II. Adam Ferguson on Corruption

Adam Ferguson’s concern with corruption, which runs through his Essay on the History of Civil Society, is focused squarely on the loss of interest, by citizens, in preserving their republic. Ferguson works out of a tradition in which “corruption” means the decay of a good system of government into an oppressive version of itself, but he places the blame for such decline on a change in the characteristic motivation of ordinary citizens rather than on structural factors like a breakdown in a system of checks and balances. Ancient writers on government had divided it into three general forms, he says—democracy, aristocracy, and despotism—noting that Montesquieu had followed them in this. Montesquieu is a central source for Ferguson: a model of how to do political thought. Ferguson draws attention to Montesquieu’s association of each form of government with a characteristic kind of motivation in the people who act under them, stressing, more than Montesquieu himself does, the degree to which these kinds of motivation determine what governments achieve. Montesquieu had said that equality is the principle of democracies, for instance, but Ferguson maintains that where people act out of fear, they will only “pretend to act on a foot of equality” while really using that pretense to further their own personal gain.^{Footnote 2} “In point of form,” there may be no difference between two states—they may have the same sorts of offices, and select people for those offices in similar ways—but where courage, “intrepidity,” and “the love of justice” motivate the citizenry, a state with this form will embody a real principle of equality and tend toward democracy, while a state in which equality is “valued merely as an equal pretension to the objects of avarice and ambition” will tend towards despotism (EHCS, 72–73). Citizen motivation is thus more important than institutional structure:^{Footnote 3} two states with the same institutional structure may represent “perfect [civic] virtue” and “total [civic] corruption” respectively (72). In a society filled with “corrupt men,” there may in fact be an oscillation between tyranny and mob rule, without the difference in form making any difference to the quality of governance: “neither the ascendancy of the multitude, nor that of the tyrant, will secure the administration of justice.” Only where the citizens of a society realize that they are “born for candour and affection to [their] fellow-creatures” can stable, good government arise (73).

Ferguson adds a slap at Hobbes to this last point. “[T]he speculative,” he says, equate the state of nature with a “habitual state of war,” but this is really to be found in the violent struggles, among corrupt men, between tyrants and the mob, “not in the first approaches of a rude and simple tribe” to establishing a government. Human nature is not in itself prone to civil war; it moves in that direction only where moral and political conditions corrupt it such that everyone seeks his or her selfish interests alone, and tries to overcome others by instilling fear in them. Pace Hobbes, we are inherently neither selfish nor fearful. We become that way only in unhealthy societies.

The political profile of a society thus depends, for Ferguson, on the moral spirit of its citizenry. Ferguson notes that both theorists and ordinary people tend to regard the cultivation of the talents and virtues of citizens as merely incidental to larger national objects. “We hazard being treated with ridicule,” he says, “when we require political establishments, merely to cultivate the talents of men, and to inspire the sentiments of a liberal mind”; some motive of personal or national self-interest must be offered to justify such a project (132). He himself thinks that cultivating talents and sentiments is worth doing for moral reasons alone, but notes that it also conduces to “public safety” and “personal freedom” (133).

Ferguson is a great believer in the priority of action over theory, when it comes to developing moral qualities,^{Footnote 4} and he says that cultivating the talents and sentiments of a people is best done by giving them an active role in their government. Where the members of a community are “admit[ted] . . . to a share in the government” and have their attention “summon[ed] . . . to objects of a public nature,” their talents and manners are improved. They are likely “to act on the maxims of freedom and justice” because that is required by their public role^{Footnote 5}. Where they have no such role, they are likely to fall back into caring about their own interests alone, and “consider[ing] their fellow subjects [just] as rivals in interest, and competitors in their lucrative pursuits.”^{Footnote 6} In that case, they will see their fellow human beings just as tools for their selfish satisfaction—mere means rather than ends in themselves, to use Kantian language. But when we take up this attitude toward other human beings, we degrade ourselves to the level of an animal:

And “[o]n this corrupt foundation, men become either rapacious, deceitful, and violent, ready to trespass on the rights of others; or servile, mercenary, and base, prepared to relinquish their own” (226–27). A disregard for the rights of others and a disregard for one’s own rights are flip sides of the same coin, says Ferguson, and they are brought on by a failure to care for one’s community: if we do not respect the communities that are essential to preserving human dignity, we will lose respect for human dignity itself. Individual freedom and dignity can be safeguarded only within communities dedicated to respecting them; following self-interest alone leads to an animal condition in which both respect for others and self-respect quickly become impossible.

