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

In the spring of 1756, Adam Ferguson joined Edinburgh’s Select Society. Post-Union Scotland had seen the proliferation of such clubs as an alternative vehicle for civic-minded expression that was no longer possible in a national parliament. The goal of the Select Society was to support ecclesiastical moderates who wished to enlist the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk in the formation of a polite and commercial people. Ferguson was a somewhat anomalous figure in a company that included David Hume, Adam Smith, the historian William Robertson, and the legal scholar Lord Kames. Ferguson had a Highlands background. He was the only major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment to speak Gaelic. This ability had led Ferguson to join the British army during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–46, go on to see European combat in the War of Austrian Succession, and become chaplain of the celebrated Black Watch regiment. Given this background, Ferguson was far more at home in the Poker Club, a successor to the Select Society formed in 1762 on the cusp of renewed conflict with France and more narrowly focused on making the case for a volunteer local defense force.

Iain McDaniel helps us understand how Ferguson’s unique position in the Scottish Enlightenment informed his most important works—the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783). McDaniel helps us understand, too, why these works, which were widely read in the Atlantic and European worlds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, remain relevant today. With Montesquieu, Ferguson believed that, however monarchical the form of Great Britain’s government, its spirit was republican. Ferguson, who had served in the wars that were building the British empire, also believed that an imperial republic would likely end in a military despotism. Like Tacitus, he saw that an envious democracy’s desire for equality might conspire with the desire of an enervated elite for security of possession, and that the conspiracy would at first serve the cause of expansion but eventually serve to undercut the habits and institutions of liberty.

For Ferguson, the most effective bulwark against the possibility of despotism was a neo-Germanic tradition of citizenly service, and it was largely to stir Scottish national sentiment that he promoted 1762’s Poker Club. Unlike the other major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson gave particularism and antagonism a central, and constructive, function. It is odd, therefore, that McDaniel, who in general is sensitive to the classical subtext of Ferguson’s thinking, makes so little of the Polybian origins of the manner in which the Essay or the History connected institutionalized conflict to the practice of liberty. At the same time, the preoccupation with how Ferguson mapped his vision of Europe’s future onto his understanding of the Roman past leads McDaniel to give rather less attention than he should to how Ferguson understood the dynamics of his own commercial present. Adam Ferguson shared with Adam Smith a concern that an ever more refined technical division of labor rendered commercial societies “tired in secret of a free constitution.” Smith—for very good reasons—had little nostalgia for the Germanic past and little patience with any idealization of warfare, both of which he saw as usurping the promise of a more cosmopolitan sociability and a more inclusive prosperity. If liberty and an open public sphere were to be maintained, the task according to Smith would have to be taken up by the moral philosophers of the Scottish universities and the convivial exchange of the Select Society. Yet there may also be reasons to worry with Ferguson that education alone cannot preserve a free constitution—that, as Kenneth Arrow would later argue, the division of labor effectively eviscerates the consensus on which any program of cultural government must be based. Perhaps, if a commercial society is to remain a free...