Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future by Iain McDaniel (review)

Along with his highly celebrated colleagues and friends Adam Smith and David Hume, Adam Ferguson was one of the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Possessed of a talented, agile mind and a taste for active life, he served as chaplain to the recently formed highland regiment, the Black Watch; and played key roles in many of the cause célèbre of his day, including the militia issue and both the Douglas and Ossian affairs. He succeeded Hume, as head of the Advocate’s Library, before being named Professor of Pneumatics, then moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He went on to become one of the most unique and prominent political and historical philosophers of the eighteenth century. Despite all this Ferguson has only recently begun to attract the scholarly attention he deserves. This book represents a welcome addition to the literature, focusing on important but neglected aspects of Ferguson’s thought.

Given the study’s main title, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, it should be said that this reviewer was struck by what it does not contain. There is little examination of Ferguson as a person or the Scottish Enlightenment as a broader intellectual and cultural movement. In important ways, this is less a book about Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, than it is a study in the history of ideas and late eighteenth-century political thought. This clarification will hopefully focus expectations and highlight its contributions to the field.

Ferguson’s standing as a philosopher and social theorist has undergone a rather dramatic rehabilitation in recent years. Yet, as this study shows, much of the precise content of his reforming politics, along with the broader character of his thought, has remained hidden from view, buried under an “Enlightened narrative” constructed predominantly around the contrasting theories of Hume and Smith. Ferguson’s political ideas which resonated so deeply in the eighteenth century, failed to do so among subsequent generations and soon fell into obscurity, eclipsed by those of his more famous contemporaries. For instance, unable to accept some of his criticisms of the modern state and commercial society, many in the Victorian era dismissed Ferguson. In the book History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, celebrated literary scholar Sir Leslie Stephen depicted Ferguson as nothing more than “a facile and dexterous declaimer” (p. 215). Meanwhile Marx’s Capital was, tellingly, one of the few works that cited him with approval (p. 474). Such contrasting responses were typical through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, and underscored the difficulty later generations had in translating his ideas, as well as the violence and misrepresentation they often suffered as a result.

McDaniel presents Ferguson’s political thought by carefully reconstructing it within its eighteenth-century context. He does so by concentrating his analysis on one of the central preoccupations and great intellectual problems of the century: how to read and make sense of the history and politics of the later Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. It has long been recognized that Ferguson’s innovative, if idiosyncratic, social and political theories drew heavily on the history of republican and imperial Rome. From the very beginning, most recognized and admired Ferguson’s originality, but few shared his uncommonly positive assessment of barbarous nations, his emphasis on martial values and military government, or his fears over the prospects of political discord and despotism in the civilized nations of Europe. Consequently, McDaniel notes that he has come to be seen as a hopelessly ambiguous thinker, torn between commitment to a confidently progressive science of politics and a more classical, republican outlook usually associated with earlier Scottish thinkers.

This ambiguity has led many to see anti-modern or Counter-Enlightenment elements in Ferguson’s thought. McDaniel generally works against such assessments. Considerable emphasis is placed on the watershed moment of 1748 and the publication of Montesquieu’s The Spirit...