate anything like the abolition of parties, which would have been both futile, seeing his view of human nature, and highly inconsistent with his views on political freedom and participation explained in the previous sections. “I know that many ill consequences might be imputed to the state of our parties; but I am not for removing any one safe-guard to freedom, until we have found a better,” he stressed in the Remarks.Footnote 146
To return to the Middlesex election dispute, Ferguson had argued that a party that came to power as a body of men and supported by the London populace would be an unpalatable and dangerous prospect. “A Popular Party in the house having the Majority within & the Cry without may proceed to the fury of mere Party expulsions,” he said.Footnote 147 This was a much more pernicious prospect than that of “a Corrupt Minister [who] will be glad to sneak through with his Majority & will surely avoid the odium of expelling any worthy man when by the very supposition of a majority he can go on without any such measure.”Footnote 148 In short, Ferguson distinguished between plurality of opinions and the politics of party: “I shoud be very sorry to see men all of one mind in Parliament: but either this manner of Party or the State itself I am perswaded cannot last.”Footnote 149
In lieu of party connection, Ferguson suggested to Pulteney many of the familiar Country proposals to deal with executive influence over the legislative, known as “corruption” in eighteenth-century parlance. These included expulsion or at least a severe reduction of MPs in the government's pay and shorter parliaments of not more than three years—reform proposals which Burke rejected in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents and instead proposed party connection as the catch-all solution.Footnote 150 In 1776, however, Ferguson advanced a “Humean” defense of executive influence over the legislative.Footnote 151 His having repeated the argument that “it is proper that the executive should have a voice in the legislature” in the Principles, we should not overstress his belief in the feasibility of these traditional Country reforms.Footnote 152 Ferguson is better described as an exponent of a Scottish form of establishment Whiggism.Footnote 153 Tellingly, Ferguson never proposed instructions from constituents, stressing that “[i]t is the Spirit of our constitution that Members of Parliament shoud be well chosen but that being chosen they should be Masters.”Footnote 154
It is clear that Ferguson agreed with Hume that extra-constitutional violence would in the end lead to military despotism.Footnote 155 More specifically, what he feared was that the London mob would make the government resort to military government to restore law and order; alternatively that a popular leader, a modern-day Caesar or Oliver Cromwell, would rise on the shoulders of the mob and put an end to political liberty.Footnote 156 Rockingham may have been one of the “Gamblers for Power,” but Ferguson concurred with Hume that the real threat from this perspective was posed by Chatham (William Pitt the Elder).Footnote 157 “I enter my Caution against not only the means that tend to a Dissolution of Parliament but even a change of Ministers, Untill this contest between Mobbing & Government has ceased & untill that designing & Dangerous Demagogue L-Chatham has again taken the Gout,” Ferguson wrote in his last surviving letter to Pulteney on the matter.Footnote 158
Later, in January 1770, the Duke of Grafton resigned, marking the end of the sixth ministry of the turbulent 1760s, and made way for Lord North, for whom Ferguson composed his pamphlet against Richard Price. The hysteria around Wilkes died down,Footnote 159 but Ferguson's fear of the “mob” and popular discontent remained. When the anti-Catholic Gordon riots broke out ten years later, he proposed the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act so that the government could effectively put down public disturbances.Footnote 160 If the government allowed “systematic or repeated riots near the vitals of Government,” it could lead to “the start of order that prevails at Constantinople,” i.e. “Asiatic” despotism, Ferguson argued.Footnote 161 His hardline approach to political disorder was perfectly consistent with his theoretical writings. As we have seen, the goal of civil government was to secure the people from crime and chaos, and it was in this security that “modern” liberty consisted, according to Ferguson.Footnote 162 He had earlier written the following in the Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769): “In times of occasional tumult, popular frenzy, or rebellion, it may be necessary to treat those who commit such crimes, not as subjects amenable to the laws, but as enemies, who, by disturbing the public peace, have deprived every citizen of his safety, and who therefore cannot have the benefit of laws until the public has recovered its security.”Footnote 163 Accordingly, Ferguson may have seen himself as following in the footsteps of Cicero, who had condoned tyrannicide on the basis that “if the wildness and monstrousness of a beast appears in human form, it must be removed from the human community.”Footnote 164
CONCLUSION
The common denominator in all of Ferguson's writings was his fear of the populace and the prospect of a demagogue rising on the shoulders of a popular “party” to establish military government.Footnote 165 This fear makes him come across as a less straightforward advocate of political conflict than is often portrayed. Popular parties are always a political evil, according to Ferguson, since, as he expressed it in his reply to Richard Price, “the power of the people is not the good of the people.”Footnote 166 Political liberty rightly understood, i.e. security under the rule of law, was usually undermined when popular discontent flared up. Some might have thought that the Rockingham party connection, with its aristocratic bias and attachment to the Court Whig tradition, would have been the kind of party that Ferguson could tolerate.Footnote 167 A recovery of Ferguson's responses to the John Wilkes episode in 1768–70 and the American rebellion shows, however, that Ferguson was appalled by the Rockinghamites’ willingness to tap into popular discontent and democratic frenzy.Footnote 168 Moreover, this article has demonstrated that Ferguson disagreed with the Rockingham Whigs not only in matter of policy but also in that of their modus operandi as an organized opposition party seeking to take power as a “body of men”—the form of political party defended by Edmund Burke.
