Adam Ferguson in the Scottish enlightenment: the Roman past and Europe's future 9780674072961, 0674072960, 9780674075269, 0674075269, 9780674075283, 0674075285

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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

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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

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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.

1

Q

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

I N A FA MOUS and often-cited passage from the Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson registered his intellectual debts to Montesquieu. When I recollect what the President Montesquieu has written, I am at a loss to tell, why I should treat of human affairs: but I too am instigated by my reflections, and my sentiments; and I may utter them more to the comprehension of ordinary capacities, because I am more on the level of ordinary men. . . . In his writings will be found, not only the original of what I am now, for the sake of order, to copy from him, but likewise probably the source of many observations which, in different places, I may, under the belief of invention, have repeated, without quoting their author.1

There were good reasons for this fulsome ac knowledg ment. Not only did Ferguson make substantial use of Montesquieu’s distinction between republics, monarchies, and despotic governments (the typology appeared in reworked versions in the 1767 Essay, the 1769 Institutes of Moral Philosophy, and the 1792 Principles of Moral and Political Science), he also referred admiringly to the account of justice adumbrated in the Persian Letters (citing Usbek’s famous claim, set out in letter 83, that justice was eternal and independent of human conventions).2 Intriguingly, he seems to have regarded Montesquieu as a kind of Stoic moralist, associating his writings with those of the third earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and James Harris as examples of the “spirit of Stoicism” among the moderns.3 While these perspectives are important, a more fundamental reason for Montesquieu’s influence on Ferguson was the revaluation of ancient and modern systems of rule first set out

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

13

in Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline and subsequently elaborated in The Spirit of the Laws. Ferguson engaged centrally with this revaluation throughout the Essay, and explicitly utilized the Considerations as a kind of philosophical guidebook for understanding the Roman past.4 Historians have identified at least three areas in which Montesquieu exercised a profound influence on the Scottish Enlightenment. First, as Dugald Stewart famously emphasized, Montesquieu’s comparative study of laws, forms of government, property, manners, religion, and climate among savage, barbarous, and civilized peoples was a key resource upon which Adam Smith, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Ferguson, and others drew in constructing “theoretical” or “conjectural” histories.5 Second, the account of the history of the French monarchy worked out in the later books of The Spirit of the Laws influenced the historical analyses of feudal property, law, and government elaborated in the 1750s by Kames, Sir John Dalrymple, and, to a lesser extent, William Robertson. In this sense, Montesquieu’s work had implications for thinking about the differences between feudal and commercial forms of property but also the wider distinction between Gothic and modern government that was at the center of the attention of many Scottish writers. Finally, and most generally, Montesquieu’s distinctive science of politics was a source, or at least a point of departure, for the Scottish project for an empirically grounded “science of man,” which a number of historians now regard as central to the Scottish Enlightenment. A concern with identifying historical change in terms of identifiable laws or general causes (causes générales) was certainly near the heart of Montesquieu’s own science of politics. As he wrote in his Considerations, “it is not chance that rules the world,” and there are “general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.”6 This chapter identifies two further issues raised by Montesquieu’s writings that would become central to subsequent Scottish political thought. The fi rst was his projection of military government as a possible future for modern states and, more specifically, his evaluation of English politics in terms of the relationship between civil and military powers. Much of Montesquieu’s political thought was constructed with the aim of forestalling a shift from civilian to military government and, more generally, of avoiding military interference in what he called the

14

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

“civil state.” His interest in this topic can be traced back to the Persian Letters of 1721, in which he argued that one of the main causes of the instability experienced by monarchies stemmed from the Crown’s exclusive control of the military. In monarchies, he wrote, “Power can never be equally divided between people and prince, and as equilibrium is too difficult to maintain, power must diminish on one side as it is augmented on the other. The advantage, however, is usually with the prince who commands the armies.”7 This interest in the organization of civil and military powers had, by 1748, sharpened into a clear vision of military government as a distinctive subspecies of the broader category of despotism (as he observed in a comment on the Roman emperor Domitian, military government was one of the “species of despotic government”).8 Unlike the paternal despotism of imperial China, the theocratic despotisms of Central America, or the conquering empires of central Asia, military governments were characterized by the subordination of civil to military power and the quasi-sovereign position held by the army. Military government, furthermore, would be the distinctive form of any despotism established in western European states. This prognosis stood at the center of much subsequent writing on the future of Europe’s wealthy societies and their tendency to liberty or political slavery. The second theme introduced in this chapter concerns Montesquieu’s account of the republic-empire transition, and, more generally, his striking idea of the unfree republic. Crucially, Montesquieu’s tripartite distinction between republics, monarchies, and despotic regimes overlapped with a broader distinction between free and unfree states. But Montesquieu rejected an earlier civic humanist association of republics with liberty, a view most strikingly exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli’s sharp distinction between republics, which were free states, and principalities, which were not.9 Montesquieu, in contrast to this position, claimed that popular states or republics (which he divided into democracies and aristocracies) were not free states “by their nature.” His history of republican Rome was a detailed elaboration of this theme. Although republican government was suitable for small and primitive peoples like the early Romans, it quickly revealed itself to be incompatible with the government of large and prosperous states. Large republics, unlike large monarchies, had a tendency to generate centralized, absolute, and despotic rule. The despotic and military character of

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

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the Roman Principate was a direct legacy of republicanism itself. The fi rst section of this chapter analyses the critique of the ancient republic contained in the Considerations, which I situate in the context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century critiques of republican conquest and universal monarchy. The second section sketches out Montesquieu’s monarchical alternative to the ancient republic, and, more generally, his vision of pacific commercial monarchy as the foundation of Europe’s future stability. The fi nal section of the chapter reconstructs the main lines of Montesquieu’s analysis of the English system of government, which he explicitly presented as a study of the principles of political liberty.

Montesquieu’s Rome A central objective of Montesquieu’s modern “science of politics” was to undermine the relevance of ancient Rome as a model for modern European states.10 One aspect of this strategy was his dismissal of the socalled thèse royale set out by authors like the abbé Dubos, who argued that the sovereignty of France’s kings was a direct legacy of imperial Rome.11 More generally, Montesquieu rejected almost every aspect of the Roman republican and imperial legacies as incompatible with the institutions of eighteenth-century monarchies. This was the one of the main arguments of the Considerations, fi rst published in 1734, which in turn served as the basis for the broader critique of republican government contained in The Spirit of the Laws. The Considerations was a philosophical history, with little narrative content. Based on a strong claim about the unsustainability of republican empire, the book was designed to underline the superiority of Europe’s moderate monarchies over the martial Roman republic, while at the same time warning against conquest or expansion. In these respects, Montesquieu’s account of Roman history contrasted strongly with the positive vision of republican expansion transmitted to posterity in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Montesquieu, it is true, did echo some themes of Machiavelli’s brand of republicanism, notably his praise of discord and division as sources of the power and liberty of republics (as Montesquieu wrote, “whenever we see everyone tranquil in a state that calls itself a republic, we can be sure that liberty does not exist there”).12 Nevertheless, Montesquieu

16

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

denigrated Rome’s military constitution, dismissed Machiavelli’s praise of the bold Roman plebeians, and rejected the Florentine’s defense of unequal leagues as the best model of a republican empire. His purpose was to demonstrate that imperial republics faced a degree of instability that made them far less fitted than monarchies as forms of government for large and unequal states. Montesquieu’s history of Rome looked back to works of several earlier thinkers who had also highlighted the difficulties of maintaining republican government in large territorial states. A similar message was set out very clearly, for instance, in Pierre Bayle’s famous Historical and Critical Dictionary of 1697, in the context of Bayle’s examination of the tyrannicide of Caesar (a traditional topos of moral and historical inquiry). Following the Roman historian Dio Cassius, Bayle argued that the republican conspirators Brutus and Cassius should have abandoned their plans and left the way open for Caesar to establish a genuine monarchy. Nobody, Bayle reasoned, could honestly believe “that at the point of greatness to which the Romans had attained, which had accustomed them to luxury and ambition, they could have enjoyed any tranquillity, either in the provinces or capital city, under a democratical government.” Rome had already been a pretty long time a republic only in name. The alteration of government will always be inevitable in popular states which amuse themselves with conquests. If they intend to preserve their liberty, they must avoid all offensive war as the plague, and be satisfied with a small extent of land; they must aggrandize and fortify themselves intensivè, and not extensivè, if I may be permitted to make use of the School Distinction.13

Bayle’s critique of republican expansion reflects an important strand of late seventeenth-century argument that connected republican government with militarism and expansionism. Thomas Hobbes’s denigration of Roman republicanism as essentially militarist and imperialist in the “Epistle Dedicatory” to De Cive is perhaps the most famous exposition of this argument.14 However, it was formulated particularly clearly by the German political phi losopher and historian Samuel Pufendorf in the fi rst chapter of his influential Introduction to the History of the Principal States and Kingdoms of Europe, fi rst published in 1682. Martial republics, Pufendorf claimed, exhibited a heightened tendency toward expansion

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

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and thus faced particularly acute risks of degenerating into civil war and, subsequently, of military government. In this way they became the “the worst sort of monarchies, where the army exercis’d sovereign authority.”15 For this reason, Pufendorf stressed, it was “not always advisable to lay the foundations of a state upon military constitutions; since the changes of war are uncertain, and so it is not for the quiet of any state, that martial tempers should prevail too much in it. Accordingly we fi nd peaceable times never did agree with the Romans; and as soon as they were freed from the danger of foreign enemies, they sheath’d their swords in one another’s bowels.”16 Pufendorf’s criticism of Rome’s martial constitution was part of a broader critique of conquest and universal monarchy. Here Pufendorf was reacting to what he perceived as the threat of French military expansion in Europe, which constituted a crucial political context for his writings on both Europe and on the German constitution. In the “Preface” to his Introduction, he condemned both Athens and Carthage for having abandoned trade in favor of expansion, claiming (in regard to Athens), that it would have been more “adviseable for them to mind the Advantage of their own Trade, than to intermeddle too much in Foreign Affairs; and rather to secure their own walls, than to invade their Neighbours.”17 All this Pufendorf contrasted with what he called “regular” monarchies in which the sovereign was “always in full readiness to perform acts of authority” (this distinction between regular and irregular states went back to Pufendorf’s early dissertations, De Systematibus civitatum of 1668 and De republica irregulare of 1669).18 Although Pufendorf’s analysis of Rome’s republican constitution as dangerously “irregular” was by no means universally accepted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (particularly by neo-Machiavellian writers seeking republican alternatives to what they saw as a Europe of corrupt and warlike monarchies), his equation of the spirit of conquest with the threat of military government proved less contentious. Whatever other issues separated writers with republican sympathies from those defending various types of monarchy, it was generally agreed that any resurgence of the Roman spirit of conquest in Europe could engender a new universal monarchy or universal empire, which Pufendorf likened to a “fuel with which the whole world may be put into a flame.”19

18

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Two aspects of Montesquieu’s narrative in the Considerations either followed or extended these earlier arguments. The fi rst was his critique of republican expansion. Rome, Montesquieu argued, was a republic whose purpose was expansion, founded upon the principle of continual war. The close proximity of warlike neighbors, the equal partition of lands, and the almost complete immersion of the individual within the citizen forged a powerful patriotic spirit which initially gave rise to the extraordinary sequence of military successes that characterized the republic’s early history. Nevertheless, the tendency toward expansion and war soon led to contradictions and instabilities. Both of the causes of the republic’s ruin identified by Montesquieu were related to its imperialism. The fi rst of these was the im mense power granted to generals in the provinces, which paved the way for the destruction of liberty by Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus. The second was the dilution of Rome’s civic spirit that resulted from the attempts of the conquered peoples to share in the rights of citizenship and sovereignty. Underlying both causes, however, was the republic’s empire. Expansion “caused all the trouble and changed popular tumults into civil wars.” Whereas external war had once “united all interests in Rome,” harmonizing social disparity in precisely the way Machiavelli had suggested in his Discourses on Livy, peace simply “united the views and interests of the leading men and brought nothing but tyranny.” The consequence was the “ambiguous government” of Augustus, a military despotism founded upon the incomplete division between civil and military forces within the state.20 Montesquieu’s attack on Rome’s republican empire was phrased in terms of a distinction between conquest and commerce that featured in several contemporary French works. The distinction was at the heart of the argument set out in Jean-François Melon’s Political Essay on Commerce of 1734, the most significant contemporary French work of political economy. Both writers shared a similar framework in their critical assessment of Roman imperialism and the Roman military system. Both were motivated by anxiety about the prospect of military government under modern conditions. Their preference for commerce, rather than conquest, found expression in overlapping assessments of the Carthaginian republic, which had traditionally been seen as among the most corrupt of all ancient states (mainly on the authority of Aristotle’s Politics).21 While Montesquieu himself did follow aspects of this tradi-

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

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tional critique—he condemned the venality of offices in Carthage and its reliance on mercenary soldiers—he identified Carthage’s conquests (especially in Spain) as the main cause of its decline. In this sense, Montesquieu was identifying the dynamics of imperial and territorial expansion, rather than commerce itself, as the primary threat to the longevity of trading states: Such powers, as are established by commerce, may subsist for a long series of years in their humble condition, but their grandeur is of short duration; they rise by little by little, and in an imperceptible manner, for they do not perform any par tic u lar exploit to make a noise, and signalize their power: But when they have once raised themselves to so exalted a pitch, that it is impossible but all must see them, every one endeavours to deprive this nation of an advantage which it had snatched, as it were, from the rest of the world.22

The second significant component of Montesquieu’s narrative was his rejection of the claim that inequal ity and luxury were to blame for the demise of the republic. This argument had been restated in 1719 by the French historian René Aubert, abbé de Vertot, whose eighteenthcentury fame rested mainly on his histories of “revolutions” (not only of ancient Rome, but also of Sweden and Portugal).23 In his History of the Revolutions That Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic, Vertot sought to demonstrate the extent to which Rome’s liberty depended upon the virtues of its senatorial aristocracy (as one English sympathizer of Caesar commented acidly, Vertot had “little or no notion of any liberty in Rome, except what was included in the walls of her senate”).24 In this respect, his narrative was marked by a critical assessment of unmitigated popular power. Nevertheless, Vertot’s defense of Rome’s patricians paralleled a significant critique of wealth and economic inequal ity. In the fi rst volume of his book, Vertot had praised Rome’s early devotion to poverty, and had underlined the strictness of sumptuary laws and other institutions.25 In the second volume, he described in detail the poisonous effects of Rome’s growing luxury and inequal ity, and depicted with some sympathy the various endeavors to restore equality among its citizens. Seen from this perspective, the agrarian laws of Tiberius Gracchus were the acts of a genuine republican, who had aimed at nothing more than to “bring the Condition of the poor Citizens nearer to that of the Rich, and to establish a kind of

