Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
Adam Ferguson in the
Scottish Enlightenment
T H E ROM A N PAST
AND
EU ROPE’S FU T U R E
Q
I AIN M C D ANIEL
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2013
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McDaniel, Iain, 1975–
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish enlightenment : the Roman past
and Eu rope’s future / Iain McDaniel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 07296-1 (alk. paper)
1. Republicanism— Rome—History. 2. Rome— Politics and government.
3. Great Britain— Politics and government. 4. Enlightenment— Scotland.
5. Ferguson, Adam, 1723–1816. I. Title.
JC83.M35 2013
321.8'6—dc23
2012034074
To Anna
Contents
Acknowledg ments
Introduction
ix
1
1
Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic
2
Military Government and Empire in the
Scottish Enlightenment 39
3
Ferguson and the Moral Foundations of Civil Society
4
Trajectories of the Modern Commercial State 92
5
Britain’s Future in a Roman Mirror 119
6
Civil-Military Union and the Modern State 155
7
Revolution and Modern Republicanism 183
Conclusion 213
Abbreviations
Notes 223
Index 271
221
12
64
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been completed without the help I have received from many people. My most significant debt is to Istvan Hont,
who has been exceptionally encouraging, personally supportive, and
intellectually inspiring throughout the entire period in which I have
been working on this book. I have benefited immeasurably from his
advice and suggestions. I also want to thank Nicholas Phillipson, who
generously shared his understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment,
and Michael Sonenscher, who dropped a number of extremely useful
hints about Ferguson’s place within the European intellectual context.
All of these scholars have offered invaluable insight, criticism, and
comment at every stage.
Much of this book was written in Cambridge between 2005 and
2008. I wish to record my gratitude to the British Academy for the award
of the postdoctoral fellowship which made it possible to continue working on this project, and to the President and Fellows of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who admitted me as a Bye-Fellow between 2006 and
2008. I am especially grateful to Richard Rex for his help during this
period. The manuscript was completed during my tenure at LudwigMaximilians-Universität, Munich, where I was working on the Exzellenzinitiative project “Die Wissenschaft des Politischen um 1800.” I am
particularly pleased to be able to acknowledge here my deep gratitude
to Eckhart Hellmuth, who did much to make my time in Germany enjoyable and productive. Martin Schmidt, Annette Meyer, and participants of the Forum Ideengeschichte were wonderful colleagues.
x
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the argument set out here have been presented at
conferences, workshops, and seminars in Edinburgh, Budapest, Rotterdam, Tartu, St Andrews, London, Cambridge, Munich, Paris, and Jena. I
am grateful to audiences and participants at these events for their questions and responses. Chapter 4 incorporates a portion of my article “Enlightened History and the Decline of Nations: Ferguson, Raynal, and the
Contested Legacies of the Dutch Republic,” History of European Ideas 36
(2010): 203–216, and I am glad to be able to reproduce this material here.
Several scholars have read and responded to draft chapters, or papers which eventually became chapters. I am particularly indebted to
Doohwan Ahn, Richard Bourke, Angus Gowland, and John Robertson,
all of whom have kindly taken the time to read and comment on my
work in a variety of different contexts. Knud Haakonssen made available
some original documents which might otherwise have eluded me. In addition to those mentioned already, I consider myself privileged to have
had the opportunity to discuss eighteenth-century thought with Thomas
Ahnert, Iwan d’Aprile, Carolina Armenteros, Moritz Baumstark, Anna
Becker, Christopher Brooke, Knud Haakonssen, James Harris, Tom Hopkins, Julian Hoppitt, Jeremy Jennings, Béla Kapossy, Avi Lifschitz, Eva
Piirimäe, Anna Plassart, Michael Schaich, Alexander Schmidt, Martin
Schmidt, Silvia Sebastiani, Koen Stapelbroek, and Richard Whatmore. I
am indebted to two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press,
whose advice, I think, really improved the book. Michael Aronson has
been an ideal editor: constructive, patient, and reassuring. I am very
grateful to Kathleen Drummy for her efficient help and friendly advice
about the submission of the final manuscript. Obviously, none of these
people is responsible for any of the mistakes I have made.