The intention of the present article has not been to add Ferguson's name to the long list of anti-party thinkers of the eighteenth century.Footnote 169 Ferguson never believed in the possibility—or indeed the desirability—of eradicating parties and differences in politics. Ferguson admired the gregarious, generous and benevolent character of the Christian Stoic. At the same time, he understood that this was a route only available to a precious few. Another necessary ingredient for happiness was activity, which for the “citizen class” could take the form of participation in politics, something Ferguson in turn viewed as inevitably conflictual because of how he interpreted human nature. Party politics was thus inescapable and potentially advantageous, since it provided an avenue for action.
Ferguson also agreed with Montesquieu and Hume that party struggle had the potential to give life to the British constitution, even if we have seen that he seems to have had different “parties” in mind. Montesquieu and Hume made more explicit references to parties of government and opposition, or Court and Country parties, whereas the only type of party conflict of which Ferguson unequivocally approved amounted to little more than the checking and balancing of the different parts of the mixed constitution. Ferguson stressed, however, that participation and party competition in this limited form made citizens attentive and engaged. Without such “agitation and troubles,” citizens of commercial nations risked losing their vitality and becoming unworthy of the freedom they possessed, he warned.
For all the reasons discussed in the present article, Ferguson emphasized that it was imperative that the contest under the British constitution was confined to the visible powers of the state: monarch, lords and commons. He was vehemently opposed to a “fourth estate” of the populace impressing their views on their representatives and involving themselves directly in government, and thereby creating disorder and tumult.Footnote 170 This does not make Ferguson a reactionary; he saw himself as supporting a mixed system of government that he alongside most of the Scottish moderate literati regarded as progressive, but fragile. He feared that if British politicians bowed to popular pressures, or, worse, if they sought to exploit such pressures to promote their self-interests, which was how Ferguson conceived of the Rockingham Whigs, Britain could expect a similar fate as that of Rome, when the ascendency of the popular party and the emasculation of the aristocratic party led to the destruction of liberty for all and the rise of military government.Footnote 171
Even if he sometimes used the words interchangeably, we can thus conclude that Ferguson made a conceptual distinction between “parties,” which represented the different parts of the constitution and protected genuine interests, and “factions,” which sacrificed the public safety to ambition and private interest. This type of distinction was, at least since Bolingbroke, fairly commonplace in eighteenth-century British discourse.Footnote 172 The Ferguson who emerges from this investigation is indeed much more a product of his own day and intellectual environment than the maverick who “approv[ed] of factional conflict” and “anticipated” both Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in his analysis of conflict.Footnote 173 While Ferguson was certainly no crude anti-party thinker, it is very unlikely that he would have accepted descriptions of himself as an advocate of internal discord. He ends up somewhere between Burke's defense of organized parliamentary parties and Rousseau's outright ban on partial interests.Footnote 174 Ferguson's views were eclectic but characteristically moderate, and not entirely dissimilar from the mainstream and sometimes hysterical anti-party rhetoric of the eighteenth century.