20

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Equality among them all.”26 Although, as Vertot recognized, this had led to a dangerous concentration of political power (a sort of “absolute empire in a republick”), his underlying message concerned the moral and political dangers of extreme inequal ity. The “luxury of the east” destroyed the last vestiges of liberty in Rome (by undermining the old sumptuary laws), and the “dextrous” politics of Augustus fi nally accustomed “the free-born to bear with slavery, and made a new monarchy supportable to ancient commonwealthmen.”27 Montesquieu’s assessment of Roman inequal ity followed a different path. In the early chapters of the Considerations he focused on the “equal partition of lands” as a source of Roman strength and patriotism, and claimed that it was equality “that at first enabled Rome to rise from its lowly position; and this was obvious when it became corrupt.”28 Nevertheless, Montesquieu rejected both the moral and political conclusions drawn by Vertot. The luxury and inequal ity that accompanied the republic’s territorial expansion were at odds with the moral and institutional cohesion of republics, but luxury was “not in itself a misfortune,” and could be accommodated readily within a particular kind of monarchy. The problem faced by the republic stemmed rather from the massive contradictions between an egalitarian political system and an unequal empire requiring military defense: When the laws were no longer stringently observed, a situation just like the one we are in came about. The avarice of some individuals and the prodigality of others caused landed property to pass into the hands of a few, and the arts were at once introduced for the mutual needs of the rich and poor. As a result, almost no citizens or soldiers were left. Landed properties previously destined for their support were employed for the support of slaves and artisans— instruments of the luxury of the new owners. And without this the state, which had to endure without this disorder, would have perished. Before the corruption set in, the primary incomes of the state were divided among the soldiers, that is, the farmers. When the republic was corrupt, they passed at once to rich men, who gave them back to the slaves and artisans. And by means of taxes a part was taken away for the support of the soldiers.29

The massive contradictions imposed on Rome’s civilian and military institutions by the empire was one of the main themes of Montesquieu’s treatment of the Principate under Augustus and Tiberius. Crucially, this part of Montesquieu’s book began with a denial of the traditional claim,

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

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reiterated by Vertot, that the imperial government could be described as a species of monarchy.30 Montesquieu emphasized that Rome’s military government bore little resemblance to the monarchies of modern Eu rope, and suggested that it was better understood as a postrepublican military government, based on the subordination of civil to military power (“the civil power, which had been steadily beaten down, was in no position to counter-balance the military; each army wanted to create an emperor”). The crucial point was that military government was a republican legacy, a state-form in which the soldiers had inherited the rights and powers of the populus romanus. As Montesquieu underlined, “most of the things that happened under the emperors had their origin in the republic,” and “perhaps it is a general rule that military government is, in certain respects, republican rather than monarchical.” The Roman empire was improperly so denominated at that time, and might rather be called an irregular commonwealth, nearly resembling the Aristocracy of Algiers, where the militia, who are invested with the sovereign power, elect and depose the magistrate they call the Dey; and it may perhaps be taken as a rule, that a military government is, in some respects, a republic rather than a monarchy.31

Montesquieu’s argument rested on a detailed historical account of the changes in the distribution of civil and military powers that occurred during Rome’s transition from republic to empire. During the early Principate, he explained, successive imperial governments sought to stabilize and reform the military government. Augustus’s attempt to deprive Rome’s civilian magistrates of the right to bear arms was simply the fi rst in a long line of attempts under the emperors to temper military government by establishing a clear demarcation between civilian and military power in the postrepublican state. Augustus failed, but subsequent emperors, such as Gallienus, confirmed the division by preventing members of the senate from entering into the army. Finally, although some emperors (like Maximinus) sought to restructure Rome on the model of military government, most learned that government by soldiers was as dangerous to themselves as it was to their subjects. Constantine succeeded in tempering the power of the army. As Montesquieu reiterated in book 6 of The Spirit of the Laws, Constantine “changed the military government into a military and civil one, and drew nearer to

22

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

monarchy.”32 Nevertheless, no emperor succeeded in entirely taming the legions. Military governments faced an insuperable contradiction between the demands of external security and internal liberty: an “empire founded on arms needs to be sustained by arms,” but the empire was “in a situation where it could not endure without soldiers and could not endure with them.” The relative stability and superiority of modern hereditary monarchy was obvious. As Montesquieu observed in a note, whereas the French monarchy had seen sixty-three kings in twelve centuries, the Roman Empire was ruled by seventy emperors in the space of only 160 years.33 Much of this material was incorporated within the broader discussion of republican government in The Spirit of the Laws. One component of this later discussion was a more fi nely grained analysis of the centralization of power and liberty that accompanied republican expansion, which Montesquieu contrasted with the more balanced and differentiated arrangements characteristic of moderate monarchies, as well as federal republics like Holland. In chapter 6 of book 10 of The Spirit of the Laws, entitled “On a republic that conquers,” Montesquieu argued that the expansion of republics should not go beyond “the number of citizens fi xed for the democracy.” This, he claimed, had been observed by the Romans in the early days of the republic, as they had extended the linked privileges of sovereignty and citizenship to conquered peoples. The danger emerged when republics transcended these limits and sought to govern conquered peoples as subjects. In this case, Montesquieu argued, the republic would “expose its own liberty, because it will entrust too much power to the magistrates whom it sends out to the conquered state.” Moreover, the government of provinces by republics— both democratic and aristocratic—was “harsher than monarchy, as the experience of all times and all countries has shown.”34 Republican expansion violated the principle of the separation of powers, and ensured that conquered states were ruled despotically (a similar problem, he implied, applied to England’s domination of Ireland). While the republic was confi ned to the Italian peninsular, the subject peoples (socii) were governed as confederates. But when it expanded beyond the limits of Italy, it had to send praetors or proconsuls armed with comprehensive executive, legislative, and judicial powers to the provinces. For this reason, they were “despotic magistrates.”

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We have said elsewhere that by the nature of things in a republic the same citizens had civil and military employments. The result is that a conquering republic can scarcely extend its government and control the conquered state in accordance with its own constitution. Indeed, since the magistrate it sends to govern has the executive power over civil and military business, he must also have legislative power, for who else would make the laws? He must also have the power of judging, for who would judge independently of him? Therefore, the governor sent by a republic must have the three powers, as he had in the Roman provinces.

As Montesquieu commented, “Liberty was at the centre and tyranny at the provinces.”35 In The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu also provided a more detailed reconstruction of the breakdown of the Roman constitution. His analysis, which traced in outline the shift from a mixed republic to a unitary popular state, provided an illustration of the principles which underpinned the separation of the three powers of execution, legislation, and judging. Rome was originally an elective monarchy in which monarchical, aristocratic, and popular powers were in harmony. The king Servius Tullius established a proportionate relationship between wealth, political authority, and taxation in a six-tiered system of classes (the wealthy paid more, but they were compensated by a higher degree of political influence in the state). Tarquin Superbus’s subsequent attempt to establish tyranny brought about a popular revolution. Rome thus became a popular state, which meant that it could do without distinctions of rank based on birth.36 However, following the tyrannical regime of the Decemvirs, Rome’s plebeians began to attack the patricians in their private rights and gradually to unify the various powers in their own order. This left no independent power capable of providing the counterbalancing mechanism that, for Montesquieu, was a crucial guarantee of both the liberty of the citizen and the liberty of the constitution. In Rome, as the people had the greater part of the legislative power, part of the executive power, and part of the power of judging, they were a great power that had to be counter-balanced by another. The senate certainly had part of the executive power; it had some branch of the legislative power, but this was not enough to counter-balance the people. It had to have part of the power of judging, and it had a part

24

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment when judges were chosen from among the senators. When the Gracchi deprived the senators of the power of judging, the senate could no longer stand up to the people. Therefore, they ran counter to the liberty of the constitution in order to favour the liberty of the citizen, but the latter was lost along with the former.37

In The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu drove home his earlier claims about the unsuitability of republican government for large and unequal states. Large states, he argued, were typically characterized by great inequalities in the distribution of wealth. Such a degree of inequality, however, undermined basic preconditions for the survival of republic regimes, notably the “political virtue” and “love of the homeland” that flourished in conditions of equality.38 It followed that a large republic would typically be a state close to dissolution, where interests would be particularized and where the common good would be sacrificed “to a thousand considerations, it is subordinated to exceptions; it depends upon accidents.”39 Monarchies were much better at neutralizing these developments. More generally, Montesquieu emphasized the vulnerability of republics to a distinctive version of absolute rule. As he had written in the Considerations, no “authority is more absolute than that of a prince who succeeds a republic, for he finds himself with all the power of the people, who had not been able to impose limitations on themselves.” This distinctive picture of the postrepublican prince was extended and elaborated in The Spirit of the Laws. An exorbitant authority suddenly conferred upon a citizen in a republic, produces a monarchy; or something more than a monarchy. In the latter, the laws have provided for, or in some measure adapted themselves to, the constitution; and the principle of government checks the monarch: but in a republic where a private citizen has obtain’d an exorbitant power, the abuse of this power is much greater, because the laws foresaw it not, and consequently made no provision against it.40

Democratic republics could also suffer an alternative route to corruption, which occurred when “the spirit of extreme equality is taken up and each one wants to be the equal of those chosen to command.”41 This was a particularly pernicious form of equality, and it was even more dangerous than the rising spirit of inequality. It led to licentiousness, the undermining of the authority of magistrates, the buying and selling of votes, and fi nally to the political despotism which always followed pop-

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

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ular anarchy. Democratic republics had to contend with both evils: “the spirit of inequality, which leads it to aristocracy or to the government of one alone, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to the despotism of one alone.”42

Modern Europe and the Modern Monarchy Montesquieu’s comparative analysis of the historical trajectories of the ancients and the moderns worked out overwhelmingly in modern Europe’s favor. Eighteenth-century rulers, he argued, were now subject to an unprecedented range of political and economic constraints on their behavior, moderating both the spirit of conquest and the misuse of royal power within states. Furthermore, the overall tendency of postRoman history was toward the integration of Europe as a pacific commercial “republic” or “commonwealth” of states. The origins of these arguments lay in Montesquieu’s manuscript work of 1734, entitled Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe, and also in some passages of the Considerations. In the Reflections Montesquieu aimed to demonstrate that universal monarchy, or “empire” on the Roman model, was no longer viable under modern conditions. The commercial development of the continent had created trading bonds between separate nations (England and France now depended on goods from Poland and Muscovy). Europe was now a single “nation” or republic, a patchwork of mediumsized monarchies, smaller republics, and trading federal states (like the Dutch Republic), bound together in a shared political culture and economy.43 This line of argument carried over to The Spirit of the Laws, where Montesquieu repeated his earlier claim that the “natural effect of commerce is to bring peace” and came close to describing Europe as a commercial union of nations, based on “mutual needs.”44 In book 21 of The Spirit of the Laws, he extended this verdict by commending Europe’s position at the center of global trade, claiming that Europe’s external trade had driven its internal commercial development, even beyond the massive levels of internal trade in eighteenth-century China. Europe as a whole had thus reached “such a degree of power that nothing in history is comparable to it.”45 Montesquieu declared that there was less of a gulf between modern European peoples than there was between Rome’s citizens and soldiers, or even between the various armies themselves “under the Roman empire, when it was become a despotic and

26

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

military government.”46 He explicitly praised the modern laws and conventions of war as an improvement on ancient practice. Religion, philosophy, and moeurs were, in modern times, genuine forces for moderation. This, crudely, was the substance of his famous claim that modern European governments had “begun to be cured of Machiavellianism,” and would “continue to be cured of it.” Particularly in regard to modern Europe’s “right of nations,” Montesquieu noted, “I leave others to judge how much better we have become.”47 Despite the overall confidence behind this assessment, Montesquieu did draw attention to features of the contemporary landscape which, he claimed, now threatened the internal liberties of states and the stability of the state system. By far the most significant of these was the pervasive, insidious militarization of the continent. This fear had its origins in the Considerations, which was in part directed against the military “project” of Frederick William I of Prussia: We hear that somewhere in the world a prince has been working for fi fteen years to abolish civil government in his states and establish military government. I have no wish to make odious reflections on this design. I shall only say that, by the nature of things, two hundred guards can give security to the life of a prince, but not eighty thousand; besides which, it is more dangerous to oppress an armed people than one that is not armed.48

In The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu generalized this critique of Prussian militarism to the wider continent. In a famous and much-cited passage (which first appeared in the Reflections), he underlined the severe military, fi nancial, and social consequences of the continuous expansion of European military establishments. Continual military preparations— which in the Reflections Montesquieu called the “malady of our century”— would put an end to Europe’s economic and political development and ultimately to take the continent backwards to the condition of the nomadic civilizations of Central Asia. A new disease has spread across Europe; it has affl icted our princes and made them keep an inordinate number of troops. It redoubles in strength and necessarily becomes contagious; for, as soon as one state increases what it calls its troops, the others suddenly increase theirs, so that nothing is gained thereby but the common ruin. Each monarch keeps ready all the armies he would have if his peoples were in danger of being exterminated; and this state in which all strain against all is

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called peace. Thus Europe is so ruined that if individuals were in the situation of the three most opulent powers in this part of the world, they would have nothing to live on. We are poor with the wealth and commerce of the whole universe, and soon, as a result of these soldiers, we shall have nothing but soldiers and we shall be like the Tartars.49

The central purpose of The Spirit of the Laws was to show why a par ticular kind of monarchy, as opposed to a republic in either its Greek or Roman guises, held out the best prospect for preventing this outcome. According to Montesquieu, the states which developed in Europe after the fall of the Roman empire diverged radically from those of antiquity. The primary reason behind these differences was the conquest and settlement of Europe by the Germanic tribes in the fi fth century. These “free nations,” Montesquieu claimed, destroyed the centralized military empire of Rome and laid the basis for a new model of political government, distinct from the small-scale republics of the ancients as well as the large-scale empires or despotic states of Asia (as Montesquieu observed, modern European history could be understood almost entirely in terms of the long-term consequences of these conquests, although they bore no resemblance to parallel conquests of the Greeks, the Romans, or the wandering peoples of Central Asia).50 He provided a full reconstruction of how this history played out in the French context in books 28, 30, and 31 of The Spirit of the Laws. His broader claim, however, was that modern European states, conceived as post-Germanic political entities, rested on different foundations and possessed different attributes from those of Rome and other ancient republics. To put it bluntly, for Montesquieu modern politics was neo-German, not neo-Roman. The major outcome of this way of mapping Europe’s history was a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, conception of monarchy. Strictly speaking, Montesquieu argued, monarchy was unknown in the ancient world. Criticizing what he took to be the arbitrariness of Aristotle’s classification, he claimed that although the ancients recognized a kind of royal government or “government of one alone,” they possessed no comprehension of how the three powers of execution, legislation, and judging could be distributed within a monarchy in accordance with the principle of moderation (even less did they recognize the English model of a “government founded on a legislative body of the representatives of a nation”).51 This kind of monarchy was entirely modern, and was a

28

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

product of the series of intricate transformations that occurred following the Germanic conquest of western Europe. Here is how the plan for the monarchies that we know was formed. The Germanic nations who conquered the Roman Empire were very free, as is known. On the subject one only has to see Tacitus on the Mores of the Germans. The conquerors spread out across the country; they lived in the countryside, rarely in the towns. Nevertheless, the nation had to deliberate on its business as it had done before the conquest; it did so by representatives. Here is the origin of Gothic government among us. It was at first a mixture of aristocracy and monarchy. Its drawback was that the common people were slaves; it was a good government that had within itself the capacity to become better. Giving letters of emancipation became the custom, and soon the civil liberty of the people, the prerogatives of the nobility and of the clergy, and the power of the kings, were in such concert that there has never been, I believe, a government on earth as well tempered as that of each part of Europe during the time that this government continued to exist; and it is remarkable that the corruption of the government of a conquering people should have formed the best kind of government men have been able to devise.52

According to Montesquieu, several features of this post-Germanic model of political government survived intact among eighteenth-century states. One branch of its development had led to the modern English constitution, which exhibited the crucial mechanism of balanced government identified by Tacitus among the ancient German societies in the Germania. The English, in preserving a balance between royal decisionmaking and the deliberative functions exercised in the legislature, had taken their “idea of political government from the Germans” (here he referred to Tacitus’s description of German government as a system in which “on lesser matters the princes consult, on greater ones, everybody does; yet even when a decision is in the power of the people, it is thoroughly considered by the princes”). The usual path of European development, however, was toward the large territorial monarchies of western Europe (especially France), where the German legacy found expression in a different set of institutional arrangements. In book 31 of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu cited Tacitus’s observation that the Germans “chose their kings with respect to their nobility of birth, their generals for their strength.”53 This arrangement, Montesquieu argued, was the beginning of a binary system of royal and noble government, which paralleled a further distinction between civil and military powers.