My friends, now situated in New York, London, Paris, Munich, and
Cambridge, have been consistently inspiring. My parents, as ever, have
been extraordinarily supportive and have helped me in all sorts of
ways. I have really appreciated the company of Helen, Grant, Charlie,
and Emma; as well as that of Ursula, Manfred, and Lisa. Above all, I
want to record my deep gratitude to Anna Becker. Not only has she
read, listened to, and commented upon a succession of draft papers and
chapters, including the entire manuscript of this book, but, even more
impressively, she has engaged sympathetically with my ideas, dealt patiently with my foibles, and persistently reminded me that there is a
world outside this book. It is dedicated to her.
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
Q
Introduction
T HIS is a book about the eighteenth-century Scottish historian and political thinker Adam Ferguson. Reassessing his contribution to Enlightenment debates about the vicissitudes of civilization and the future of
Europe’s prosperous states, its main aim is to provide a clear picture of
his political thought and his critique of modern politics. My central focus is upon Ferguson’s attempt to understand modern Britain’s, and
Europe’s, historical prospects through the mirror of the ancient Roman
past, a strategy which, I suggest, helps to dispel some of the ambiguities
which have surrounded his thought and, simultaneously, to broaden
and revise conventional assessments of Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the historical progress of civil society. One of my more general aims is to shed light on eighteenth-century assessments of the
prospects for maintaining constitutional government in large and competitive modern states and, more specifically, for averting the switch
from civilian to military government that had characterized ancient
Rome’s transition from republic to empire. Ferguson, like many of his
European contemporaries, viewed the threat of military government as
among the central political dilemmas of modernity. His works open up
broader eighteenth-century debates about the apparently intractable
problem of securing a more benign relationship between the civil and
military powers of modern states and of avoiding the military dictatorships that, historically, had accompanied the combination of wealth
and empire. This book, then, is about eighteenth-century perceptions
of modernity’s potential for military government, and about the ways
in which ancient Rome’s history of empire, revolution, and military
2
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
rule was mapped onto concerns about the viability of modern republics and constitutional states.
Since the publication of his Essay on the History of Civil Society in
1767, Ferguson has been interpreted as a distinctively antimodern
thinker, whose writings stood somewhat uneasily alongside the most
advanced Enlightenment thinking in moral philosophy or political
economy. Although many of his contemporaries recognized the Essay
as an original intervention in eighteenth-century debates about sociability and the history of mankind, they also questioned his predilection
for the worlds of barbarism and antiquity, his emphasis on martial values, and his anxieties about the prospect of despotism in modern civilized monarchies. Edmund Burke’s complaint that “so able and zealous
an advocate for benevolence, should have lavished so much praise on the
Spartan government” is symptomatic of wider uncertainties about
the underlying relationship between morals and politics in Ferguson’s
thought. David Hume’s disappointment with the Essay, and his broader
antipathy toward Ferguson’s brand of military virtue, are well known.
Many other contemporary readers— including Edward Gibbon, Isaac
Iselin, and the abbé Sieyès—were puzzled by his commitment to political discord and military preparedness, which sat uneasily with their
own commitments to a more moderate or Enlightened form of patriotism. For the majority of his contemporaries, then, Ferguson appeared
as an ambiguous thinker whose emphasis on martial values and preoccupations about the fragility of modern civilization set him apart
from the eighteenth-century mainstream. As one reviewer— probably
Edward Gibbon—remarked in the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne,
the moral and political ideas sketched in the Essay were liable to provoke
a “shudder” among the more “tranquil phi losophers” of Enlightenment
Europe.1
While more recent scholarship has yielded crucial insights into
Ferguson’s writings and their contexts, the sense of ambiguity surrounding his political thought has proved difficult to dispel. He has
proved difficult to absorb into the most recent historiography on the
Scottish Enlightenment, and seems trapped between a commitment to
a forward-looking science of politics (usually associated with Hume’s
and Adam Smith’s science of man) and the more classical, republican
patriotism conventionally associated with earlier thinkers like Andrew
Fletcher. From the broader perspectives of eighteenth-century Euro-
Introduction
3
pean political thought, these problems are compounded. While some
earlier scholarship tended to associate Ferguson with a protoromantic
counter-Enlightenment, more recent assessments have tended to see
him in terms of an oversimplified antithesis between a virtuous, anticommercial republicanism and a rights-based, individualist liberalism.
Although there remains intense disagreement about his affi nities to
republicanism or liberalism, the majority of recent commentators have
suggested that Ferguson was a classical republican, whose main relevance lies in his moral critique of modern commercial society.2 But the
precise content of his reform program as well as the broader identity
of his thought have remained hidden from view.