This is corruption, for Ferguson. At its core it is not simply a failure to care about the public as a whole, but a failure to regard one’s fellow citizens as one’s equals. Or perhaps we should say that a failure to care about the public as a whole, for Ferguson, is a failure to care about one’s fellow citizens as one’s equals. There are two reasons for that: because maintaining the equal respect of each citizen for the others seems to be constitutive of the public good for Ferguson, and because if one does regard one’s fellow citizens as one’s equals, one will care about the good of each of them, hence the good of all of them.^{Footnote 8} In any case, people need to take up these linked concerns and not rely just on formal principles or institutional structures to protect their rights. Ferguson stresses that the mere “pretension to equal justice and freedom” (177)—the mere declaration of their importance in public discourse and law—will not ensure true justice and freedom under conditions of great economic inequality. The “lowest orders of men” in such unequal societies, he says, suffer not merely from ignorance but from corruption, which he defines as “a principle of envy, or of servility” that follows from the desire to amass wealth in order to achieve social status. The desire for wealth is unproblematic as long as it leads us only to acquire what we need for “subsistence, or even [for] enjoyment,” but it corrupts us once it comes to define “distinction and honour”: once “fortune constitutes rank” (154, 226). (Rank is what Fred Hirsch dubbed a “positional good”: something that one person can have only if others do not.^{Footnote 9}) In that case, we cannot regard others as equals, and we become prone to seeing them instead either as inferiors to look down upon or superiors to ingratiate. But people who see their fellow citizens as inferiors or superiors cannot govern themselves: they are “unfit to command” and given either to infighting or to “servility and corruption” (178).

Ferguson does not think that the moral spirit of a people is something that arises purely from the internal state of their wills, from religious or ideological commitment, or from a process of moral education. Rather, for all his dismissal of the idea that institutional forms, on their own, can preserve peace and freedom, he sees certain institutional arrangements as crucial to arousing and maintaining moral spirit. One such arrangement, as indicated above, is participation in government. That’s of particular interest to me here, and I’ll come back to it later. But Ferguson doesn’t think the entire population in any large state can participate in government—that will just be mob rule, which is oppressive to the real interests of the people (156-58). He also sees the root cause of a turn from public spirit to private interest as an attitude toward wealth that cannot be altered by way of political structures. As we’ve seen, he regards the idea that fortune should bestow rank as the deepest source of moral and political corruption, the force that most leads people away from realizing that they were “born for candour and affection to [their] fellow-creatures.”^{Footnote 10} So the real cure for corruption would seem to involve eliminating economic inequality, at least where it is great enough to determine social status.

And Ferguson indeed thinks that economic equality would be wonderful if it were possible, praising the institutions of ancient Sparta at length. Sparta alone, he says, “made virtue an object of state.”^{Footnote 11} But he does not think that anything like ancient Sparta is possible in the modern day.^{Footnote 12} We have been bitten irremediably by the desire to compete for wealth, he thinks, and “must be contented to derive our freedom” from sources other than the Spartan arrangements. Laws limiting “the excessive accumulation of wealth,” from the abolition of primogeniture and entail to sumptuary regulations, may be of some use in this regard, but Ferguson warns that they will not “shut up [the] source of corruption” that comes from the idea that fortune should bestow rank.