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By the eighteenth-century, it had found expression in a form of monarchy where the king possessed executive power and part of the legislative power, while an independent martial nobility, with both judicial and military functions, played a key role in preventing the state from degenerating into despotism. Along with the various other “political bodies” (notably the parlements, the “depositories of the laws,” and ecclesiastical jurisdictions), the nobility would provide restraints against the direct exercise of royal power and the centralizing inclinations of men like Cardinal Richelieu. As he famously put it in book 2 of The Spirit of the Laws, “the nobility is of the essence of monarchy, whose fundamental maxim is: no monarch, no nobility: no nobility, no monarch.”54 One crucial aspect of this model of monarchy was a strict division between civil and military powers. At the end of book 5, in a crucial chapter entitled “New consequences of the principles of the three governments,” Montesquieu laid out five questions about the different ways of organizing civil, political, and military power in republics and monarchies. The third question had relevance not only for Montesquieu’s comparative science of politics, but also for Ferguson’s later thinking on the problems of liberty and despotism in modern Europe. THIRD QUESTION. Shall civil and military employments be given to one person? They must be united in a republic and separated in a monarchy. In republics it would be very dangerous to make the profession of arms a par tic u lar estate distinct from that of civil functions; and in monarchies, there would be no less peril in giving the two functions to the same person. One takes up arms, in the republic, only to defend the laws and the homeland; it is because one is a citizen that one becomes, for a time, a soldier. If these were two distinct estates, the one who bore arms and believed himself a citizen would come to feel that he was only a soldier. In monarchies, the object of men of war is only glory, or at least honour or fortune. One should be very careful not to give civil employments to such men; they must, on the contrary, be contained by the civil magistrates, and they must not have at the same time both the people’s trust and the force to abuse it. In a nation where the republic hides under the form of monarchy, observe how a par tic u lar estate for fighting men is feared and how the warrior still remains a citizen or even a magistrate, so that these titles serve as a pledge to the homeland so that it is never forgotten.

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment That division of the magistracies into civil and military ones, which the Romans made after the loss of the republic, was not arbitrary. It followed from a change in the Roman constitution; it was in the nature of monarchical government. And in order to temper the military government, the emperors that succeeded Augustus were obliged to fi nish what he had only begun.55

In chapter 16 of the same book, entitled “Of the communication of power,” Montesquieu elaborated on the separate civilian and military hierarchies that he took to be characteristic of monarchy. Unlike despotic states, where power was “communicated entire” to subordinate officers, “wisely regulated” monarchies maintained a clear distinction between “military bodies” and the civilian governors of provinces and towns. In this way, Montesquieu claimed, military officers were “not attached to any body of militia, with the result that, as their command derives only from the par ticular will of the prince, who employs them or not, they are, in a way, in ser vice and, in a way, outside it.”56 In accordance with his broader conception of monarchy, the subdividing, tempering, and mixing of the monarch’s civilian and military administrations would ensure that nobody could attain the kind of dangerous power in the provinces that would be possible if civil and military authority was entrusted to the same person. All this was consistent with Montesquieu’s underlying critique of republican expansion. As he put it, it was easier for a monarchy to extend its government, “because the officers it sends, have, some the civil executive, and others the military executive power; which does not necessarily imply a despotic authority.” The overall logic was clear. A “republican” union of civil and military powers would result in despotism in a large monarchical state.57 Montesquieu’s conception of monarchy had several further components. The most important of these was an elaborate hierarchy of ranks and “pre-eminences,” which in Montesquieu’s view would be compatible with a modern commercial economy.58 Although he counseled against noble participation in commercial activity, the wider commercial development of the state and the participation of the people in commerce were to be encouraged. The kind of commerce appropriate to monarchies, Montesquieu claimed, would be a “commerce of luxury,” rather than the “economic commerce” appropriate to republics.59 Indeed, luxury trade was appropriate for the economies of both England and France. In this situation, it was useful that the status of nobility could

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be “acquired with silver,” since it encouraged the activity, emulation, and success of merchants and traders. The broad picture was of a flourishing commercial economy based on luxury, held together politically by a decentralized system of civil and military powers under the control of the nobility and local judicial bodies. The moral-psychological component of this outline was Montesquieu’s substitution of honor for virtue as the “principle” of monarchical government. This denial of the need for virtue among large modern states was among the most contentious aspects of Montesquieu’s work, and generated considerable discussion and criticism across Europe in the decades after 1750.60 Nevertheless, his conception of honor (which he sometimes called “false honour”) was complex. On the one hand, honor was a product of inequal ity, and found expression in the love of distinction and ambition for superiority that characterized members of highly inegalitarian societies. This was why Montesquieu claimed that political virtue, which in republics translated into a love of equality, had no place in monarchies. As he put it, “the idea of equality does not even occur; in these states everyone aims for superiority.”61 Distinctions of wealth and prestige formed the major objects of public esteem, and hence competition and ambition. Yet as Montesquieu famously argued, honor simultaneously made “all parts of the body politic move,” so that “each person works for the common good, believing that he works for his individual interests.”62 This face of honor raised the specter of Bernard Mandev ille’s Fable of the Bees and, behind that, the great Augustinian and Epicurean writings of the previous century.63 On the other hand, Montesquieu was quite explicit about honor’s capacity to promote civil and military ser vice. Among the French nobility, honor prescribed “nothing more than serving the prince in war: indeed, this is the preeminent profession because its risks, successes, and even misfortunes lead to greatness.”64 Montesquieu’s conception of honor thus had a curiously ambiguous character. While it was compatible with military ser vice and patriotic activity, its overlap with politeness, vanity, and even arrogance ensured that honor-based monarchies would be morally empty. Honor was the psychological glue that held monarchy together, but in monarchies “everyone will be almost a good citizen, and one will rarely fi nd someone who is a good man.”65

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England’s Prospects The most important contemporary alternative to this model of monarchy was England.66 The most striking feature of the English regime, in Montesquieu’s treatment, was its hybrid character, a mixture of the distinct “species” of republic and monarchy. As Montesquieu insisted twice in The Spirit of the Laws, England was a state where a “republic hides under the form of monarchy” (or where the “form of an absolute government” overlay the “foundation of a free government”). This emphasis upon England’s republican foundations meant that Montesquieu was able to present his analysis of the English system as an examination of the principles that maintained political liberty in what he called a “free state.” According to Montesquieu, England constituted a historically unique example of a state that had taken political liberty as its “direct purpose.” By examining its principles, he declared, “liberty will appear there as in a mirror.”67 Nevertheless, his discussion of the foundations of the English system of government was not simply a descriptive exercise, a neutral reconstruction of the principles underlying a free political constitution. More fundamentally, he also rehearsed a more substantive argument about the overall direction of England’s political development. This more substantive argument, however, was singularly ambiguous in its conclusions. Although Montesquieu was generally quite positive about liberty’s prospects in the English context, his reservations about the weaknesses or tensions in the constitution of the state gave his assessment a darker and less reassuring tone. Montesquieu’s analysis of the English constitution in book 11 of The Spirit of the Laws formed part of his wider account of political liberty. Although he addressed various mistaken interpretations of liberty, his main purpose was to refute the commonplace association of liberty with republican government and the conflation of popular power with political freedom. The equivalence of liberty with democratic rule, Montesquieu emphasized, represented a dangerous confusion of the concepts of liberty and independence. It is true that in democracies the people seem to do what they want, but political liberty in no way consists in doing what one wants. In a state, that is, in a society where there are laws, liberty can consist only in having the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being constrained to do what one should not want to do.

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One must put oneself in mind of what independence is and what liberty is. Liberty is the right to do everything the laws permit; and if one citizen could do what they forbid, he would no longer have liberty because the others would likewise have this power.68

For these reasons, democracies and aristocracies were not “free states by their nature.” Political liberty was only found in moderate governments where power was capable of checking power. By implication, this encompassed the various kinds of mixed state (Rome and Britain) as well as the moderate monarchy of France, which approximated or came close to attaining political liberty.69 Montesquieu’s evaluation of England’s prospects as a free state drew much of its explanatory power from a series of comparisons with republican Rome (and, to a lesser extent, with Athens). While his broad purpose was to show that the English system, in properly separating, balancing, and limiting the executive and legislative powers, was superior to that of ancient Rome, he identified three more specific features of the English constitution which qualified it for liberty. The use of juries meant that judicial power was now attached to no specific order or class within the state, and hence the judicial power could not be used as an instrument of politics. The existence of representative assemblies meant that the “people” were unable to exercise their legislative power collectively, and were prevented from interfering with, or usurping, the power of execution. The ability of the executive to check the deliberations of the legislature, and the reciprocal veto that existed between the two legislative assemblies, meant that neither the executive power nor the legislative power was able to exercise authority despotically. More generally, as he had written in his Considerations, the English parliament had a capacity to correct itself. All this was the framework for a system of political liberty which prevented the emergence of partial interests and gave to individuals a remarkable degree of personal security against arbitrary interference.70 Montesquieu widened his frame in chapter 27 of book 19 of The Spirit of the Laws, in which he focused less on the specifics of the English constitution and more on the full range of factors encompassed by the “mores, manners, and character” of the nation. Here he reworked the embryonic judgment on England’s divided, but curiously stable and free, political life he had inserted in the Persian Letters, in which he described England as a country where one saw “liberty endlessly issuing

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from the fi res of discord and sedition, the prince always tottering on an immoveable throne. You see an impatient nation, wise even in anger, and, becoming mistress of the seas (a thing unheard of before), combining trade with empire.”71 In the later version he emphasized the inability of England’s political divisions to subvert the constitution. Although he recognized the factious character of English political culture, Montesquieu dismissed the worries of those, like Lord Bolingbroke, who had argued that the divisions between its political parties had the capacity to undermine the constitution. Crucially, he denied the possibility that populist leaders could succeed in undermining the authority of the legislature (this, he emphasized, was the “great advantage such a government would have over the ancient democracies, in which the people had an immediate power; for, when the orators agitated them, these agitations always had their effect”). The broader picture was of a nation which, despite its apparent instability, its moral failings, and the polarized character of its public life, had managed to achieve a healthy balance between its liberty, its commerce, and its religion. Even those vicious passions which, in ancient Rome, had destabilized the political system proved in the British case to have salutary consequences: “hatred, envy, jealousy, and the ardour for enriching and distinguishing oneself would appear to their full extent, and if this were otherwise, the state would be like a man who, laid low by disease, has no passions because he has no strength.”72 The second claim was about the positive consequences of England’s commercial development. Britain’s economic dynamism, and even its luxury consumption, were not incompatible with the preservation of its liberty. Although its commercial culture may not have been particularly morally admirable, the “spirit of commerce” brought with it the compensatory virtues of frugality, economy, moderation, and tranquillity. Moreover, Britain was not a new Rome. Rather, Montesquieu argued, England would survive for as long as it continued to subordinate its political interests to its commercial interests. He concluded that the English were the “people in the world who have best known how to take advantage of each of these three great things at the same time: religion, commerce, and liberty.”73 Despite this confidence in England’s political foundations, Montesquieu voiced significant doubts about the nation’s stability. His anxieties centered upon what he called its “extreme” version of political lib-

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erty and the possibility that its quasi-republican constitution made it more, not less, vulnerable to corruption than the more moderate monarchies of continental Europe. His broad message can be read as an extension of the claim fi rst set out in the Considerations about the precariousness of liberty in free states (i.e., republics): The tyranny of a prince does no more to ruin a state than does indifference to the common good to ruin a republic. The advantage of a free state is that revenues are better administered. But what if they are poorly administered? The advantage of a free state is that there are no favourites in it. But when that is not the case—when it is necessary to line the pockets of the friends and relatives, not of a prince, but of all those who participate in the government— all is lost. There is greater danger in the laws being evaded in a free state than in their being violated by a prince, for a prince is always the foremost citizen in his state, and has more interest in preserving it than anyone else.74

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu gave two further hints as to the sources of Britain’s tendency toward political slavery. The fi rst of these centered on the absence in Britain of a system of intermediary ranks. According to Montesquieu, England’s unusual character within the broad swathe of European regime-types was the outcome of an alternative pattern of historical development to that of other monarchies. As he explained in book 2, the English had “removed all the intermediate powers that formed their monarchy,” and were “quite right to preserve that liberty; if they were to lose it, they would be one of the most enslaved peoples on earth.” The territorial nobility had lost its character as an intermediate power as a consequence of its engagement in commerce, the centralizing inclinations of Tudor monarchs, and the seventeenthcentury civil wars. Given the absence of intermediary ranks in Britain, there now existed a strong possibility that the factions and licentiousness characteristic of nonvirtuous popular governments might overwhelm the entire political system. As Montesquieu commented, if “you abolish the prerogatives of the lords, clergy, nobility, and towns in a monarchy, you will soon have a popular state or else a despotic state.”75 As the criticisms set out by some of his early readers suggest, the overall picture was that of a commercialized, dangerously unstable and quasi-republican state, incapable of holding the middle ground between liberty and slavery.76 From this perspective, Montesquieu was implying that England was gradually losing the character of a moderate regime and was verging

