The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson (The Pickering Masters) (review)

In the course of his long life, the Edinburgh professor Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) pursued academic interests in moral philosophy, politics, and both narrative and ‘conjectural’ history, the results of which have secured his reputation as one of the leading – and most original – thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet the character of Ferguson’s intellectual enterprise remains notoriously elusive. Today he is chiefly remembered for his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), a work which is usually characterised as a critical intervention in the Scottish Enlightenment debate on commercial society, phrased in the republican or civic-humanist language of ‘virtue and corruption’. Although the best recent scholarship has emphasised the broader scope and sophistication of his inquiries into human nature, the history of human societies, and the foundations of European government, the standard image of Ferguson as a somewhat nostalgic advocate of the civil and military virtues associated with the ancient republic has proved tenacious. The thirty-two essays and dialogues contained in Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, written between 1799 and 1810 but never published at the time, help to pave the way towards a more coherent, and more detailed, picture of his thought. As Vincenzo Merolle comments in the first of three editorial essays which introduce the volume, the manuscripts represent Ferguson’s effort to ‘summarize and reappraise’ the arguments of his published works, and hence provide an opportunity to reassess the overall significance of his intellectual preoccupations and ambitions.

As many of the essays collected in this volume testify, Ferguson’s attempt to fashion a moral philosophy capable of inculcating the virtues and responsibilities he deemed necessary to the leading members of modern states remained a life-long concern. In several pieces, he reflected upon the principal controversies of eighteenth century moral thought, returning to the question of the relations between benevolence and self-interest, and utility and sympathy, in explanations of morality and sociability. Not only do these essays demonstrate just how keenly Ferguson felt the challenge of broadly ‘Epicurean’ arguments that reduced human sociability to ‘mere self Love’, but they also shed more light on specific disagreements with his old friends Hume and Smith than is available in his published works. In particular, the important dialogue ‘Of the Principal of Moral Estimation’ sought to short-circuit Hume’s concept of utility in the explanation of moral judgements, and to truncate Smith’s attempt to ground morality on the workings of a sympathetic impartial spectator. Ferguson’s didactic concern to instil the virtues of ‘Magnanimity’ and ‘Elevation of Mind’ demanded an alternative to Smith’s moral lexicon, but as Eugene Smith notes in his useful introductory essay on ‘Ferguson’s Moral Philosophy’, he did not simply revert to Francis Hutcheson’s older ‘moral sense’ theory. Ferguson sought to reconcile the reality of moral virtue with the active and ambitious propensities of mankind through an idiosyncratic concept of human perfectibility. It is equally clear that he had absorbed at least some of the lessons of Hume’s call to ground the study of human nature and morality upon a more ‘scientific’ footing.

Ferguson’s continued engagement with the realities of European power politics is represented in some of the most interesting essays in this collection, particularly ‘Of Statesmen and Warriours’ and ‘of the French Revolution with its Actual and Still Impending Consequences in Europe’. In these pieces (written between 1803 and 1808), Ferguson observed post-revolutionary Europe from the perspective of a British ‘patriot’, focusing on the problem of securing Britain’s defence against potential French aggression (a practical issue which had dominated his thinking from at least as early as 1756 and which formed the backdrop to his argument for the establishment of a Scottish militia). As Merolle comments in his introduction, Ferguson (like Burke) deeply distrusted the speculative, visionary ‘project’ of 1789. But no other Scottish thinker of Ferguson’s generation lived to see the French Revolution play out...