Nothing will shut up that source. But we can limit the damage it does by restricting extreme wealth: and by the rule of law, a balance of powers in the structure of government, and institutions like jury trial and habeas corpus (159–60). In addition, Ferguson thinks that open, wide discussion can strengthen our freedom and widen our horizons. He praises the “dispute[s] of a free people” (209), says that “nothing . . . but corruption or slavery can suppress the debates that subsist among men of integrity” (63), and warns against rulers who try to “silence the voice of mankind” (210). Ferguson believes that vigorous ideological disagreement, even what others in his day denounced as “faction,” is useful to keep freedom alive. “The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties, not in enjoying the reposes of a pacific station,” he says, and it is a great mistake to suppose that the “intermission of national and political effort” contributes to the public good. On the contrary, without “those disputes of party . . . and . . . noise of dissension which generally accompany the exercise of freedom, we may venture to prognosticate corruption” to the manners and spirit that preserve a free nation (242).^{Footnote 13}

In short: freedom of speech, protection of equal rights under the law, and participation in both making and applying law are essential to developing what Ferguson calls the “political character” of people, as against their private, self-interested character. And only with a well-developed political character will the inhabitants of a country a) look out for the interests of their fellow citizens, and therefore b) preserve their own, and their fellow citizens’, political freedom (210). A believer in the importance of political freedom must therefore also be a believer in the importance of political character, and seek to prevent the corruption of freedom by maintaining political systems that encourage open discussion, and that involve citizens, as much as possible, in the running of the state. By contrast, a constitution which leads “all orders of men [to be immersed] in their separate pursuits of pleasure,” without paying attention to the good of the state, is one which “may put an end to the exercise of those very virtues that were required” to design that constitution (210). A state designed that way is likely, that is, to undermine the foundations of its own freedom. This is the most devastating kind of corruption, for Ferguson (210-11).

III. Ferguson and Smith

It’s worth taking a moment to compare Ferguson with Adam Smith on corruption. Ferguson and Smith are often contrasted with one another. The first is seen as a civic republican, foreshadowing Marx, suspicious of the division of labor and the market and enthusiastic about government. The second is seen as the classical liberal par excellence, foreshadowing Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, suspicious of government and lavishing praise on the division of labor and the market. Scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment know that this contrast is far too stark, if only in the way it overlooks Smith’s reservations about the effects of the division of labor.^{Footnote 14} But the problems with the standard view go far beyond this. Ferguson and Smith were friends; Ferguson was in the end as thoroughly committed as Smith to the liberal political and socioeconomic order of their day;^{Footnote 15} and while it may be true that Marx found more to admire in Ferguson than in Smith, and that Friedman found more to admire in Smith than in Ferguson, neither of these later figures is particularly close to his eighteenth-century forebear. There is a contrast between Ferguson and Smith, and it is an instructive one for both an investigation into the meaning of corruption and the history of political theory more generally. But the contrast is subtler than the standard picture suggests. To see it, we need first to appreciate how much these figures share.

To begin with, Ferguson borrows a great deal from Smith when it comes to the nature and virtues of commercial society. He tells us that commerce leads people to become “punctual” (138, 180), just as Smith does,^{Footnote 16} and to develop a number of the other virtues that Smith sees as a result of commerce.^{Footnote 17} He says, as Smith does, that “liberty and personal security is the great foundation” of national wealth, and suggests, as Smith does, that politicians should refrain from intervening in the economy while merchants should not confuse their business interests with the interests of their country.^{Footnote 18} His account of the division of labor is close to Smith’s (172–75), although he calls it “the separation of arts and professions”; he has a parallel, if highly compressed, account of the distinction between productive and unproductive labor;^{Footnote 19} and he has a similarly brief version of Smith’s famous account of how feudal lords gave up their power in return for luxury goods (238–39; compare WN, III.iv). In addition, he does not at any point suggest that a commitment to the public good should motivate economic activity: like Smith, he seems to think that self-interest is the appropriate or inevitable driving force of the system by which we improve our material condition. There is no reason, then, to think that Ferguson differs with Smith over either the structure of the modern, commercial economy or its moral and political advantages.