This study offers a more authentically historical interpretation of
Ferguson’s thought by reconstructing his lifelong investigation into the
prospects facing Europe’s “civilized and commercial nations.” The roots
of this project lie in the 1750s, when he began to think seriously about
the history of civilization and the distinctive threats to the stability and
liberty of Europe’s large and increasingly prosperous states. These
themes would have been at the center of his “Treatise of Refi nement,”
an unpublished “dissertation on the vicissitudes of human society”
which circulated among Ferguson’s friends in the late 1750s but which,
unfortunately, has not survived.3 But the most extensive products of
his engagement with these topics were the two works of philosophical
history which made his eighteenth-century reputation: the Essay on the
History of Civil Society, fi rst published in 1767, and the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, which appeared in three volumes in 1783. Despite the many superficial dissimilarities between
these works, both were driven by an underlying concern with the history of civilization and with the causes propelling modern states toward instability, revolution, and military government. They formed the
core of a major late Enlightenment investigation into the history and
prospects of modern European states that extended into the period of
the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath (Ferguson died,
at the remarkable age of ninety-three, in 1816). Several later writings—
the Principles of Moral and Political Science and a number of unpublished
essays— attest to Ferguson’s continuing anxieties about the shift from
civilian to military rule in Europe’s modern states. These anxieties
were expressed in the context of a growing unease about the imperial
proclivities of large republics like France, which Ferguson imagined as
4
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
a potentially global republican empire stretching from “California to
Japan.”
This remarkable inquiry was an answer to the influential assessment of modernity’s prospects set out in Charles-Louis de Secondat,
baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, a work which constituted
the primary intellectual framework for many late eighteenth-century
political thinkers.4 While there have been some excellent studies of Ferguson’s appropriation of Montesquieu’s political typology in the Essay,
their diverging assessments of modern Europe’s foundations, history, and
prospects have, I think, been insufficiently appreciated.5 Despite some
significant ambiguities in his argument, Montesquieu dismissed ancient
Rome’s relevance for understanding Europe’s historical trajectory. In
his Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, first published in 1734, he had sought to break the parallel between the ancients
and the moderns and, simultaneously, to undermine the attractiveness
of republican politics for modern states. When reworked in The Spirit of
the Laws, these claims underpinned a remarkably confident assessment
of modern Europe’s moral and political foundations. Although he voiced
fears about the expansion of Europe’s military establishments, and questioned the stability of the English system of government, his broad argument was that the moderate scale of modern states, the Germanic foundations of monarchy, and the peaceful consequences of international
trade now made a revival of ancient models of empire, universal monarchy, and despotism highly unlikely. The ancient pathologies of conquest
and expansion had been replaced by commerce, peace, and prosperity,
while the ancient virtues of patriotism and public virtue had become
largely irrelevant to the workings of honor-based monarchies. Europe
could look forward to relative stability as a continent of pacific commercial monarchies.
Ferguson’s exploration of modernity’s prospects was a critical
response to two related aspects of Montesquieu’s intellectual project.
Most generally, his fears about a revival of “despotic empire” led Ferguson to reject Montesquieu’s broad confidence in the stability of the
European state system. The combination of prosperity with moderate
or civilized government that Montesquieu took to be the hallmark of
modern politics would have little effect in forestalling the shift from
civilian to military rule that, in Ferguson’s view, menaced modern European states. At a more specific level, Ferguson radically amplified Mon-
Introduction
5
tesquieu’s ambiguous assessment of Britain’s future as a “free state” by
highlighting those causes that were undermining the constitution and
transforming Britain into an unfree, military, but pseudodemocratic
regime analogous to the Roman Principate. He thus rejected Montesquieu’s logic and returned to Rome’s history as the most comprehensive and authoritative example of the rise, progress, and termination of
a large mixed state. As Ferguson wrote in the History, Rome’s transition
toward military government remained a “signal example of the vicissitudes to which prosperous nations are exposed.”6
The account developed in this book has several more specific implications. Most urgently, it revises conventional assessments of Ferguson’s republicanism and challenges the idea, advanced by a number of
scholars, that he advocated the establishment of a popular, egalitarian,
or nonmonarchical form of government in modern states. As we shall
see, Ferguson certainly drew heavily from classical Greek and Roman
political thought, emphasized the traditional civic virtues of public service and patriotism, and praised what he took to be the institutional
foundations of Rome’s republican system of government. Some of his
arguments about civic emulation and discord resemble famous classical
and early modern arguments about the moral basis of a vivere civile. But
it is crucial to emphasize that he fiercely opposed the idea of transforming modern monarchies into republics, and displayed few of the anxieties
about monarchical domination that are usually associated with neoRoman politics.7 Perhaps most strikingly, he repudiated the emphasis on
political participation which has dominated much of the literature
on eighteenth-century republicanism since the publication of Hannah
Arendt’s On Revolution.8 Not only did he share Montesquieu’s view that
popular and egalitarian versions of republicanism were practicable only
in very small and socially cohesive states but, even more revealingly, he
explicitly endorsed Montesquieu’s claim that both democracies and aristocracies (the two simple or unmixed forms of republic) were not naturally free states. Far from advocating the creation of republican constitutions, his works were characterized by acute anxiety about the likely
consequences of combining republican politics with commercial society
in large modern states.