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toward the kind of unitary and egalitarian republic that James Harrington had prescribed for seventeenth-century England. As Montesquieu noted early on in the work, “it was a fi ne spectacle in the last century to see the impotent attempts of the English to establish democracy among themselves”. Later he remarked that “Harrington, in his Oceana, has also examined the furthest point of liberty to which the constitution of a state can be carried. But of him it can be said that he sought this liberty only after misunderstanding it, and that he built Chalcedon with the coast of Byzantium before his eyes.”77 The second and more specific argument was connected to the problem of organizing civil and military power in a hybrid regime. Montesquieu had taken a serious interest in parliamentary debates on the subject of standing armies in the course of his sojourn in England between 1729 and 1731.78 His interest remained prominent in The Spirit of the Laws. In chapter 27 of book 19, for instance, he explained that under the English constitution “civil status” was more highly esteemed than military ser vice, and that “military men” were regarded as both “useful” and “dangerous.”79 But the most significant passages came in the course of the chapter “On the constitution of England,” which contained several paragraphs on the institutional arrangements necessary to ensure that the English executive was unable to oppress the nation. Here Montesquieu was quite explicit about the resemblance between England and the Roman republic. “So that the one who executes is not able to oppress, the armies entrusted him must be of the people and have the same spirit as the people, as they were in Rome until the time of Marius.”80 This could be achieved in one of two ways: either by instituting a citizens’ militia, with a strict property qualification and other devices such as the annual rotation of officers, or, if a standing army was established, by giving the legislature the power to disband the armies “as soon as the legislature so desires” (although it was also important that the troops should not live in separate camps or barracks). However, control of the army itself should always rest with the executive. In this respect Montesquieu sided with the Court Whig argument for executive control of the military, voiced by earlier writers such as Lord Hervey, who in 1734 had vehemently attacked proposals to make the army “free and independent of the Crown” on the grounds that this would ultimately leave the army independent of every legal authority, leading to the “worst of all slavery, which is that of a stratocracy, or

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military synod.”81 Military government, Montesquieu reasoned, would be the inevitable outcome of placing the army under the direct control of the legislature. Once the army is established, it should be directly dependent on the executive power, not on the legislative body; and this is in the nature of the thing, as its concern is more with action than deliberation. Men’s manner of thinking is to make more of courage than of timidity; more of activity than of prudence; more of force than of counsel. The army will always scorn a senate and respect its officers. It will not make much of the orders sent from a body composed of people it believes timid and, therefore, unworthy to command it. Thus, whenever the army depends solely on the legislative body, the government will become military. And if the contrary has ever occurred, it is the effect of some extraordinary circumstances; it is because the army there is always separate, because it is composed of separate bodies each of which depends upon its par tic ular province, because the capitals are in excellent locations whose situation alone defends them and which have no troops.82

Perhaps sensing the ambiguity of his discussion of this issue in the first edition of the work, Montesquieu added a further remark on the origins of military government in an amendment he made at some point before the publication of the posthumous edition in 1757. For if, in the case of an army governed by the legislative body, par tic ular circumstances keep the government from becoming military, one will encounter other drawbacks; one of these two things must happen, either the army must destroy the government, or the government must weaken the army.83

Montesquieu’s legacy for his immediate readers was an ambiguous one. His celebrated account of the principles governing the English constitution, along with his wider assessment of the “mores, manners and character” that sustained Britain’s commerce, religion, and liberty, were frequently understood as a clear statement of England’s stability and moderation. From this perspective, the distinctions between ancient Rome and modern Britain were sharp and important. Nevertheless, sophisticated readers could also fi nd in his account a more pessimistic assessment of England’s trajectory toward division, instability, and political slavery. While the precise shape of this trajectory remained unspecified, Montesquieu dropped two tantalizing hints that England’s

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political future would be that of a large, unitary, and unfree republican state. The first of these hints was his suggestion that England would “perish when legislative power is more corrupt than executive power.” The second was his suggestion that the outcome might be the establishment of an “unfree republic” (une république non-libre) or, as his eighteenthcentury translator wrote: “no longer a monarchy, but a kind of republican, tho’ not a free, government.”84 An additional layer was added to this problem by the curiously uneven relationship between Britain’s civilian and military establishments. As we shall see in Chapter 2, these suggestions lay behind a great deal of subsequent Scottish speculation on the nature of the British system of government, and provided a crucial starting point for Ferguson’s own analysis of Britain’s prospects.

2

Q

Military Government and Empire in the Scottish Enlightenment

M ONTESQUIEU ’S insights into the sources of modern Britain’s social and political instability were discussed with great interest among the next generation of Scottish thinkers. Although the picture of the English constitution he presented in The Spirit of the Laws was by no means accepted uncritically, his analysis stimulated a remarkably focused debate among Scottish thinkers writing after 1748. Three overlapping issues loomed large in subsequent Scottish discussions of Britain’s situation. The fi rst concerned the accuracy of Montesquieu’s characterization of England as a quasi-republican and highly commercialized state which, in the absence of intermediary ranks, was now prone to a dangerous degree of faction, political corruption, and instability. A number of Scottish texts reflected precisely these preoccupations in their discussions of the plebeian or popular politics of the 1760s, which raised new questions about the slide from liberty to license. A second set of issues revolved around Britain’s security and survival as a global commercial power, and the extent to which its extensive commerce might ultimately prove incompatible with its security within Europe. A third issue was the relationship between Britain’s civil and military powers and the broader difficulties posed by orga niz ing military force in large, econom ical ly powerful states. In all three respects, Montesquieu’s assessment of Britain’s options provided the analytical framework for a sustained but wide-ranging debate about Britain’s vulnerability to empire, military government, and political slavery in the decades after 1748.

40

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

This chapter identifies Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society as the most significant Scottish reconstruction of the causes promoting instability and military government in the British polity. As he noted in one of the central sections of the work, Britain exhibited “a spectacle new in the history of mankind; monarchy mixed with republic, and extensive territory, governed, during some ages, without military force.”1 This was a direct comment on Montesquieu’s earlier characterization, and one of Ferguson’s central aims in the Essay was to understand the destiny of this republican-monarchical hybrid in conditions of commercial and imperial greatness. Yet for a number of reasons Ferguson’s analysis of the causes favoring political slavery differed from that of Montesquieu. First, Ferguson feared that the politics of the 1760s disguised an underlying tendency toward a centralized, but populist, model of commercial monarchy. From this perspective, Ferguson attacked the dangerous “Athenian” combination of commerce, empire, and democratic politics in Britain, which he may have associated with the populist vision of patriotic monarchy set out in Lord Bolingbroke’s Patriot King.2 More generally, the Essay reflected earlier Scottish preoccupations with the prospect of military usurpation in Britain and a related, if more theoretical, concern with the consequences of establishing a republic in a large country. These issues, which were at the forefront of David Hume’s famous essay of 1741 entitled “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic,” were expressions of a residual anxiety about the recurrence of the disastrous combination of republic with empire that occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s republican empire (or imperial republic), and later, it was argued, resurfaced in the “neo-Roman” militarism of William III.3 Ferguson’s Essay looked back to these distinctive concerns about the legacy of popular politics and republicanism for the stability of large states and explicitly invoked the specter of Roman imperial rule as the future for the British “free state.”

War, Democracy, and Empire in the Scottish Enlightenment Montesquieu’s conjectures about the army destroying the government (or the government weakening the army) had a strong resonance in Britain in the 1760s. Although research has shown that in this period the army came to defi ne itself as the embodiment of patriotism, dem-

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onstrating loyalty to the nation (rather than to the king) and an ethic of public ser vice, older concerns about its potential as an instrument of constitutional subversion did not disappear.4 The issue returned to prominence in the political thought of the early 1760s, which corresponded with the ending of the Seven Years War (and the demobilization of soldiers), the beginning of a decade-long economic downturn, rising food prices, and a series of strikes and riots. Against this background, many observers feared that social and political discontent across England might, under the direction of sufficiently radical leadership, lead ultimately to the politicization of the army or, alternatively, to the imposition of “emergency” military rule. As Samuel Johnson wrote in an unpublished essay of 1766 entitled “Considerations on the Corn Laws,” But scarcity is an evil that extends at once to the whole community: that neither leaves quiet to the poor, nor safety to the rich: that in its approaches distresses all the subordinate ranks of mankind, and in its extremity must subvert government, drive the populace upon their rulers, and end in bloodshed and massacre. Those who want the supports of life will seize them wherever they can be found. If in any place there are more than can be fed, some must be expelled, or some must be destroyed. Of this dreadful scene there is no immediate danger; but there is already evil sufficient to deserve and require all our diligence and all our wisdom. The miseries of the poor are such as cannot easily be borne: such as have already incited them in many parts of the kingdom to an open defiance of government, and produced one of the greatest of political evils— the necessity of ruling by immediate force.5

The dilemma to which Johnson pointed—rule by “immediate force” in circumstances of political emergency—was central to the concerns of many Scottish thinkers in the 1760s and 1770s. In the autumn of 1769, near the height of the Wilkes affair, Hume wrote to William Strahan asking whether “popular discontent may not reach the army, who have a pretence for discontents of their own. . . . Our government has become an absolute chimera: so much liberty is incompatible with human society; and it will be happy, if we can escape from it without falling into a military government, such as Algiers or Tunis” (here he echoed Montesquieu’s discussion of the military aristocracy of Algiers).6 Hume’s remarks of the 1760s were not an isolated aspect of his

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thought, but reflected a long-term preoccupation with the populist aspects of eighteenth-century politics, anxieties about the precariousness of “public liberty” in a free government, and, crucially, a historiographical interest in the politics of republicanism and democracy.7 Hume hinted at the special instabilities facing governments without discretionary powers in his 1752 essay on “Public Credit,” where he also remarked on the dangers of “Jacobitish violence” and “democratical frenzy.”8 In “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic” he underlined the disastrous political consequences that would result from attempts to establish a republic in Britain. Although Hume claimed that the political tide was just beginning to turn from popular government toward monarchy, he underlined the fact that mixed monarchy in Britain rested on a delicate balance of institutional structures. He warned explicitly that the establishment of popular government was likely to entail a massive centralization of political power, reminding his readers that the question was “not concerning any fi ne imaginary republic, of which a man may form a plan in his closet.” If any single person acquire power enough to take our constitution to pieces, and put it up a-new, he is really an absolute monarch; and we have already had an instance of this kind, sufficient to convince us, that such a person will never resign his power, or establish any free government.9

This reference to Cromwell raised a cluster of problems that were given extensive treatment in Hume’s History of England, the fi rst volume of which was published in 1754. In the later volumes, Hume treated at length the attempts to “impose a more perfect system of liberty” immediately prior to the regicide, and described the rise of Cromwell in terms of the gradual “encroachments of the military upon the civil power.”10 In dealing with this period, Hume warned against the implications of republican doctrines of resistance as well as the more general strand of utopianism which he detected in much seventeenth-century political theory (in a brief discussion of James Harrington’s Oceana, he held the idea of a “perfect and immortal commonwealth” to be as “chimerical as that of a perfect and immortal man”). Since government was founded on opinion, not force, it was dangerous to undermine the multitude’s reverence for authority. Here Hume’s thinking—which paral-

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leled Montesquieu’s in significant respects— certainly reflected what he perceived to be the fragility of political authority in the contemporary context. While the regicide was a warning for those princes who might aspire to extralegal authority, it also furnished “another instruction, no less natural, and no less useful, concerning the madness of the people, the furies of fanaticism, and the danger of mercenary armies.”11 An alternative response to Montesquieu’s discussion of Britain’s prospects can be found in Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man, a work fi rst published in 1774 but written gradually over a period of many years.12 Although much of what he had to say about Montesquieu was little more than a rehearsal of contemporary commonplaces (such as his claim that Montesquieu’s “warm panegyric” on the English constitution had underestimated the opportunities it afforded for the exercise of virtue), Kames did set out a more substantial analysis that reflects careful reading of The Spirit of the Laws. The central issue addressed by Kames concerned the political consequences of Britain’s extensive commerce. According to him, Montesquieu had failed to recognize the dangerously entangled nature of trade and empire. Moreover, Britain’s fi nancial and military resources were by no means adequate to its exorbitant external ambitions. Although by the 1770s it faced the combined enmity of France, Spain, and the American colonies, Britain foolishly wanted to be the new “formidable power that threatens universal monarchy” and, in its projects of naval adventurism, had come to resemble ancient Athens (as described in Plutarch’s life of Themistocles). Furthermore, as a rich country it was vulnerable to military aggression from its poorer neighbors. Invoking the barbarian invasions of the Roman empire, Kames noted that “plenty of corn in the temperate regions of Europe and Asia, proved a tempting bait to northern savages who wanted bread: have we no cause to dread a similar fate from some warlike neighbour, impelled by hunger, or ambition, to extend his dominions?” London was vulnerable to an attack from open sea, public credit was precarious, and the need to maintain a constant coastal presence in the English Channel diverted the navy from guarding territories in America and the West Indies. Continued external aggrandizement and reliance on standing armies, moreover, had opened a door to the revival of military monarchy at home. By trusting the sword in the hands of those who “abhor the restraints of civil law,” Kames wrote, “a solid foundation is laid for military government.”