At the same time, Smith agrees entirely with Ferguson that to base status on wealth is a great source of corruption. “[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition,” says Smith, “is . . . the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”^{Footnote 20} Smith thinks this disposition is the source of a distinction of ranks in society that is necessary to its stability (TMS, 52–53, WN, 710–15), but he also regards it as morally corrupting. Admiration and honor are due to “wisdom and virtue,” not to wealth, and contempt is due to “vice and folly,” not to poverty; the twisting of these attitudes of approval and disapproval so that they go out instead to a status based on wealth attacks moral judgment at its core, giving rise to a pursuit of empty vanities, on the one hand, and a failure to care adequately for the poor, on the other. The first of these pathologies makes for shallow lives, and for the flourishing of “the insolent and insignificant flatterers, who commonly figure the most in such corrupted societies” (TMS, 63); the second makes for inequity and cruelty.^{Footnote 21}

Where Smith and Ferguson differ is over the best solution to this problem. Smith does not recommend a participatory political system, and is much more worried than Ferguson about the dangers of “party” and faction, and of the sorts of ambition that Ferguson thinks will keep us concerned with the good of our nation. Not coincidentally perhaps, Ferguson was a far more enthusiastic advocate of widespread military participation than Smith. Although both Smith and Ferguson belonged to the “Poker Club,” which was formed to “poke up” public opinion in favor of a Scottish militia after the 1745 Jacobite rising, Smith played down the military value of such grassroots fighting groups in the Wealth of Nations, to the irritation of his friends in the Club, including Ferguson.^{Footnote 22} And even as regards the moral value of militias, Smith located that in the fact that participation in a fighting force helps foster the courage of the individual participants—helps overcome the “mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness, which cowardice necessarily involves in it” (WN, 787)—not in its keeping alive energies by which citizens can collectively protect their freedom. Smith also sees the intellectual limitations of the simple worker, in an advanced division of labor, as the most significant moral problem facing the poor, and proposes some level of universal education as a corrective for this problem, while Ferguson, in a passage that looks as though it was written as a direct rebuke to Smith,^{Footnote 23} dismisses “the defect of knowledge, and of liberal education” as “the least of [the] failings” of the poor, insisting that we should focus our moral concern for them instead on the corruption that comes of their “admiration of wealth unpossessed,” which leads to “envy or . . . servility” (177): a resentment of the wealthy or a fawning attendance on them. Ferguson also thinks that the division of labor breeds an irremediable corruption of civic virtue when it professionalizes the political and military realms. To separate our lives in society from the governance and defense of society “dismember[s] the human character,” he says (218). Whatever citizens do to make a living, they should participate in statesmanship and soldiery—be committed to shaping and defending their commonwealth. By the same token, no one should be only a statesman or a soldier, uninvolved in other aspects of the lives they govern or protect.^{Footnote 24} Smith takes the professionalization of politics and soldiery more in stride, agreeing that it can be harmful to the virtues (civic and personal) of ordinary citizens, but seeing it as an inevitable consequence of the advanced division of labor, and as less baleful, politically, than Ferguson supposes (WN, 782, 694–707).

Smith thus seems to have had less faith than Ferguson did in either the need for or the availability of public remedies for the corruption that comes about when social status is tied to wealth. Correspondingly, he seems to have had more faith than Ferguson in the possibility that we can alleviate the problem by way of private remedies: internal changes to ourselves, such as the development of a strong self-command, and efforts to raise our children properly: to model virtue for them and make sure that their interactions with their peers enhance their self-command (TMS, 145–56; WN, 773–74). Smith looks to moral and small-scale social remedies for corruption, rather than to grand public policies, or features of a state’s design.

There are, I think, deep sources in the moral outlooks of our authors for this difference between them. Smith, less utilitarian than Ferguson,^{Footnote 25} sees virtue, in Stoic fashion, as achieved by way of an internal struggle that we each carry out with ourselves; he is consequently more skeptical of the impact that law and institutions can have on us. Ferguson, conceiving virtue more as what fits us out to be part of a social whole, and as expressed in our commitment to such wholes, is also more comfortable with having our societies shape us.