This revision of our understanding of Ferguson’s politics highlights
two issues which have been silently ignored in most recent assessments
of his thought. The fi rst concerns the affi nity he discerned between
6
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
republican politics and empire, an issue which has been central to
much recent work on eighteenth-century political thought (and, of
course, the thought of earlier periods).9 This book contributes to this
scholarship by focusing upon Scottish debates about republican imperialism as they developed in the period between 1750 and 1815 and,
more generally, upon parallel concerns about the imperial or despotic
faces of republican regimes. It also shows that Enlightenment thinkers
remained preoccupied by the prospect of empire within, as well as beyond, Europe. Like Montesquieu, Hume, and Immanuel Kant— three
major thinkers who reflected carefully on Britain’s historical experience with unfree republican rule— Ferguson recognized the possibility
of a despotic republic as a crucial problem for modern politics.10 As he
argued in his History, it was the drive toward an egalitarian and democratic form of republicanism that ultimately undermined the Roman
res publica and sparked the alliance between popular and military forces
in the postrepublican Principate. Similar assumptions informed Ferguson’s assessment of the propensity of republics to external conquest and
imperial domination. Echoing and elaborating Montesquieu’s earlier
critique of republican conquest, he argued that the revival of republican democracies in modern Europe would create a new era of militarism and expansionism (a view which he believed had been confi rmed
by the republican imperialism of Napoleon Bonaparte). In Ferguson’s
hands, therefore, the key threat to the stability of a modern res publica
came less from a monarchical executive than from anachronistic projects to revive, under modern conditions, the combination of democracy, egalitarianism, and conquest that was conventionally associated
with ancient politics. Modern imperialism was, from this perspective,
ancient and republican in origin, and popular government and empire
were less antithetical than is sometimes assumed.
The second important feature which contemporary scholars tend
to miss relates to Ferguson’s explicit recognition that the stability of
large modern societies rested on a hierarchy or distinction of ranks.
This theme, which is familiar to Scottish Enlightenment specialists because of John Millar’s Observations on the Distinction of Ranks, was a central feature of Ferguson’s conjectural history of mankind and his analysis of the stability of modern societies. The centrality of this issue in
Ferguson’s thought has tended to be overlooked because of a longstanding tendency to see equality, at least political equality, as a crucial
Introduction
7
component of republican ideology. But for Ferguson, as well as for Montesquieu, a distinction of ranks was a key feature of the monarchical
regimes which had developed in Europe following the decline of the
Roman Empire, while a high degree of socioeconomic inequal ity was
an inescapable concomitant of a prosperous commercial society. One
key to the termination of the Roman republic was the complete political emasculation of the existing “distinction of ranks” and the transformation of the Roman patriciate from a genuinely martial elite into an
aristocracy of privilege. The key problem in Ferguson’s political thought
(and in that of many contemporaries across Europe), concerned the appropriate mechanisms for keeping these different kinds of social distinction in balance. As we shall see, Ferguson himself fi rmly opposed the
ancient politics of equality. His solution, rather, was to call for a military
and political hierarchy, grounded on the militia, that would run parallel
to the socioeconomic hierarchy and create an alternative focus for the
dynamics of authority and prestige in a modern civil society.
