Abstract
Political theorists who are interested in the Western republican tradition often interpret Adam Ferguson as a civic humanist and contrast his work with the liberal institutionalism of Hume and Smith. I argue that the republican interpretation fails to understand Ferguson's view of human action and thereby obscures his potential contribution to liberal theory. This article offers a comprehensive account of Ferguson's concept of action, and emphasizes the instrumental and scientific aspects of his thought. Ferguson views politics as an accumulative project involving both political participation and non-political forms of activity. His thoughts on action and politics, therefore, reveal much about his view of the potential of non-political action and the ways it contributes to civil and political society.
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Notes
Pocock's sustained forays into the Scottish Enlightenment can be found in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and in an essay, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist Paradigm and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The first major republican “revisionist” account of the period was Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
For many years, David Kettler's book on Ferguson has been the seminal book-length treatment of Ferguson's thought. Since the reissuing of Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, however, Ferguson studies have grown substantially. See David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965); Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political, and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2006); David Allan, Adam Ferguson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: History, Progress, and Human Nature (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
The link between Ferguson and free-market thinking is due in large part to Friedrich Hayek's work on “spontaneous order,” a concept whose origins he attributes to Ferguson. See Friedrich Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in The Essence of Hayek, ed. Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984). See also Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Ronald Hamowy, The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek (Cheltanham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2005); Malcolm Jack, Corruption & Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate (New York: AMS Press, 1989).
Allan, Adam Ferguson, 93.
Ibid., 96; Chapter 5.
Duncan Forbes, “Introduction,” in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 28; Marco Guena, “Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of Adam Ferguson,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Vol. 2, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181.
Christopher Berry, The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 136.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating; Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. A. Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson's Politics of Action,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress, and Human Nature, ed. Heath and Merolle; Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Introduction,” in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
9 Oz-Salzberger, Translating, 4.
Ibid., 111.
This is to suggest not that all republicans are civic humanists, but that the characterization of Ferguson as a republican leans heavily on a civic humanist reading of his thought.
Pocock argues that classical republicanism can be reconciled with commercial activity so long as such activity is confined to producing the “possessor of property whose function was to bring him not profit and luxury, but independence and leisure. Without property he must be a servant.” Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms,” 236. Oz-Salzberger notes that Ferguson concedes the inescapability of luxury to his Scottish friends; Oz-Salzberger, Translating, 44, 98, 119. On Ferguson's response to the American cause, see especially his response to Richard Price in Adam Ferguson, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price… (London: T. Cadell, 1776), where he confronts what would become the argument for freedom-as-non-domination: “the Liberty of every class and order is not proportioned to the power they enjoy, but to the security they have for the preservation of their rights” (11). On that theory, see especially Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On his ambiguous republicanism, see Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Chapter 3.
On civic humanism, see Oz-Salzberger, Translating, 91, 122, 37. On “activism,” see 125–26.
Oz-Salzberger, Translating, 126–27, emphasis added. She is referring to Ferguson, Essay, 221–22. Elsewhere she refers to “political laziness”; Oz-Salzberger, Translating, 98.
Oz-Salzberger is not alone in identifying action at the center of Ferguson's thought. See also Hill, Passionate Society, Chapters 5, 7, 10; Allan, Adam Ferguson, Chapter 5; Kettler, Ferguson, Chapters 4, 6, 7; Craig Smith, “Adam Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Heath and Merolle; Gary L. McDowell, “Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism,” Review of Politics 45 (1983): 536–52; Christopher J. Berry, “‘But Art Itself Is Natural to Man’: Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity,” in Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Heath and Merolle.
Oz-Salzberger notes that the noun “pursuit”—“Ferguson's favorite term for manly exertion as well as political verve”—appears seventy-six times in the Essay and fifty more times in The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic. One might add to that count in the Essay twenty-three uses of the word “exertion,” twenty-six for “zeal,” forty-one for “active,” thirteen for “activity,” and thirty more for “action.” Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson's Politics of Action,” 150.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33. Additionally, it should be noted that the “Stoic” described in Hume's thus-named essay bears a great resemblance to his good friend, Ferguson.
