![]() Other French thinkers, Diderot for example, also posited a distinction between “natural” savage societies as “unnatural” European ones, a difference that Ferguson emphatically rejected. They were indeed social beings, but nonetheless closer to “nature” than European societies. Admittedly, Rousseau did not argue that savages were specimens of human beings in the state of nature. Any distinction between natural and social humanity is intrinsically misguided and misleading. Humans, Ferguson insists, are naturally social creatures. He rejects Rousseau’s paradigm of a natural, asocial humanity. Ferguson specifically objects to the distinction between “natural” and “social” human beings so elaborately constructed in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1985). The obvious target of Ferguson’s polemic is Rousseau, who nonetheless remains unnamed throughout the Essay except for one short and entirely unrelated passage. On the other hand, Ferguson adamantly rejected earlier French paradigms of savagery that hinged on the identification of savages as relatively “natural” specimens of humanity (Launay 2018). The different forms of society he contrasted – republics, monarchies, and despotisms – all constituted varieties of “civilization”. Unlike many other French Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu displayed no interest whatsoever, either empirical or theoretical, in savagery. Where Ferguson deviates from Montesquieu most notably is his emphasis on “rude” nations – “barbarians” and above all “savages”. He writes, somewhat coyly, “When I recollect what the President Montesquieu has written, I am at a loss to tell, why I should treat of human affairs (1767, p. Meek (1976) notes that Turgot had developed a stage theory of progress in the 1750s in an unfinished and at the time unpublished manuscript, On Universal History, but this would certainly have been unavailable to Ferguson.įerguson acknowledged his debt to earlier French thinkers, especially Montesquieu. Such an insistence on the reality, indeed the inevitability, of progress is in sharp contrast to his French Enlightenment predecessors (Vyverberg 1958). Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization” (1767, p. Indeed, in the very first paragraph of the Essay, he writes “… progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal. His military experience left a very discernable mark on his thought.įerguson is most remembered as one of the first and most important theoreticians of progress (e.g., Harris 1968, Nisbet 1969, Adams 1998). He accompanied the regiment when it was campaigning in Flanders, preaching to them in their native Gaelic. These ties influenced his early career, which was not at all at the University but rather as a minister to the celebrated regiment of Highlanders, the Black Watch. Unlike any of the others, he was, if not a full-blooded highlander, well acquainted with the Scottish Highlands and could even speak Gaelic. He succeeded Hume as Keeper of the Advocates Library at the University of Edinburgh, where, like Adam Smith, he was later appointed to lecture. ![]() Of the various Scottish attempts at writing universal history, Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, published in 1767, was not the first but certainly the most influential and one of the most systematic.įerguson was a member of a distinguished circle of Scottish thinkers, most notably David Hume and Adam Smith, both of whom he counted as friends. Indeed, Morgan was well aware of these Scottish thinkers, many of whose books he kept in his personal library (Trautman and Kabelac 1994). The idea of such a scheme, and even its terminology, were hardly original, but had been systematically elaborated by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers over a hundred years earlier (Meek 1976, Pocock 1999). In 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan (1985) proposed a scheme of universal human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization. ![]()
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