One important outcome of this study is the recovery of a significant alternative to the philosophical histories of civilization conventionally associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. As scholars have
long recognized, Scottish assessments of the viability of modern politics
were underpinned by elaborate theoretical histories of society from
conditions of barbarism to those of civility and refi nement. This kind of
inquiry, which found its archetypal expression in Smith’s famous fourstages theory, is usually associated with a broader endorsement of modern systems of property, manners, and civility. More recently, historians have emphasized the Scots’ contributions to the construction of an
“Enlightened narrative,” which tracked the history of post-Roman Europe in terms of the emergence of large, powerful, and civilized monarchies with a capacity for maintaining liberty, security, and stability.11
This understanding of Europe’s prospects as a stable system of civilized
states was compatible with the wider analysis of commerce, liberty, and
refinement which underlay many of Hume’s essays (and his more erudite History of England), with William Robertson’s account of the progress
of society in Europe, as well as with the more schematic account of Europe’s economic and political development worked out by Smith in his
jurisprudence lectures. While the details of these histories may have differed, the overall impression created by much recent historiography on
the Scottish Enlightenment is of an intellectual inquiry driven by a
8
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
strong confidence in the moral and political foundations of modern commercial societies and in the compatibility of “opulence and freedom.”12
Ferguson’s own philosophical history of the state challenged almost every aspect of this way of thinking about modernity and civilization. His distinctive theory of human sociability, which developed
in opposition to Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was also
implicitly a response to Hume’s and Smith’s concepts of commercial
(utility-based) sociability and its role in sustaining modern liberty. His
history of mankind, with its unusually positive depiction of barbarous
“rude nations,” underpinned a far more ambiguous verdict on the progress of society toward conditions of refi nement and civilization. His
emphasis on the intensity of rivalry and antagonism among separate
societies served to undercut contemporary confidence in the idea of pacifying relations between modern Europe’s commercial states. Perhaps
most revealingly, his claim that the progress of society in post-Roman
Europe was paving the way for a revival of “despotic empire” and ancient
military government drove a wedge between his own thinking and
that of his contemporaries. Against Smith’s positive vision of wealth’s
compatibility with liberty, or Robertson’s picture of a balance of power
among modern commercial monarchies, Ferguson outlined a nightmarish scenario in which Europe would come to be dominated by wealthy
but despotically governed machine-states, whose future would resemble that of imperial Rome or, alternatively, China (which in Ferguson’s
view combined an extensive division of labor with a centralized system
of despotic government). The result was a major rival to the more prominent histories of civilization usually associated with Hume, Robertson,
or Smith, and a much-diminished confidence in the capacity of modern constitutional or civilized states to avoid the sequences of empire,
revolution, and despotism that had destroyed the states of antiquity.
These arguments aligned Ferguson with some of the most prominent eighteenth-century critics of the modern commercial state, as this
was conceived and defended in the conjectural histories of the later
Enlightenment. There was, for example, a significant degree of overlap between Ferguson’s Essay and the more notorious hypothetical history of government set out in Rousseau’s 1756 Second Discourse, as well
as important later, quasi-historical works like the abbé Raynal’s 1771
Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Deux Indes or Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1774 This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity.13
Introduction
9
What Ferguson shared with these and other contemporaries was an
acute sense of the instability of Europe’s territorial states, coupled with
a marked reluctance to endorse the more confident philosophical histories of Voltaire, Hume, or Robertson (whose accounts of Europe’s progressive improvement were dismissed by Herder as “classical ghosts of
twilight”).14 The overlap with Rousseau is particularly striking. The fi nal
section of Ferguson’s book, entitled “The Progress and Termination of
Despotism,” closely resembled the concluding pages of the Second Discourse, with its famous projection of a “hideous despotism” establishing
itself on the ruins of civil society after a period of revolutions.15 Nevertheless, Ferguson’s own assessment of Europe’s prospects ultimately diverged significantly from that of Rousseau. His more positive vision of
human sociability, in particular, made his conjectural history of civil
society markedly less skeptical than that of the Second Discourse.
The book is organized as follows. The fi rst two chapters supply an
intellectual and political context for understanding Ferguson’s thought.