Ferguson was a chaplain in the Black Watch Regiment—a cleric, not a soldier. See Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Introduction,” vii-xii; Kettler, Adam Ferguson, 44–47, n.5. On Ferguson's role in the Poker Club, see John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: J. Donald Publishers, 1985). On his enthusiasm for MacPherson's Ossian, see Dafydd Moore, “Adam Ferguson, the Poems of Ossian and the Imaginative Life of the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of European Ideas 31 (2005): 277–88. Pocock makes the Fletcher-Ferguson connection. See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 230–52.
Allan notes that “the vita activa, so characteristic of Fletcher's political career as of his political thought, was in turn to re-emerge as the main underlying theme of Ferguson's own theory of citizenship.” Allan, Adam Ferguson, 100.
Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson's Politics of Action,” 147.
Ibid.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Introduction.” “Corruption” and “decline” were two prominent themes in the Machiavellian civic vocabulary circulating through the end of the eighteenth century. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Hume was unimpressed with the Essay. See David Hume, “Hume to Blair, February 11, 1766,” in Letters of Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 11–12.
I treat the Principles as broadly representative of Ferguson's thinking, despite it being published (1792) some twenty-five years after the Essay (1767). By his own account, the purpose of the Principles was not “attempting the invention of entire new systems,” but rather “recalling labours… past” (vi). More specifically, the Principles were a revision of the Institutes, published in 1769 on the heels of the Essay. The Institutes itself was a collated edition of Ferguson's lecture notes during his time as chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, work that commenced in 1764.
It speaks to the centrality of action in Ferguson's thought that he commences the Principles—a two-volume work of some eight-hundred pages, meant to embody a life's work in the fields of moral and natural philosophy—with a discussion of the biological foundation of action. All parenthetical references are to Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science (Edinburgh: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1782).
On this zoological taxonomy of active natures, see also Essay, 28, 47.
Craig Smith suggests Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Power of Man may have inspired these passages, but he correctly notes that Reid's essays also may have served as a “window” at most. There is an element of natural and social science in Ferguson's method that sharply distinguishes it from Reid's. Reid uses “active” to describe those “powers” for which individuals can be held morally responsible; Ferguson uses “active” to describe the capabilities and behavior of animal species. We might here remember that Ferguson is hereby commencing a work of moral and political philosophy. See Smith, “Active Genius of Mankind,” 159; Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, ed. Baruch A. Brody (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).
Cf. Essay, 21.
Ibid., 14.
Cf. Principles i.32, 155, 168, 171, 180–81, 216, 234–46, 297, 301–02.
The rest of this instructive passage reads: “It is the tendency of experience to detect every false opinion, and, by this means, to narrow the scope of aberration and mistake. The experience of evil tends for the future to inculcate a better choice; and, by teaching mankind effectually what they ought not to do, limit that at last to what ought to be done, or put them in the train of a wiser or more happy conduct.”
Lisa Hill casts Ferguson's idea of “ambition” in a Machiavellian light, contrasting it with the Machiavellian vice of ozio. See Hill, Passionate Society, 95–99.
On this same point, Ferguson writes in the Essay: “If we are asked therefore, Where the state of nature is to be found? we may answer, It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan. While this active being is in the train of employing his talents, and of operating on the subjects around him, all situations are equally natural… Acknowledged defects are to man in every condition matter of dislike … Whither should his feelings and apprehensions on these subjects lead him? To a progress, no doubt, in which the savage, as well as the philosopher, is engaged; in which they have made different advances, but in which their ends are the same.” Essay, 14.
The theme of progress—understood broadly both as a phenomenon observed of nations and civilizations, on the one hand, and individual teleology, on the other—guides Ferguson's inquiry in the Institutes, the Principles, and the Essay. In the very first sentence of the Principles, he sets his conceptual table by choosing for examination the “two aspects” of natural subjects (of which man is the most important): first, “their actual state”; second, the “specific excellence, or defect, of which they are susceptible.” Likewise, the first lines of the Essay read: “Natural productions are generally formed by degrees. Vegetables grow from a tender shoot, and animals from an infant state. The latter being destined to act, extend their operations as their powers increase: they exhibit a progress in what they perform, as well as in the faculties they acquire.” Principles, i.1, italics added; Essay, 7.
Hill, Passionate Society, 118–21, emphasis added.