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

With the rising threat of a despotic empire in continental Europe (at this point Kames cited Montesquieu’s account of the European arms race in full), Kames conjectured that another foreign war would fi nally prove to be the spark that destroyed Britain’s liberties and reintroduced military monarchy. A future British monarch, with a powerful army at his disposal, might well take advantage of the “drowsy security” into which British citizens had been lulled by a succession of “mild princes.” Suppose only, that a British King, accomplished in the art of war and beloved by his soldiers, heads his own troops in a war with France; and after more than one successful campaign, gives peace to his enemy, on terms advantageous to his people: what security have we for our liberties, when he returns with a victorious army, devoted to his will?13

Further dimensions of Britain’s problems as a commercial, warlike and quasi-republican state were considered in a number of Scottish works that preceded the publication of Ferguson’s Essay. The social and agrarian dimensions of the predicament were laid down clearly in 1764 by the Scottish lawyer and historian Sir John Dalrymple, in a work entitled Considerations on the Policy of Entails. Dalrymple, who had indicated his intellectual debt to Montesquieu in his 1757 Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, set out to demonstrate why Britain, and Scotland in par tic ular, urgently needed to preserve the social authority of its landed elite if it was to forestall a rerun of the Cromwellian disaster.14 This emphasis on the preservation of the nation’s landed elite sharply distinguished Dalrymple from both Kames (who had described in lurid detail the injustices of Scotland’s great landowners in his Historical Law Tracts of 1758) and Adam Smith (who would denounce both entail and primogeniture as inconsistent with a commercial society in the Wealth of Nations).15 According to Dalrymple, abolition of Scotland’s law of entails would constitute a modern agrarian law and would rapidly erode the material foundations of the authority of Scotland’s higher ranks. It would weaken Scotland’s political position vis-à-vis England (since Scottish representatives would be reduced to dependence upon ministerial bribes) and, by massively expanding the market in landed property, would absorb the money that would otherwise have stimulated commerce. This, in turn, would raise the price of government borrowing and, given the rising national debt, would potentially “add to the dangers and distresses of the

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State.” More broadly, destruction of the system of entails that underpinned Scotland’s agrarian economy would encourage a fully-fledged mercantile or commercial culture as existed in the Dutch Republic, thereby destroying the balance between Britain’s military and economic foundations.16 Nonetheless, Darymple’s objections to the abolition of entails were primarily political, rather than economic, in nature. For him, the ancient families of every European state had always been the main bulwark against “tyranny or invasion,” and remained “a sure wall behind which the common people run naturally to form and to rank themselves.” He developed this claim by referring to the “late disorders” in the English state which, to his mind, were a clear symptom of the dangerous growth of democratic component of the constitution. Perhaps the support of families, almost always expedient, is now necessary in Britain. Those who look at the domestic history of England for a century past, without the prejudice of party, will see, that the monarchical and aristocratical parts of the constitution, have yielded considerably to the democratical part of it. The two former, perhaps, now need that help, which the latter once needed. Some late disorders only prove the abuse, but not the duration of liberty: for if one part either of the constitution, or of the nation, incroaches upon another; that exact poise, in the different parts of both, which has made the wonder of mankind, and in the preservation of which alone liberty is secure; may be difficult to be recovered. The reign of Charles I is not the only instance in the later English annals, which shews, that an English king, and an English constitution, have more to fear from popular demagogues, than from the illustrious offspring of antient statesmen, patriots, and heroes, tho’ adorned with titles, and loaded with riches. A solid and lasting nobility and gentry, are the best barriers against the invasions of the crown, and the false popularity of par tic ular men, and the insolences of the rabble.17

Dalrymple’s invocation of the growing dangers of “democratical” politics and his reference to the “popu lar demagogues” of the seventeenth century formed part of a wider argument about the importance of social hierarchy to the preservation of liberty. He noted that the “fall of the higher is almost always attended with the ruin of the political liberties of the inferior orders of the State.” At this point Dalrymple came quite close to Montesquieu’s view of the desirability of maintaining an honor-based nobility as a fundamental source of stability

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and cohesion in a large commercial state. Dalrymple’s vision of men of property and family as both the “fi rmest assertors of liberty” and the “bulwarks of war,” furthermore, provides a close parallel to the argument about Britain’s prospects developed several years later by Ferguson in the Essay. The ideals of gentlemanly distinction predicated on a system of social inequal ity might well lead to an overabundance of individual and national pride, but when “an individual or a public loses the feeling of right pride, the one ceases to be a man, and the other to be a nation.”18 One of the most interesting of all Scottish attempts to underline the British state’s tendency toward republicanism and military government was made in a series of works published between 1765 and 1781 by the painter and political essayist, Allan Ramsay. The fi rst of these was his anonymously published An Essay on the Constitution of England.19 Like both Kames and Ferguson, Ramsay had been an active player in the setting up of the Select Society of Edinburgh in 1755. He took a keen interest in European politics and the latest developments in European political thought throughout his life. Unlike Dalrymple, however, Ramsay rejected Montesquieu as a guide to politics and instead offered a fi rm defense of a strong royal executive as the crucial underpinning of a wealthy empire. In An Essay on the Constitution of England, Ramsay placed the origin of Britain’s liberty no earlier than the accession of William III (it was a childish mistake, he insisted, to view the Magna Carta as anything other than a barbarous document “calculated for the benefit of a few landed tyrants”). But he immediately went on to underline the extreme vulnerability of that liberty, a vulnerability which he attributed to the combination of popular faction, military adventurism, and the institutions of public credit that had grown up during the reign of William III. According to Ramsay, the establishment of public credit was a peculiarly mixed blessing. On the one hand, in providing the Crown with a source of revenue that lessened its dependence upon parliamentary supplies, these “schemes of anticipation” had saved the English mixed monarchy from degenerating into a “factious and fluctuating Commonwealth, little different from anarchy.” Furthermore, by enabling the state to engage in almost perpetual war it had raised Britain to a position of unprecedented dominance in the international realm, while simultaneously uniting almost every order of the state in the great expansionary projects of the first half of the century. But the

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combination of public credit and national aggrandizement had also poisoned the foundations of the constitution. It had destroyed the influence of the landed gentry and had given rise to a new political interest: a “new set of constituents; who, without being necessarily connected with the land, with the trade, with either of the Houses of Parliament, or with any corporation or regular body of men in the kingdom, became no less formidable than they were useful to Government.” From that point onwards, war became necessary as a means of mitigating domestic political faction. The “Constitution of England began to be actuated by a spirit somewhat similar to that which actuated the Constitution of ancient Rome; where a foreign war never failed to stop the mouths of the Seditious, and to put an end to domestic broils.” This meant that Britain’s domestic tranquillity and political cohesion now depended to an alarming extent upon the state’s continuing ability to wage war and undertake conquests. But to continue with such expansionary politics, as the Roman example suggested, risked the unenviable alternatives of “universal Monarchy” or “complete ruin.” With the rising level of taxation required to ser vice what had by 1765 become an enormous national debt, Ramsay projected a change of ministry and, ultimately, the state’s inability to face any prolonged naval or military struggle against its continental neighbors. Bankruptcy, in short, would mean the “natural death of war in Great Britain” and the preliminary to the conquest of the state.20 The broader argument Ramsay developed in his subsequent works was rooted in a perception of the dangers to liberty posed by abstract, or “metaphysical,” political arguments for reform. The fashionable ideas of a state of nature and a social contract served only to ignite the worst passions of the lower orders, while the “principle of equal right to liberty” that usually followed from these ideas could “hardly be separated from that of an equal right to property.”21 Demands for political liberty thus brought demands for economic equality in their wake. This, Ramsay declared, violated the relations of protection and subordination which naturally constituted civil societies, and which were “the true nature of this contract, which pervades every part of the social world, and is to be seen at all times, in every empire, republic, city and family.”22 Ramsay was at his most explicit about these matters in a letter to Denis Diderot, probably written in the late 1760s, in which he offered a critical appraisal of Cesare Beccaria’s recently-published Of Crimes and

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Punishments (a work Ferguson himself later criticized for its attempt to rest the right of punishment on the theory of contract).23 Ramsay’s letter was motivated by a deep hostility to the revolutionary implications of Beccaria’s argument. He suggested that Of Crimes and Punishments rested upon a menacingly utilitarian conception of a social contract which, he asserted, was only a “metaphysical idea which was never the source of any real transaction, whether in England or elsewhere.” More pressingly, Ramsay suggested that “those who propose, in governments of a certain nature, to suppress torture, the wheel, impalement, the rack . . . tend to deprive themselves of the best means of security, and would abandon the administration of the state to the discretion of the first armed rebels who like better to command than obey.” From this perspective, the reforming zeal of “Enlightenment” phi losophers revealed itself to be at best futile and at worst deeply pernicious. According to Ramsay, the “universal revolution” or “general reform” advocated in works like Of Crimes and Punishments was, like Plato’s Republic, dangerously utopian. General reform or revolution could only be “effected by extremely violent methods.” I know that this much-vaunted general enlightenment (lumière générale) is a beautiful and sweet chimera with which phi losophers love to delude themselves, but which disappears as soon as they turn to history and observe the fate of the best institutions. The nations of antiquity are gone, and all modern nations will pass before the phi losopher has corrected a single government.24

Ramsay explored the interaction between England’s quasi-republican constitution, its fi nancial institutions, and its extensive empire in a series of pamphlets which appeared during the course of the 1770s. The dominant theme of these short works was the diminishing authority and power of the state in an age of commercial empire and democratic politics. As Ramsay claimed in his 1777 Letters on the Present Disturbances in Great Britain and Her American Provinces, the territorial expansion and commercial development of the British state, while not evils in themselves, had produced a corresponding expansion of democratic sentiment and political instability. It was, therefore, imperative that the legal and military powers available to the executive were proportioned to the challenges of governing an extensive, populous, and wealthy empire. The more “prosperous any free country is, and the faster it

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grows, either by commerce or conquest, the more it is subject to these returns of civil dissention, which arise from a deficiency in the powers of government, or, what is the same thing, a disproportionate increase of wealth and power in the individuals.” This implied that laws and executive power needed regular adaptation to changes in the nation’s circumstances. With the gradual redistribution of wealth to the lower orders of the state, what was required was “a proper degree of Force in the hands of those who are already vested with Authority” and “an executive power suitable to the present riches and extent of the British Empire.”25 A powerful royal executive thus remained a crucial component of Britain’s liberties. Reiterating the point in 1780 in response to Edmund Burke’s famous speech on econom ical reform (in which Burke had argued for a reduction of the Crown’s civil list), Ramsay argued that to reduce the Crown’s powers of patronage was to invite disaster. According to him, the British political system had become “the most popular and democratic that was ever seen in an empire so rich and extended as ours.” It is a system originating from the people, and which has been carried to the utmost limits of popularity that are consistent with civil order and government: nay I even suspect, with some degree of uneasiness, that it has already passed those limits, and that the disorders which have always accompanied every attempt of the many to govern the many, already begin to shew themselves.26

Ramsay had no doubt that the ultimate outcome of these tendencies would be the establishment of a military government in Britain. As he wrote in his Observations on the Riot Act, a pamphlet published in the immediate aftermath of the 1780 Gordon Riots, “dangerous combinations” and “associations and cabals” were now seeking to undermine the authority of the legislature itself. Any diminution in the authority of Parliament, however, would lead directly to the establishment of military rule. “Soldiers,” Ramsay wrote, “like what is said of fi re and water, are excellent servants, but bad masters.” While the House of Commons is alone, intrusted with the power of raising money for the payment of the Army, the Army must always continue to be the servant of that House, and of its constituents the proprietary people; and can never be used as an instrument in the hands of a King against those who have it in their power to reduce or annihilate

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment it. But having got rid of a parliamentary government, a military one must, of course, take place; as Government must be procured upon any terms.27

Between the 1760s and 1780s, then, the themes of democratic politics, commercial empire, political instability, and the prospect of military rule were at the center of Scottish political discussion. It was this debate that Ferguson joined in the 1760s with the publication of the Essay. Before turning to that text, however, it is essential to consider a rather different assessment of Britain’s political trajectory.

Rome and Britain in Adam Smith and John Millar The most significant Scottish critic of this line of argument was Adam Smith. Not only did he reject Montesquieu’s deployment of the RomeBritain parallel, he also implicitly criticized those of his Scottish contemporaries, like Ferguson, who believed that the British state was veering toward military government and despotic empire. Scholars have long underlined the divergences between Ferguson’s and Smith’s thought on a whole range of issues, and more recent commentators have tended to emphasize Smith’s engagement with, but criticisms of, Montesquieu.28 While a full account of Smith’s thinking on these issues is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth trying to capture the broad reasons behind Ferguson’s and Smith’s divergent assessments of Britain’s future. One set of reasons certainly stemmed from their contrasting views of the respective merits of militias and standing armies. These differences, in turn, rested upon conflicting assessments of the moralities, politics, and economics of modern societies, and upon fundamental disagreements about the relevance of ancient history to understanding such societies. Like Hume before him, Smith underlined the sharp divergence between the historical trajectories of the ancient world and modern Europe (although Greek and Roman material had an important place in his stadial history of society).29 Although Smith was by no means an untroubled advocate of commercial society in every respect, this history, as well as the analysis of modern commercial politics that Smith pioneered not only in the Wealth of Nations but also in the Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 and in his lectures to his students at Glasgow throughout the 1760s, committed him to a less anguished view of Britain’s future.

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It should be noted immediately, however, that Smith did develop a comparative history of military government or “military monarchies” in both ancient Rome and modern Britain that drew significantly from Montesquieu’s writings.30 In book 5 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith referred to the history of imperial Rome in terms that strikingly resembled Montesquieu’s earlier account of the shifts between civilian and military power under Rome’s emperors. Noting that both Constantine and Diocletian had sought, for their own security, to disperse the legions throughout the towns, Smith claimed that the civil character had entirely superseded the military character in Rome, leaving the empire open to the inroads of the German and Scythian militias.31 More importantly, he devoted considerable space to the Rome-Britain analogy in his Glasgow lectures of the 1760s, in which he provided a detailed examination of military monarchy or military government. In his account of the termination of conquering republics, Smith identified two examples of military monarchy: the government of the Roman empire (which had its origins in the military dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla), and the English military monarchy established by Cromwell. According to Smith, these European examples were quite different from the military governments of Turkey and Central Asia, because the state had been conquered by one of its own subjects and because they remained governed to a significant degree by law.32 Rome provided Smith with most of the detail. Like many other eighteenth-century authors, he identified the reform of military recruitment under Marius as the turning point in Rome’s shift from a republican to an imperial and military system of government. Marius’s enemy, the patrician Sulla, did in fact change the Roman government into a kind of monarchy, but he resigned his power. Caesar followed Sulla’s example, but refused to resign his dictatorship and thus established what Smith called military monarchy, or “monarchy supported by military force.” But as Smith emphasized repeatedly, the establishment of military monarchy did not fundamentally distort the provision of justice and the institutions of civil law.33 Given the strong resemblance Smith discerned between the military monarchies of Caesar and Cromwell, his confidence in the eighteenthcentury British constitution requires explanation. One broad reason for the political stability of modern states vis-à-vis the ancients lay in the absence of slavery, which in Smith’s analysis was the major structural

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cause of the tendency to military government in republican antiquity. Slavery not only explained the violent upheavals over property among the ancients but also explained why social inequal ity in the modern world did not lead to the kind of political conflicts that had fueled Rome’s destruction.34 In this respect, the shift from an economy based on slavery to one based on wages and the division of labor had positive political consequences. More broadly still, Smith redefi ned modern liberty in terms of economic, rather than political, independence. His defense of the politics of commercial society rested on the belief that it secured not only the needs but also the “independency” of its lower ranks: “nothing tends to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independency. Commerce is one great preventative of this custom.”35 The more specific answer relates to Smith’s understanding of the distinctiveness of Britain’s situation. One set of reasons may be connected to Britain’s status as an island and sea-power, which reduced its dependence on a very large standing army.36 But the most noticeable feature of Smith’s own argument, when compared with the writings of Ferguson, Dalrymple, and even Hume, was its lack of anxiety about the rise of populist or demagogic politics in the British context. For him, the combination of a modern constitution with commercial society enabled the British state to tolerate a far greater degree of popular license (the “liberty which approaches licentiousness”) than the states of antiquity.37 More generally still, Smith believed that a “rational system of liberty” had been established in eighteenth-century Britain, a “happy mixture of all the different forms of government properly restrained and a perfect security to liberty and property.” The principles of authority and utility, which Smith associated with monarchy and democracy respectively, had been properly balanced. Smith identified three more precise institutional foundations of modern liberty in Britain. The fi rst was the stability and rectitude of the fi nancial system. According to Smith, since the revenue of the sovereign now depended upon the approbation of Parliament, no monarch could endanger liberty. Moreover, the public creditors of the state had an interest in avoiding a revolution in Britain because they stood to lose their investments. The second concerned the independence of the judiciary, juries, and courts, a point of view which aligned Smith with those contemporaries who