Chapter 1 examines Montesquieu’s reworking of the contrast between
the ancients and the moderns and considers his verdict on Britain’s
future as a free state. Chapter 2 traces the legacy of Montesquieu’s
thinking on these topics for the Scottish Enlightenment after 1748,
concentrating on Scottish appraisals of Britain as a warlike, commercial, and constitutional state. The following three chapters provide thematic accounts of the moral-philosophical, political and historical dimensions of Ferguson’s inquiry into the foundations, character and
future of eighteenth-century Europe. The third chapter focuses on the
theme of sociability and its place in the conjectural history of politics
adumbrated in the Essay. It shows that Ferguson’s project for a history
of civil society was targeted against the neo-Epicurean claim that pride,
vanity and the quest for superiority were the real drivers of civilization
and morality, and begins to consider his thinking about the moral and
political foundations of Europe’s post-Roman governments. The fourth
chapter supplies a reappraisal of Ferguson’s critical evaluation of commercial society and scrutinizes his view that modern competitive commerce could be a driver of conquest, empire and despotism. The fi fth
chapter reconstructs Ferguson’s comparative examination of ancient
Rome and modern Britain in the History and claims that he perceived
in British politics the seeds of a post-republican despotism analogous
to the ancient Roman Principate. The fi nal two chapters of the book
10
Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
reconstruct the outlines of Ferguson’s own vision of a modern state and
contrast it with contemporary alternatives in the period of the American and French revolutions. While the primary aim of these chapters is
to provide a detailed description of his proposals for the reform of the
British system of government, the broader purpose is to identify an important historical rival to eighteenth-century conceptions of the modern representative republic, which— as revisionist historiography has
now amply demonstrated—was explicitly conceived as the state-form of
large-scale commercial societies.16 According to this scholarship, modern
republicanism emerged as a conceptual alternative not only to traditional conceptions of monarchy, but also to strongly moralized visions
of the egalitarian ancient republic, which was deemed to be incompatible with large, commercial, and unequal eighteenth-century societies.
While I am indebted to this research, it is crucial to distinguish Ferguson’s
political thought from the more commercially oriented and representative models of modern republicanism that motivated the writings of
thinkers like Thomas Paine, James Madison, or Sieyès. In this respect,
this book contributes to the current debate on the emergence of modern
republicanism by emphasizing one of its forgotten alternatives.
Ferguson’s reform program amounted to a different kind of republican politics, which was grounded less on the intricacies of political
representation within a commercial society than on meritocracy, martial
aristocracy, patriotism, and civil-military union. As I argue in Chapter
6, the cornerstone of Ferguson’s political reform program was to be the
establishment of a merit-based system of civil and military offices, which
would underpin a reformed public-service aristocracy and bring about
a revival of patriotism. This amounted to a program for the comprehensive overhaul of Britain’s entire civilian and military establishment and
was designed to bring rank and honor into line with public ser vice and
merit. The tight unity of civilian and military functions, as well as the
broader emphasis on patriotic commitment that ran through Ferguson’s
writings, was recognizably civic and republican in inspiration, echoing
both the moral vision of virtuous nobility that was so central to much
earlier humanist thought as well as the more institutional emphasis on
maintaining a balance between law and force as a criteria of a free state.
These features of Ferguson’s reform program distinguished his modern
politics from the considerably thinner conceptions of the civic virtues
necessary to sustain a modern political society set out by Montesquieu,
Introduction
11
as well as by Sieyès or by Kant. In this sense, Ferguson’s account of a
military civil society was a patriotic and republican answer to Montesquieu’s evaluation of the British state. But despite its civic origins, Ferguson was explicit about its adaptability to a monarchical society with
an elaborate hierarchy of ranks. A merit-based distinction of ranks was
explicitly conceived as a support of the British mixed monarchy and as
an antidote to the dangerous slide toward democratic license that Ferguson came to associate with French politics in the course of the 1790s.
Ferguson should be taken seriously as a modern political thinker.
He is best seen as a significant critic, rather than an advocate, of modern projects to revive the liberty of the ancients within econom ical ly
advanced states, which he believed would fuel the rise of unfree military states and imperial republics. The chapters that follow question the
assumption that Ferguson was a nostalgic, or anachronistic, republican
and present a picture of a more sophisticated thinker who was centrally
engaged in Enlightenment debates about the political and economic
trajectories of modern states. But as we shall see, Ferguson’s critique of
modernity has a more general relevance for understanding the Enlightenment’s thinking about the prospects for maintaining constitutional
government in a world of competitive commerce and republican imperialism. Not only does it help to clarify the ways in which the ancient
world’s historical experience was transposed onto eighteenth-century
debates about the viability of modern republics and the history of civilization, but it also raises a number of broader questions about the relationship between civil and military powers within modern constitutional
states.
Ferguson’s anxieties about the ability of modern republics to preserve themselves in conditions of war and revolution, and to insulate
themselves against a permanent condition of military government, persist across the world in the twenty-first century. The problem of resolving
the tension between the civil and military powers of modern states has
not disappeared. Concerns about the reemergence of republican conquest in commercial modernity have not fallen off the agenda. While the
history of political thought provides no straightforward answers to these
dilemmas, Ferguson’s own inquiry into modernity’s prospects is not
without contemporary resonance.