See the Essay, Parts II and IV.
“Decline,” along with “Corruption,” constitute the subjects of the final two parts of the entire work.
Essay, 199–200.
For example, Essay, Part V, Section III.
Even the loosely stated stadial theory of the Essay is absent from the Principles, despite the latter work's emphasis on progress.
Hill also mentions “trial-and-error” in this capacity; see Passionate Society, 81, 200.
The quotations are taken from the Preface of The Great Instauration. See Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-Mary Sargent (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 69–70. Kettler also has connected Ferguson to Bacon. See Kettler, Adam Ferguson, 66. But see also, with its characteristic fastidiousness, Hill, Passionate Society.
See, for example, Scotland in the Age of Improvement, ed. N. T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). Of particular interest is Peter Stein's entry on “Law and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Thought,” 148–67.
On Ferguson's possible Romanticism, see Robin Dix's introductory essay, “Ferguson's Aesthetics,” in The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), lxxvii–lxxxv.
In a remarkable passage of the Principles—made more so by what Ferguson perceived to be a contemptible reluctance on the part of wealthy Scotsmen to engage in military pursuits: “The rich and powerful, (say the vulgar) are happy, for they are exempted from labour and care: Their pleasures come unfought for, and without any allay of pain. But what are the high objects of ambition to which the wealthy and powerful aspire? Are they not often situations of great trouble and danger, in continual application to arduous affairs of state, or in frequent exposure to the dangers of war? What do the idle devise to fill up the blank of real affairs? Not a bed of repose, nor a succession of inert and slothful enjoyments: They devise sports that engage them in labour and toil, not less severe that that of the indigent who works for his bread; and expose them to dangers not less real, than those which occur in what are thought the most hazardous pursuits of human life.” Principles, i.186.
Many have noted Ferguson's potential as a Scottish pre-cursor to Marx. But this association is typically made in the context of Marx's acknowledgements of Ferguson's work and their respective treatments of the dehumanizing effects of the division of labor. This romantic aspect of Ferguson's theory of action, however, suggests a connection between Ferguson's understanding of material production as both an instrumental and a spiritual activity and Marx's conception of human beings as homo faber. I thank a Polity reviewer for this suggestion. On Ferguson's proto-Marxism, see Hill, Passionate Society, 69–70, 161–8; Allan, Adam Ferguson, 131–8.
On this point, I am indebted to exchanges with Ryan Hanley. This passage owes much to Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Social Science and Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlightenment and Today,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7 (2009): 36–38.
Francis Hutcheson, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, ed. Luigi Turco (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 34; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 106.
Lord Kames, Loose Hints Upon Education, Chiefly Concerning the Culture of the Heart (Edinburgh, 1782), 282.
Ferguson, Remarks, 7, 11, 14.
On Smith's reconciliation, see recent work by Ryan Hanley Smith, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
See Smith, “Active Genius of Mankind.”
In a recent article describing what he calls Ferguson's “principle of simultaneity,” Berry articulates the tripartite division of action employed in the preceding section. He begins with a passage from the Principles that reads:
The wants of men, indeed, are of different kinds, and may be unequally urgent; but the movements, performed for the supply of very different wants, appear to be simultaneous and bring at once into practice the rudiments of every art, without any such order as we might suppose to arise from their comparative degrees of importance or the urgency of occasions on which they are practised.
Berry demonstrates how each activity is “self-standing” and “self-generating” in that the political does not arise out of circumstances produced by the economic. Rather, the need for political action is derived from strictly political circumstances—the inevitable difficulties of communal life. See Berry, “‘But Art Itself Is Natural to Man’: Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity,” especially 148.
He repeats this sentiment, substituting “ingenuity” for “genius,” on 261.
Berry, “‘But Art Itself Is Natural to Man’: Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity.”
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I would like to thank Daniel Kapust, David Kettler, Eugene Heath, Lisa Hill, Vickie Sullivan, James Otteson, and three anonymous reviewers at Polity for their comments, suggestions, and insights. In particular, I would like to thank the Institute for Humane Studies for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article at a Current Research Workshop.
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Turner, B. Adam Ferguson on “Action” and the Possibility of Non-Political Participation. Polity 44, 212–233 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.1