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believed that the independence of the courts was now a more significant criteria of modern liberty than the political form of government. The third foundation of modern liberty was the organization of military force. According to Smith, the combination of legislative and martial duties in the nobility and gentry of the British state meant that they possessed the joint control of civil and military powers that Smith, like Ferguson, saw as a crucial counterweight to royal power. “It would never be their interest to join with the King in any design to enslave the nation, as no consideration he could bestow on them would be able to turn their interest to his side.”38 This became the main principle behind Smith’s defense of standing armies in the Wealth of Nations. As is well known, he argued there that a properly constructed standing army conferred upon the sovereign a source of security which “renders unnecessary that troublesome jealousy which, in some modern republics, seems to watch over the minutest actions, and to be at all times ready to disturb the peace of every citizen.” Although he recognized that a standing army would be dangerous if the interests of its general and officers were not “connected with the support of the constitution of the state,” he famously argued that in eighteenth-century Britain this criteria of liberty had been met: “But where the sovereign is himself the general, and the principal nobility and gentry of the country the chief officers of the army; where the military force is placed under the command of those who have the greatest interest in the support of civil authority, a standing army can never be dangerous to liberty.”39 Smith’s confident verdict on the stability of eighteenth-century Britain was amplified by his former pupil, John Millar, in his 1771 Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society and in his 1787 Historical Essay on the English Government. In both these works Millar, who later earned a reputation as an antimonarchical republican who had failed to recognize the revolutionary dangers of democracy, offered an account of modern politics with strongly anti-Montesquieuian undertones.40 Like Smith, Millar downplayed the relevance of Roman history to the future of Europe, noting that, although there was originally a strong resemblance between the “barbarous” governments of ancient Greece, Rome, and Germany, “the different situation of the people soon gave rise to a remarkable diversity in the progress of their government.”41 Whereas in Rome, Millar explained, the power of the noble families was brought to ruin with the establishment of the republic, the

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history of modern European monarchies was shaped by the survival of a powerful territorial nobility (here Millar echoed Smith’s view of the massive differences between the egalitarian republics of antiquity and the inegalitarian monarchies of post-Roman Europe).42 This, however, was far from an endorsement of Montesquieu. Millar rejected Montesquieu’s neo-German politics, sarcastically observing that the liberties of ancient Germany had been “the subject of many a well-turned period.” Far from being the original foundation of modern liberty, the Germans in Millar’s view were “accustomed to stake their persons, and yield up themselves to a voluntary servitude, upon the issue of a game of chance. And it is certain that in all tribes of shepherds or husbandmen, fidelity and submission to the chief is the principal point of honour, and makes up a distinguishing part of their character.”43 Millar was much closer to Smith’s view that Europe’s territorial nobilities had obstructed the progress of liberty, and praised the higher degree of personal “independence” that had been opened up for the lower orders in England (if not in Scotland) as the nobility’s power declined. According to Millar, the overall impact of the decline of the ancient nobility and the rise of commerce had, in England at least, been positive. Although the power of the nobility had been reduced, this had not given rise— as in France— to a dangerous accumulation of fi nancial and military powers by the Crown. Eighteenth-century Britain had, therefore, avoided the usual historical fate of commercial societies— to become either a popular government or an absolute monarchy. Millar’s conclusion was unambiguous. Britain had “at length settled the disposal of the public revenue, and modelled the standing army, in such a manner as to remove all just ground of terror from the effects of the one, or the operations of the other.”44

Democracy and Despotism in Ferguson’s Essay In the fi nal sections of the Essay, Ferguson set out a striking argument about the vulnerability of constitutional governments to a “fatal revolution” leading to military government. These sections of the work used Rome’s transition from republic to empire as a way of making sense of the threats to the mixed constitution of Britain. Citing the famous account of Rome’s shift from republic to empire contained in the fi rst few

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books of Tacitus’s Annals, Ferguson argued that a new military emperor, a modern Augustus or Tiberius, would unite in his own person the distinct powers that were characteristic of mixed or republican states.45 The revolution would terminate in a situation in which all legitimate sources of political authority had been rendered powerless and in which sovereignty had come to rest with the army itself. In such an extremity, laws are quoted, and senates are assembled, in vain. They who compose a legislature, or who occupy the civil departments of state, may deliberate on the messages they receive from the camp or the court; but if the bearer, like the centurion who brought the petition of Octavius to the Roman senate, shew the hilt of his sword, they fi nd that petitions are become commands, and that they themselves are become the pageants, not the repositories of sovereign power.46

These passages are rarely considered in the context of the Seven Years War and the debates about Britain’s future that it generated. But the linked contexts of war, commercial empire, and “democracy” that were central to the arguments of Hume, Kames, Dalymple, and Ramsay are fundamental to understanding the book’s political argument. As already noted, the starting point for the argument of the Essay was Montesquieu’s description of Britain as a “republic disguised as monarchy.” Yet the account presented in the Essay differed from that of Montesquieu in important respects. Broadly, these differences added up to the charge that Montesquieu had overplayed the differences between Britain and Rome, and hence had seriously underestimated the praetorian character of eighteenth-century politics. The work as a whole was marked by the clear fear that modern state power might be deployed, under emergency conditions, as means to an equalization of property and conditions. Ferguson’s major aim was to show that, left unchecked, populist and egalitarian social forces could undermine the existing constitution, provoke a revolution, and establish a new kind of quasi-republican regime, guaranteed and underpinned by the army. This was why he warned so strongly against the “alliance of faction and military force” which, as in republican Rome, would pave the way for the “government of force.” The starting point for this argument was the comparative analysis of modern Britain and republican Rome set out in the section of the

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Essay entitled “Of Civil Liberty.” Ferguson explained that both Britain and Rome were mixed governments in which the interaction and opposition of different social interests had, over time, found expression in a mixed or balanced constitution. In both cases, liberty was the result of healthy rivalry and opposition between the various orders of the state. As he put it in a much-cited passage, liberty “is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government. In free states, therefore, the wisest laws are never, perhaps, dictated by the interest or spirit of any order of men: they are moved, they are opposed, or amended, by different hands, and come at last to express that medium and composition which contending parties have forced one another to adopt.”47 In both cases, the people possessed a significant share in both legislative and judicial power. The real key to the similarity between the British and Roman constitutions lay in the degree of regularity, impartiality, and security afforded to citizens by the authority of the laws. Eighteenth-century Britain was, in this sense, a res publica or “free state” and, like the Roman republic, was characterized by the supremacy of the legislature, the rule of laws and not of men: Rome and England, under their mixed governments, the one inclining to democracy, the other to monarchy, have proved the great legislators among nations. The fi rst has left the foundation, and great part of the superstructure of its civil code, to the continent of Eu rope: the other, in its island, has carried the authority and government of law to a point of perfection, which they never before attained in the history of mankind. Under such favourable establishments, known customs, the practice and decisions of courts, as well as positive statutes, acquire the authority of laws; and every proceeding is conducted by some fixed and determinate rule.48

The British state did not just equal, but in some areas actually surpassed, ancient Rome. Britain’s representative system of government trumped ancient Rome’s system of popular assemblies and, as Ferguson emphasized in both private correspondence and his pamphlet on American independence, the joint exercise of sovereign power among its three “collateral powers” (Crown, Lords, and Commons) meant that it was quite unlike the arbitrary government of France. In this account, political representation, coupled with a mixed constitution, trumped the popular

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governments of antiquity, where the people were, “when assembled, the tyrants, and, when dispersed, the slaves, of a distempered state.”49 Despite the positive tone of this analysis, Ferguson immediately went on to underline the vulnerability of the British constitution. He did so by expounding two related arguments about the threats to liberty. The fi rst of these arguments took the form of a claim that neither legal nor constitutional arrangements were, in themselves, sufficient guarantees of liberty, a position which distinguished his thinking not only from that of Montesquieu but also from that of Hume and Smith. This argument was essentially about the nature of civil liberty and the limited effectiveness of legal mechanisms in securing it. As he underlined in the section on “On Civil Liberty,” justice and liberty did not rest on “mere laws,” but on the social and moral forces that underwrote them. Patriotic commitment was as important to liberty as constitutional design. Thus, notwithstanding the range of mechanisms that sustained civil liberty in the postfeudal British state, their effectiveness depended upon a “fabric no less than the whole political constitution of Great Britain, a spirit no less than the refractory and turbulent zeal of this fortunate people.” The most “equitable laws on paper,” Ferguson declared pointedly, were compatible with the “utmost despotism in administration.”50 All this led Ferguson to a rather different conclusion from Montesquieu. Paradoxically, he argued, it was precisely the perfection of Britain’s civil and criminal laws— and the degree of personal liberty and security afforded by the constitution— that made this level of patriotic commitment difficult to maintain. The “seeming perfection” of the arrangement tended in practice to “weaken the bands of society, and, upon maxims of independence, separate and estrange the different ranks of men it was meant to reconcile.” In other words, the liberty of the constitution, and the security of rights and property it afforded, were quite compatible with the moral and political degeneracy of the citizen. If to any people it be the avowed object of policy, in all its internal refi nements, to secure the person and the property of the subject, without any regard to his political character, the constitution may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it. The effect of such a constitution may be to immerse all orders of men in their separate pursuits of pleasure,

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment which they may now enjoy with little disturbance; or of gain, which they may preserve without any attention to the commonwealth.

When combined with the absence of “public alarms” deriving from the threat of foreign war, Ferguson claimed, the usual psychological impulses toward national vigilance were greatly diminished. Postwar Britain, in other words, was suffering from a dangerous form of moral, political, and military complacency. The nation’s vigor, he concluded, would decline “from the abuse of that very security which is procured by the supposed perfection of public order.”51 The second argument centered upon the vulnerability of the mixed constitution to egalitarian political forces. Throughout the work Ferguson expressed a subtle but unmistakable hostility against the “spirit of equality” which he associated with ancient republicanism. Democracy, he argued, was of all political regimes the “most subject to errors in administration, and to weakness in the execution of public councils.” It was, furthermore, dangerously close to and occasionally indistinguishable from despotism.52 This hostility found expression in the Essay in a commentary on the combination of republican and monarchical elements that Montesquieu had identified in the British state. From this perspective, however, it was the republican, rather than the monarchical, component of that combination that presented the greatest danger. This was why he warned against the “misplaced ardours of a republican spirit” as a genuine danger to the balance of the British constitution.53 Ferguson commented explicitly on this predicament in the section of the Essay entitled “Of the Manners of Commercial and Polished Nations.” Emphasizing the tension that existed between the “spirit of equality” and the ranks and distinctions that permeated the British state, he identified a dangerous incompatibility at the heart of the eighteenth-century commercial state. The resorts for commerce might be frequented, and mere amusement might be pursued in the croud, while the private dwelling became a retreat for reserve, averse to the trouble arising from regards and attentions, which it might be part of the political creed to believe of no consequence, and a point of honour to hold in contempt. This humour is not likely to grow either in republics or monarchies: it belongs more properly to a mixture of both; where the administration of justice may be better secured; where the subject is tempted to

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look for equality, but where he learns only independence in its place; and where he learns, from a spirit of equality, to hate the very distinctions to which, on account of their real importance, he pays a remarkable deference.54

Throughout the remainder of the Essay Ferguson hinted at the processes by which this tension between ranks and the “spirit of equality” would play out in eighteenth-century Britain. His account centered on the division that had opened up between the civilian and military departments of the state and the creation of a situation in which “one set of men were to have an interest in the preservation of civil establishments, without the power to defend them” and where another group “were to have this power, without the inclination or the interest.” Since authority, honors and preeminence were now solely connected to the perfor mance of civil functions, the military had come to be dominated by the lower ranks of society and there now existed a dangerous asymmetry in the balance of powers between the propertied and the poor. Those who had an “interest” in the maintenance of the established order no longer had “power” on their side, whereas those with “power” no longer had neither “the inclination or the interest.” The departments of civil government and of war being severed, and the pre-eminence being given to the statesman, the ambitious will naturally devolve the military ser vice on those who are contented with a subordinate station. They who have the greatest share in the government of their country, having resigned the sword, must pay for what they have ceased to perform; and armies, not only at a distance from home, but in the very bosom of their country, are subsisted by pay. A discipline is invented to inure the soldier to perform, from habit, and from the fear of punishment, those hazardous duties, which the love of the public, or a national spirit, no longer inspire.55

This left nothing to prevent a sufficiently determined individual from utilizing the army to exploit popular sentiment. As Ferguson argued quite early on in the Essay, any revival of the ancient, plebeian politics of envy in modern Britain would play directly into the hands of any potential military despot, enticing him to undertake the leveling of social and economic conditions and to destroy the higher ranks of the state. This, Ferguson hinted, was something that Montesquieu himself had drastically underestimated in The Spirit of the Laws.

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment It was certainly never foreseen by mankind, that in pursuit of refi nement, they were to reverse this order; or even that they were to place the government, and the military force of nations, in different hands. But is it equally unforeseen, that the former order may again take place? and that the pacific citizen, however distinguished by privilege and rank, must one day bow to the person with whom he has entrusted his sword. If such revolutions should actually follow, will this new master revive in his own order the spirit of the noble and the free? Will he renew to his country the civil and military virtues? I am afraid to reply. Montesquieu observes, that the government of Rome, even under the emperors, became, in the hands of the troops, elective and republican: but the Fabii or the Bruti were heard of no more, after the praetorian bands became the republic.56

The result, Ferguson declared, would be military monarchy and, instead of a moderated liberty, an equality of servitude. Reworking the language of dependence, mastery, and political slavery that had been brought to prominence in Scottish political discourse by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Ferguson declared that “many invidious distinctions and grievances peculiar to monarchical government, may, in appearance, be removed; but the state of equality to which the subjects approach, is that of slaves, equally dependent on the will of a master, not that of freemen in a condition to maintain their own.”57 Several important clues to Ferguson’s assessment of the sources of modern despotism can be found in two detailed letters that Ferguson wrote to his friend, William Pulteney, two years after the publication of the Essay. Written during the height of the Wilkes affair of 1769, in these letters Ferguson directly confronted the balance of forces in the British state and the problem of popular political radicalism. The Wilkite disturbances, Ferguson suggested, signaled the existence of a dangerous “fourth power in the State,” which was the “populace of London.” In turn, this was symptomatic of a worryingly plebeian dimension to the British state that had been completely ignored by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws: “Our government is said by M. Montesquieu and others to be perfect. They think only of the dangers that come from the Crown. They do not consider the dangers to liberty that come from the populace.”58 The important point here is that Ferguson believed Montesquieu, and perhaps others, to have seriously underestimated the ways in which Britain’s liberty and stability were threatened by popular poli-