This difference between the two informs, I think, a passage on corruption in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments that has no parallel in Ferguson:

Here the greatest “corrupter” of our moral sentiments is no longer the admiration for wealth; it is “faction and fanaticism” instead (the first of which, remember, Ferguson rather liked). However exactly we want to reconcile this claim with the discussion of corruption as due to the admiration of wealth in TMS,^{Footnote 26} it fits well with Smith’s moral system as a whole. The hinge of Smith’s moral system is the impartial spectator: the notional figure that represents our ability to suspend our passions and prejudices when we make judgments. So anything that imports biases into our conception of the impartial spectator itself will badly corrupt our moral sentiments. Like the attraction we have to the rich, this threat is more likely to arise when it is supported by a social group to which we belong, but in this case a fanatic religious or political movement that sets itself against the rich could be that social group. So this does not seem to be the sort of corruption that Ferguson had in mind. Indeed, because it conduces to a concern with the public, “faction” is a check on corruption for Ferguson, while the kind of concern with the public characteristic of faction is for Smith a kind of corruption.^{Footnote 27}

Once again, we see a far greater association of virtue with community in Ferguson than in Smith. For Ferguson, the greatest danger to morality and politics is selfishness, an exclusively private orientation, by which one turns away from the good of one’s community. For Smith, that greatest danger is partiality, which is not quite the same thing as selfishness. Partiality is a mode of moral judgment that favors people more or less than they deserve. One may, and commonly will, favor the rich over the poor this way, but one may also unjustly or inappropriately favor the poor over the rich, or the members of one’s own political party over its opponents, or the members of one’s religion or nation over everyone else. Unjust or inept favoring is the problem here, not a private orientation. A good human being and good citizen, for Smith, may legitimately care about various individuals more than about her community, and in that sense may have a private orientation; she just needs to do so fairly, rather than allowing her attachments to overwhelm her judgment of individuals with whom her loved ones come into conflict. Ferguson is less worried about being unfair to individuals and more worried about caring for communities. Accordingly, a public orientation is essential to his conception of how we fend off corruption; it is incidental to Smith’s.

That said, Ferguson supposes that caring about the good of our community entails caring about the freedom and rights of the individuals in that community,^{Footnote 28} while caring about each individual, for Smith, entails caring about a variety of public goods (the establishment of justice, especially, but also infrastructure and educational institutions). Both Ferguson and Smith see us as “born for candour and affection” to our fellow human beings;^{Footnote 29} both think we all need freedom and dignity, and should not live in “servility”; both think that the association of wealth with status, and division of society into ranks on the basis of that association, corrupts our ability to respect and promote one another’s freedom and dignity. They are, that is, both liberals—believers in the equal dignity of individuals, in the need for societies to respect that dignity, and in the importance of market freedom and the freedom of speech to the ability of societies to respect individual dignity. They just have different views about what institutions are needed—the market plus basic public education, for Smith; participatory governance and militias, for Ferguson—to foster liberalism.

Accordingly, we should not dismiss Ferguson’s conception of corruption as something that only an illiberal admirer of virtue-based societies would endorse. The fact that Smith shares his concerns can help inoculate us against that thought. The fact that Ferguson himself expresses respect for the free market and for free speech also helps. The two disagree in more nuanced, limited ways.

IV. Conclusion: What Remains Useful about Ferguson on Corruption

Once Ferguson’s full position comes into view, even modern liberals should be able to take seriously his suggestions about what corruption is, and how it can best be alleviated. I don’t mean to suggest that Ferguson has the only correct conception of corruption, and that we should ignore the more familiar problems of, say, cops taking money from drug dealers, or elected officials selling political favors for personal gain. But I do think that Ferguson has his eye on certain real and important problems, and that bearing them in mind will give us a different perspective on the more familiar, personal kinds of corruption.

In the first place, the dependence of social status on wealth does tempt people to downplay decency or virtue. It also encourages us to engage in a zero-sum game—wealth-based status is necessarily a positional good—and therefore attend to our own well-being as opposed to that of our neighbors. The achievement of virtue is by contrast not a zero-sum game. We could in principle all be courageous, wise, temperate, kind, and so on; these qualities are not defined, as wealth is, by way of a comparison between the amount one of us has of them and the amount that others have. This is especially true where it is basic to virtue (as it is for Smith and Ferguson) that we respect every other human being as our equal.^{Footnote 30} Construed in this way, virtue is something we can all attain, and encourage one another to attain. To replace wealth with virtue as the foundation of social status is thus a project well-suited to the health of a democratic society: to the maintenance of a society in which we strive to “face each other openly,” as John Rawls famously put it.^{Footnote 31}

In the second place, it is not unreasonable to suppose that an increase in the kinds of corruption that we commonly associate with the term today—bribery, misuse of public office: what I have called “personal corruption”—can be a consequence of the corruption of virtue that Ferguson describes. These activities will surely be more common in a society in which self-interest is highly valued, especially if that self-interest is directed at outdoing others in the accumulation of money. A concern for decency and the common good will tamp down the excesses of self-interest, as will the fear of being seen as excessively self-interested, in a society that values decency and commitment to the common good. A society of people actively engaged in protecting and promoting their common good is also likely to be more vigilant in rooting out bribery and public malfeasance, and more vigorous in punishing it. Moreover, the conditions enabling liberal societies to survive surely include a willingness, among all who live in such societies, to shape and protect their institutions: to shape and protect at least the common good that consists in liberty itself.

Finally, Ferguson’s institutional recommendations for fostering a concern with the common good are eminently compatible with liberalism. Unlike Marxist or theocratic proposals, they do not offend against free speech, the freedom of conscience, or the importance of private property. They also seem realistic. Both open political discussion and participatory government do encourage people to be concerned with the public good rather than just their private goods. To stick just with participatory government: we learn to care about the common good by practice, as we learn other virtues. The more we are put in situations in which we need to care about the common good, therefore, the more we are likely to care about it—and to know how to do that thoughtfully.

But if this much of what Ferguson says is reasonable, then we have reason, in many cases, to seek more government, not less, as a cure for corruption. To have many of our goods publicly provided rather than privately purchased is likely to instill in us a positive attitude toward our public realm as well as a sense of responsibility to the other citizens served by it. And to be able directly to participate in the decisions about how those goods are provided—as we can where they are fairly local goods: a neighborhood school or park, for instance—will help us develop citizen virtues.^{Footnote 32} Accordingly, we will want problems to be handled by citizen groups, school boards, town councils, and the like, rather than leaving them up to the market, or private initiatives, alone,^{Footnote 33} and we will have a more general presumption in favor of public rather than private ways of providing goods. There are costs in efficiency here, to be sure, as well as a danger that poorly educated citizens will be swayed, in their views about how to manage public goods, by foolish or dangerous ideologies. It is also true, as the invitation letter soliciting this essay suggested, that large government bureaucracies can be prone to personal corruption and that that corruption can be hard to root out. For all these reasons, sometimes it will clearly be better not to have government handle a problem—to put it instead in the hands of private entities, especially where they can compete with one another in a vigorous free market. But there will always be a cost to privatizing a problem, in the reduction that that entails of opportunities for citizens to be engaged in the pursuit of the common good. And reducing those opportunities, by encouraging citizens to immerse themselves in their private interests, is corrupting of democracy.

So while we may well have reasons for a presumption against government action, out of a concern for personal corruption, we also have reasons for a presumption in favor of government action, out of a concern for civic (Fergusonian) corruption. There is a trade-off between these concerns, and I have no recipe for how to strike the optimum balance between them. I do want to insist that there is a balance to be struck here, and that the presumption in favor of government is at least as reasonable as the one against it.