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tics and political partisanship (it is worth noting that a strikingly similar argument about Montesquieu’s blindness to the political dangers of democracy was set out by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne in the early stages of the French Revolution).59 In Ferguson’s letter, written some twenty years before 1789, the immediate prospect was that the general state of political disorder in the capital might, in the eyes of the army, constitute grounds for the emergency imposition of military rule. A few weeks later he dispatched another letter to Pulteney. Not only “the Mob,” he wrote, “but the very Women & Whores at London may make Military Government appear Necessary to those who are to prevent Military Government if they are encouraged & cannot be governed without it.” He criticized all “gamblers for Power” who hoped to rise to power on the “shoulders of the Mob.” Ferguson continued, I wrote a few days ago a short apology for my apprehensions of the London Mob. It is not the courage but the Cowardice of them & their opponents I Dread. Recollect & you will fi nd that cowardice has raised & perpetuated more Military Governments than ever Courage did. Sylla is the only man since the beginning of the World that ever had the Courage to lay down a Military Government at the head of which he had offended. If you drive a Coward to the wall he is more dangerous than a brave man in another situation.60

This positive reference to the Roman dictator Sulla, a crucial model in early modern political thought of the virtuous use of extralegal dictatorship to restore the balance of the constitution, is of great significance in understanding Ferguson’s thinking in the late 1760s. In his later History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic he provided a thorough defense of Sulla’s actions which, as his critics argued, reflected a clear preference for the decisive actions of the patrician statesman. In 1769, however, the point was to show that men could not be relied upon to act like Sulla and virtuously renounce dictatorship for patriotic reasons. Rather, emergency dictatorships would quickly become permanent.61 From this perspective, the letter to Pulteney was not a call for the use of military power against the London “Mob,” but rather a sharp warning against this course of action. The broader difficulties involved in these kinds of judgments formed part of the subject matter of the last sections of the Essay. Here Ferguson underlined how easily the instabilities characteristic of free states could

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provoke a shift from civilian to military government in circumstances of political emergency. Even the most benevolent and public-spirited leader would, if vested with the awful powers of the state, tend to establish something like despotic rule as he aimed at public order and security. “Let him,” Ferguson wrote, at the head of a free state, employ the force with which he is armed, to crush the seeds of apparent disorder in every corner of his dominions; let him effectually curb the spirit of dissension and variance among his people; let him remove the interruptions to government, arising from the refractory humours and the private interests of his subjects; let him collect the force of the state against its enemies, by availing himself of all that it can furnish in the way of taxation and personal ser vice: it is extremely probable, that, even under the direction of wishes for the good of mankind, he may break through every barrier of liberty, and establish a despotism, while he flatters himself, that he only follows the dictates of sense and propriety.62

In this way, Ferguson underlined the narrowness of the gap between temporary or emergency dictatorships and the “permanent fabric” of despotic government. The temptations of an authoritarian solution to social and economic crises that periodically afflicted advanced societies had to be avoided at all costs, since even a temporary suspension of liberty under the auspices of a patriotic prince would probably prove irreversible in the long run. In this case, the “medicine” was “sure to create the distemper it is destined to cure.”63 Ferguson’s anxiety about the transformation of the British res publica into a despotic state was a reworking, amplification, and criticism of Montesquieu’s prognosis of Britain’s political future. Grounded on a comparative analysis of modern Britain and ancient Rome, his overall purpose was to demonstrate how easily free states could undergo the shift from libertas to imperium and military government on the Roman imperial model. Where Ferguson differed from Montesquieu was in his heightened sensitivity to the republican “spirit of equality” and its potential incompatibility with the existing distinction of ranks. The book’s fi nal sections examined the options available to statesmen in situations of political crisis and, crucially, warned against the indiscriminate use of military power as a response to emergency. This route, which paralleled that of Sulla under the Roman republic, usually ended in a permanent

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military government rather than temporary dictatorship. The centralization of political and military power in modern states had magnified the possible disastrous consequences of miscalculation. Searching for an alternative outcome to this set of sequences stood at the heart of Ferguson’s thinking over the next forty years.

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Ferguson and the Moral Foundations of Civil Society

A DA M Ferguson’s verdict on Britain’s tendency to empire and military government rested upon a conjectural history of the state. Set out primarily in the Essay on the History of Civil Society, this conjectural history established Ferguson as a major participant in the broader eighteenthcentury debate about the foundations and prospects of modern societies, and marked out the Essay as a distinctive contribution to the Enlightenment’s histories of mankind.1 In this sense, the work was a theoretical history of politics and a genealogy of the modern state, a Scottish variant of the kind of philosophical history that dominated much European political speculation between the 1750s and the 1780s. But Ferguson’s thinking about the options available to modern societies was also grounded upon a highly distinctive theory of the “Characteristicks of Human Nature.” In that sense, the Essay was an original intervention in contemporary debates about the origins, nature, and extent of human sociability. This chapter situates Ferguson’s account of sociability in three closely related contexts. First, the Essay was a contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment’s science of man and, more specifically, to the project for a philosophical history of human society that dominated much late eighteenth-century Scottish writing. Stimulated in part by David Hume’s famous call for a scientific approach to the study of human nature, and in part by Montesquieu’s elaborate comparative approach to the study of societies, this project found expression in a number of well-known works by Adam Smith, Lord Kames, John Millar, and Ferguson in the 1760s and 1770s.2 Ferguson’s own contribution to this

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endeavour took the form of a natural history of man or a “history of human nature.” Grounded on the distinction between the “history of the species” and the “history of the individual” that was one of the foundations of Ferguson’s moral philosophy, this history was conceived as a counter to excessively speculative, but also excessively skeptical, assumptions about mankind’s natural state. From this perspective, philosophical history formed part of a broader, experimental science of politics which could serve as the cornerstone of an improved moral science. Ferguson’s history of mankind drew inspiration from both ancient and modern accounts of the natural history of man (he explicitly endorsed both Pliny’s Natural History and George-Louis Leclerc Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle), as well as from the more general conjectural approach to the history of society, government, law, and property already significantly developed by Montesquieu, Hume, Sir John Dalrymple, and Kames.3 The result was an explicitly empirical and comparative study of the progress of human societies which drew eclectically from both ancient sources, notably Caesar and Tacitus, and from an array of more recent works dealing with the manners and customs of “rude” or “uncultivated” nations in Asia, Africa and the Americas. As Ferguson wrote, it is “in their present features, that we are to behold, as in a mirrour, the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our fathers were placed.”4 The second context within which the Essay must be read was the ongoing controversy generated by Thomas Hobbes’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notoriously skeptical accounts of human sociability. The difficulty of responding adequately to Hobbes was a major preoccupation for Ferguson throughout his career as a moral phi losopher. Not only did he attack Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature in the opening sections of the Essay but, more broadly, he engaged substantially with Hobbes’s moral psychology, with its central emphasis on fear, suspicion, and honor-seeking. The Principles of Moral and Political Science, as well as the unpublished lectures, indicate that Ferguson was a careful critical reader of both De Cive and Leviathan.5 The problems posed by Rousseau were, in some respects, continuous with those posed by Hobbes. As some of the best recent scholarship has shown, what most European readers of the Second Discourse objected to was Rousseau’s skeptical stance toward natural sociability, a position which seemed to

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undermine the possibility of explaining morality or society except as systems of pure, even Hobbesian, artifice. As Rousseau argued more fully in the Social Contract, only a very “artificial” entity, or State, would be able to replace the natural independence that mankind had lost with the progress of civilization. This resolutely skeptical vision of politics generated intense controversy across Europe between the mid1750s until the late 1780s and, as a number of recent studies have emphasized, constituted a primary point of departure for Smith’s moral and political philosophy.6 Ferguson’s Essay cannot be separated from this context. As a number of his eighteenth-century readers pointed out, Ferguson’s anthropology, his rejection of the distinction between nature and artifice, and his properly historical account of societal development held out real promise for undermining Rousseau’s skepticism.7 The Essay on the History of Civil Society can, therefore, be read as a distinctive answer to the “hypothetical history of government” set out in Rousseau’s Second Discourse. The third and fi nal context in which I situate Ferguson’s account of sociability was a related, but more specifically British, controversy about the origins of morality. Crucially, Ferguson’s Essay was a distinctively anti-Epicurean work, representing an important alternative to the modified Epicureanism historians have associated with Hume and Smith.8 The Essay was, instead, recognizably Stoic in inspiration, echoing a number of themes and arguments laid out by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and by Francis Hutcheson in their earlier attacks on the philosophies of Hobbes and Bernard Mandev ille.9 The fi rst part of the book was a frontal attack on the “selfish system of philosophy” which Ferguson associated with Mandev ille and Hobbes as well as with ancient satirists like Juvenal. But he may well also have been reacting to Smith’s account of sympathy, which he elsewhere described as a simple “coincidence of sentiment” which could take place between “knaves and fools as well as honest men.”10 Ferguson strongly advertised the Stoic affi liations of his thought in the Essay, the Institutes of Moral Philosophy, and the Principles (the frontispiece of which was adorned with a passage from Cicero’s De Legibus, in which Cicero had described mankind as unique among the animals on account of the semidivine faculty of reason).11 For several of Ferguson’s German readers, this Stoic residue and its apparent compatibility with a disinterested patriotism were grounds for strong admiration. Others, however, saw the rework-

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ing of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson as questionable. As one French critic asserted in a work published in 1789, Ferguson’s recapitulation of the “beau moral” found in Shaftesbury added up to little more than “a political dream” (un rêve en politique).12 This chapter reconstructs Ferguson’s account of sociability in three sections. In the fi rst section I analyze his critique of the “selfish system” of morality, which Ferguson associated primarily with Bernard Mandev ille’s Fable of the Bees, and I consider his specific intellectual debts to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. The second section focuses on the most distinctive aspect of Ferguson’s theory of sociability: its strong emphasis on war, contest, and rivalship. Crucially, Ferguson’s anchoring of sociability in dynamics of friendship and enmity not only grounded a critique of individual self-love (the starting point for Epicurean accounts of commercial sociability) but also the idea of “love of mankind,” the idea of a global sociability that featured in many traditional and contemporary accounts of natural sociability. The chapter’s third section concentrates on the anti-Rousseauvian dimensions of Ferguson’s “history of rude nations.” This section introduces Ferguson’s lifelong concern with the issue of hierarchy, subordination, and inequal ity in the progress of civil society and the related issue of wealth and empire. My main aim in this section is to bring out the political dimensions of Ferguson’s account of the history of nations and of civil society, underlining his emphasis on the necessity of political subordination and an extensive system of social ranks as a source of cohesion and union in extensive communities.

Human Nature and the Selfish System of Morality The Essay on the History of Civil Society opens with an account of the “Characteristics of Human Nature.” Ferguson’s initial strategy in this section was to undermine the distinction between nature and artifice upon which both Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s arguments rested. As he noted, the “highest refi nements of political and moral apprehension, are not more artificial in their kind, than the fi rst operations of sentiment and reason.” Art and culture were themselves natural, as was demonstrated by mankind’s early capacity for craft, song, and literary invention.13 What followed was an affi rmation not only of the natural sociability of man, but also of the irreducibly complex character of

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human propensities. Humans were not solely driven by perpetual “competition for dominion and interest,” as Hobbes had claimed, nor were they “possessed of mere animal sensibility,” lacking reason, language, and all but the most minimal of moral sentiments, as Rousseau had argued. As Ferguson later pointed out, Rousseau’s natural man, without reason or moral judgment, would be a “monster too odious for nature to endure,” and not the peaceful animal of Rousseau’s imagination.14 Moreover, mankind had to be “taken in groupes, as they have always subsisted.” Echoing the critique of Hobbes that Montesquieu had placed prominently at the beginning of The Spirit of the Laws, he suggested that Hobbes’s famous state of war more aptly described the relations between a “despotical prince and his subjects” than those of a “rude and simple tribe.” Finally, Ferguson echoed Buffon’s emphasis on the distinctiveness of mankind vis-à-vis the animals and, in par ticu lar, his account of the naturalness of language. Speech, sociability, rationality, and many further human virtues and capacities were coterminous with the history of mankind itself. Without reducing sociability to the “herding instinct” seen among certain species of animals (here he followed Aristotle’s account of the origin of the polis), he maintained that “society appears to be as old as the individual, and the use of the tongue as universal as that of the hand or foot.”15 What followed in part 1 of the Essay was a strikingly anti-Epicurean and antimaterialist account of human sociability that was targeted explicitly against thinkers like Mandev ille, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis as well as against Hobbes and Rousseau.16 It began with a claim about interest. Self-interest, Ferguson claimed, was a refi nement or extension of the instinct for selfpreservation. It led to the invention and improvement of mechanical arts and, more broadly, was the dynamic force behind the progress of civilization.17 As he later wrote to his friend, Sir John Macpherson, self-interest was a “projectile force” without which most men would “fall into the heap and not move at all.”18 But self-interest did not “comprehend at once all the motives of human conduct,” and it manifestly failed to capture the reasons why humans lived together in groups. Like the English clergyman Joseph Butler, who had pursued a similar line of attack against Hobbes, Pierre Bayle, and François de la Rochefoucauld in his widely read Sermons of 1726, Ferguson argued that the multiplicity of competing impulses and passions in human nature

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made it an absurdity to reduce every “generous” or “other-regarding” principle to self-love or self-interest.19 These latter propensities were, in reality, quite weak when compared with “the resolute ardour with which a man adheres to his friend, or his tribe,” while the social affections, with a “power not inferior to that of resentment and rage . . . hurry the mind into every sacrifice of interest, and bear it undismayed through every hardship and danger.” Indeed, social affection operated “with the greatest force, where it meets with the greatest difficulties.” Ferguson stressed the “obstinate attachment of a savage to his unsettled and defenceless tribe, when temptations on the side of ease and safety might induce him to fly from famine and danger, to a station more affluent, and more secure.” Even modern commercial societies often manifested among their members a “disposition to compassion, to candour, and goodwill,” notwithstanding “the prevailing opinion that the happiness of man consists in possessing the greatest possible share of riches, preferments, and honours.”20 Many of these arguments looked back to those developed in Shaftesbury’s attack on Hobbes and Hutcheson’s critique of Mandev ille. The impact of this set of exchanges upon the Scottish Enlightenment hardly needs restating here, yet it is essential to my argument to rehearse the main positions staked out by both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Shaftesbury, a writer whom Hume had classed among the “zealous partizans of the ancients,” had been concerned to inculcate among the political elite of his time a renewed sense of the duties necessary to maintain a virtuous commonwealth.21 He implicitly rejected Hobbes’s characterization of man’s natural state, claiming that man never did, or could, exist outside of society or community. He argued that mankind had a natural capacity for moral approbation (a claim Ferguson explicitly endorsed in the Principles), denied the skeptical and Hobbesian position that self-interest underlay almost all human motivation, and stressed that “passion, humour, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs, which are counter to self-interest, have as considerable part in the movements of this machine” (this was probably the main source for Ferguson’s own view of the multiplicity of human motivations).22 Virtue, Shaftesbury emphasized, did not consist in rigid selfdenial. He suggested that “life without natural affection, friendship, or sociableness would be found a wretched one, were it to be tried,” while an excessive focus on the self promoted moral disorientation

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and, consequently, misery, self-loathing, and “inward deformity.”23 These claims underpinned Shaftesbury’s description of nations as genuine moral and social communities, held together by bonds of love and affection rather than force. From this perspective, Hobbes’s “multitude held together by force” was not in fact “properly united.” Nor does such a body make a people. It is the social league, confederacy and mutual consent, founded in some common good or interest, which joins the members of a community and makes a people one. Absolute power annuls the public. And where there is no public or constitution, there is in reality no mother country or nation.24

Shaftesbury’s neo-Stoic ethics of sociability was a primary target of Mandev ille’s Fable of the Bees, a work written to expose what Mandeville took to be the hypocrisy of his contemporaries who opposed the Whig regime established in the wake of the Glorious Revolution.25 In the section of the Fable entitled “A Search into the Nature of Society,” Mandev ille had argued that a powerful and econom ical ly flourishing state could not be built upon the “wholesome” and “calm” virtues celebrated by Shaftesbury. Such virtues, he supposed, were incompatible with the raising of “any multitudes into a populous, rich, and flourishing nation.”26 Moreover, virtue theorists like Shaftesbury had a naïve understanding of the reality of moral virtue. According to Mandev ille, virtue and honor had no intrinsic merit beyond their effectiveness as strategies for achieving selfish ends; “virtue” and “honor” were, in fact, conventional linguistic redescriptions of individual self-liking. A similarly skeptical argument about the reality of honor and virtue was set out in Mandev ille’s Enquiry into the Origin of Honour of 1732.27 Mandeville’s logic was attacked very comprehensively by Hutcheson, the Irish professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the principal conduit of the early eighteenth-century debates on selflove and sociability to the later generation of Scottish theorists.28 For Hutcheson, Mandeville’s moral skepticism was philosophically incoherent and practically dangerous, since it threatened the very foundations of the conception of a virtuous civil society that ran through all his writings. He thus attacked Mandev ille, along with those other modern “Epicureans,” Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, for arguing that “self-love alone, or everyone’s search for their own pleasure or advantage,” was the cause of every human motivation.29 In a series of books and lectures

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culminating in the posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Hutcheson sought to refute every aspect of this Epicurean strand in modern moral and political philosophy. Not only did mankind possess a distinctive natural capacity to distinguish good from evil (a “moral sense”), but there were also a range of disinterested “benevolent affections” in the human soul that made it impossible to reduce every human action to selfish motives. Furthermore, in an explicit reference to Aristotle, Hutcheson observed that man was “naturally social and political.” Aristotle did not mean, Hutcheson explained, that mankind “immediately desire a political union, or a state of civil subjection to laws, as they desire the free society of others in natural liberty.” Sociability did not immediately express itself in a fully-fledged political community. Nevertheless, human beings were naturally endowed with a range of attributes and capacities that made them better fitted for life in civil society than either Hobbes or Pufendorf had admitted. As Hutcheson put it in the System, it was “wrong to assert that there is no occasion for civil policy except from human wickedness,” and as he noted in his Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, it was “not only our dread of injuries, but eminent virtues, and our high natural approbation of them have engaged men at first to form civil society.”30 Civil society was thus the expression of a rather fuller set of human sociable and moral attributes than Hobbes, Pufendorf and Mandev ille had allowed. Ferguson highlighted his debts to both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. In his Institutes he referred his readers, as he presumably referred his students, to Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit for an explanation of the relationship between virtue and benevolence. In the Principles, he explicitly praised both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (along with Montesquieu and the English moral phi losopher James Harris) as those among the moderns most acquainted with the “true spirit” of Stoicism. Later in the same work, he associated his own position on the origin of moral sentiment with that of Shaftesbury. Many of the arguments deployed in the Essay overlapped with those of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Although he never quite asserted the existence of an independent moral “faculty” in the same way as Hutcheson, he nevertheless grounded moral judgments in sociability (“in these various appearances of an amicable disposition, the foundations of a moral apprehension are sufficiently laid”). Justice, he taught his students at Edinburgh, rested upon a “disposition favourable to mankind,” not on utility, a view which

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obviously contrasted with that of Hume. Furthermore, Ferguson’s thinking echoed Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s intellectual onslaught against Hobbesian moral conventionalism. As he noted in a passage that reads as a direct critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan, although men might submit to the sword from “a sense of necessity or fear,” they lay “under no obligation from a motive of duty or justice.”31 The influence of Shaftesbury is perhaps most evident in the two sections of the Essay which dealt with happiness. These sections generated par ticular interest among Ferguson’s international readers, who seem to have recognized their significance as an alternative to utilitybased or hedonistic conceptions of happiness.32 While there was much that was distinctive about Ferguson’s discussion, its underlying argument about the close compatibility between happiness, benevolence, and virtue closely resembled Shaftesbury’s earlier criticisms of the selfish system. Echoing the argument laid out in the second book of the Inquiry, Ferguson rejected the idea of a sharp separation between the selfish and the sociable. The strict demarcation between selfish interests and disinterested virtue which underpinned the writings of rigid Christian moralists as well as Mandev ille’s Fable had not promoted the cause of virtue, and had instead led people to forget that “their happiest affections, their candour, and their independence of mind are in reality parts of themselves.”33 Ferguson attacked the view that benevolence constituted a duty, noting that if “in reality, courage, and a heart devoted to the good of mankind, are the constituents of human felicity, the kindness which is done infers a happiness in the person from whom it proceeds, not in him on whom it is bestowed.” Ferguson was explicit about the Stoic foundations of this argument, referring to both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as thinkers who had stressed that happiness rested upon a benevolent disposition to mankind. Excessive selfconcern, by contrast, created a spiral of competitiveness, jealousy, and, ultimately, psychological torment the undermined the possibility of genuine happiness: There is a degree, however, in which we suppose that the care of ourselves becomes a source of painful anxiety and cruel passions; in which it degenerates into avarice, vanity, or pride; and in which, by fostering habits of jealousy and envy, of fear and malice, it becomes as destructive to our own enjoyments, as it is hostile to the welfare of mankind. This evil, however, is not to be charged upon any excess in the care of

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ourselves, but upon a mere mistake in the choice of our objects. We look abroad for a happiness which is to be found only in the qualities of the heart: we think ourselves dependent on accidents; and are therefore kept in suspense and solicitude: we think ourselves dependent on the will of other men; and are therefore servile and timid: we think our felicity is placed in subjects for which our fellow-creatures are rivals and competitors; and in pursuit of happiness, we engage in those scenes of emulation, envy, hatred, animosity, and revenge, that lead to the highest pitch of distress. We act, in short, as if to preserve ourselves were to retain our weakness, and perpetuate our sufferings. We charge the ills of a distempered imagination, and a corrupt heart, to the account of our fellow-creatures, to whom we refer the pangs of our disappointment or malice; and while we foster our misery, are surprised that the care of ourselves is attended with no better effects. But he who remembers that he is by nature a rational being, and a member of society; that to preserve himself, is to preserve his reason, and to preserve the best feelings of his heart; will encounter with none of these inconveniences; and in the care of himself, will fi nd subjects only of satisfaction and triumph.34

One key target throughout Ferguson’s discussion was Mandev ille’s neo-Epicurean suggestion that moral virtue and sociability were the products of a disguised self-liking. Throughout the Essay, he warned against the dangers of false politeness and the counterfeit virtues that, according to Mandev ille, underpinned a flourishing society. Similarly, he lambasted both Juvenal’s and Alexander Pope’s satires of heroic virtue, and later attacked Richard Steele’s Tatler for encouraging its readers to prefer “consideration, or the reputation of worth, to worthiness itself.” Here the underlying target was the love of distinction and superiority, a psychological propensity which had long been anathema to classical and humanist writers. The desire of appearing superior to others, which he glossed as “self-conceit,” the “love of distinction and vanity,” or the desire to “surpass other men,” was the primary source of envy, jealousy, and malice. As Ferguson later wrote in the Principles, if one could “purify the mind of this taint,” “most of the other evils in society would be done away.”35 Ferguson recognized the strength of Epicurean motivation in the real world. “We live,” he wrote, “in societies where a man must be rich, in order to be great,” where “pleasure itself is often pursued on account of vanity,” and where fortune is allowed to bestow distinction and

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rank.” He understood that, in complex commercial societies, “power, distinction, and pleasure” were “baits to imagination, and incentives to passion.” He even accepted that modern states might depend on “emulation and jealousy” for the preservation of their “political life” (this was a cautious acceptance of Montesquieu’s idea of false honor or emulation could sustain the liberty of societies). But with the dissemination of the “selfish philosophy,” modern individuals were in danger of considering public life as a “scene for the gratification of mere vanity, avarice, and ambition.” Cynical and satirical readings of public-spirited actions, from Juvenal to Mandev ille, had fostered a fashionable disregard for “what is aspiring and prominent in the character of the human soul.” The depth to which modern individuals were penetrated by notions of emulation and competition meant that politeness and modern sociability “cannot be any other than an effect of disguise.” Since now individuals measured their own worth through others’ opinions, it became increasingly difficult to ascertain the genuinely meritorious. Emulation between citizens might eventually consist in a fierce competition for superiority and distinction, which ultimately distracted the human mind from “the consideration of qualities on which it ought to rely.”36

Rivalry and Dissension in Civil Society One further feature of the Essay set it apart from almost every other contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on human nature and sociability. This was the extraordinary prominence Ferguson ascribed to “war and dissension” as features of human nature and principles of sociability. According to him, sociability was inseparable from rivalry; the core bonds of human association inevitably created dynamics of rivalry, antagonism, and “dissension” within and between human groups. At the same time, enmity and even war were positive sources of domestic political cohesion and of moral and political energy: “In [men’s] several collisions, whether as friends or enemies, a fi re is struck out which the regards to interest or safety cannot confine.”37 It is crucial to recognize the centrality of these ideas in structuring Ferguson’s broader moral and political thought. His strong emphasis on war as a principle of sociability not only set him apart from the interest- or sympathy-based theories expounded by Hume and Smith, but also from more conven-

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tional theories of human natural sociability. It provided a foundation for his critique of despotic government, which he called the “order of mere inaction or tranquillity,” or the “order of slaves.”38 It also had significant implications for his understanding of the international order. It was, furthermore, widely recognized by contemporaries as the core feature of Ferguson’s theory of sociability. As the abbé Sieyès wrote in a manuscript note summarizing his reading of the French translation, society for Ferguson “exercises and excites all the passions of man,” but also gives rise to dynamics of love and hatred, generosity and vengeance, which went well beyond the cold consideration of self-interest. In a similar vein, another French reader claimed that Ferguson had depicted the “seeds of love and of hatred, which constitute for all men a mélange perpétuel of war or of peace, of virtues and of vices.”39 The most important aspect of this argument was Ferguson’s description of war, rivalry, and animosity as principles or causes of human association. On this understanding, sociability was not a byproduct of fear (as Hobbes had suggested), but nor was it a spontaneous outgrowth of friendship, love, or benevolence (as more traditional natural sociability theorists had argued). Rather, sociability was the product of a dynamic interaction between love and fear, friendship and animosity, and concord and discord. The principles of sociability, Ferguson wrote, while “inlisting him [man] on the side of one tribe or community, frequently engage him in war and contention with the rest of mankind.”40 This led to a major amendment to the monocausal and overly systematic anthropologies that, he argued, had characterized earlier discussions of sociability: In theory we profess the investigation of general principles; and in order to bring the matter of our inquiries within the reach of our comprehension, are disposed to adopt any system. Thus, in treating of human affairs, we would draw every consequence from a principle of union, or a principle of dissension. The state of nature is a state of war or of amity, and men are made to unite from a principle of affection, or from a principle of fear, as is most suitable to the system of different writers. The history of our species indeed abundantly shews, that they are to one another mutual objects of both fear and of love; and they who prove them to have been originally either in a state of alliance, or of war, have arguments in store to maintain their assertions. Our attachment to one division, or to one sect, seems often to derive much of its force from an animosity conceived to an opposite one: and this animosity in

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Ferguson’s emphasis on the principles of “war and dissension” put him at odds with most earlier and contemporary Scottish theorists of natural sociability. Hutcheson, for example, had consistently underlined the primacy and potentially universal scope of natural sociability, and was careful to argue that the unsocial passions arose only secondarily from collisions of interest. For Hutcheson, the state of nature was not a state of “violence, war, and rapine,” but one of “peace and good-will, of innocence and beneficence.”42 Similarly, James Dunbar, professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen from 1765 to 1794, argued that early societies were held together by “social love” alone and that intersocietal hostility only emerged much later in the sequence of human progress. In what may have been a veiled criticism of Ferguson’s position, Dunbar was explicit that the principles of “union are, in the order of things, prior to the principles of hostility.”43 Ferguson, by contrast, disaggregated confl icts that stemmed from naked self-interest from those deriving from the nobler principle of dissension. Confl icts of interest, he noted, tended to show human nature in the worst possible light. Echoing Aristotle’s description of man’s bestial nature outside the polis, he noted that the principles of interest and self-preservation, “if unrestrained by the laws of civil society,” would “exhibit our species, by turns, under an aspect more terrible and odious, or more vile and contemptible, than that of any animal which inherits the earth.” But the principle of dissension pointed in a quite different direction: “we may be satisfied that war does not always proceed from an intention to injure, and that the best qualities of men, their candour, as well as their resolution, may operate in the midst of their quarrels.” The capacity for both “friendship” and “enmity” was one feature that distinguished mankind from the animals.44 Ferguson’s emphasis on the interaction of war and sociability remained central to his thought after the publication of the Essay. In his Edinburgh lectures, he stressed repeatedly that mankind’s natural condition was one of war and animosity as well as one of peace and friendship. In a lecture of November 1779, for example, he argued that the individual was “destined to have his Antagonist as well as Associate,” and would “have among his fellow Creatures Objects of Animosity and Distrust as well as Friendship.” He noted explicitly that “Man is by

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Nature in a State of War as well as of Amity.” In a subsequent lecture of 1779, he taught that “in the History of human Nature . . . Man appears destined to War as well as Peace & Amity.” Sociability, in this sense, was a principle of division as well as union: “The Tendency of human Nature is not to Universal Confederacy. But to separate Groupes & Partial Societys in which attachment to one Party is often the source of Animosity to another. And in this sense Society may be said to divide as well as to unite the Species.”45 All of these claims reappeared in the Principles of 1792. It is true that in some passages of the later work Ferguson retreated slightly from the highly original position he had taken in the Essay. For instance, he endorsed Montesquieu’s characterization of presocial man as motivated by his “weakness” (sa foiblesse) and subsequently by his “needs” (ses besoins) in entering society, and noted that “the earliest sensation of human nature, as Montesquieu has observed, is rather a feeling of weakness and a need of support, than a feeling of strength or a disposition to provoke animosity” (here Ferguson, like Montesquieu, echoed Pufendorf’s insistence on imbecillitas or weakness as a cause of human sociability). But the original argument of the Essay retained its prominence. Contest held moral equivalence with concord. Ferguson noted once again that the disposition to “contest and struggle” could be separated from ordinary hostility, and again he noted that emulation in the game of life was a chief source of “delight” for its participants. The “possibility of discord and war,” he reiterated, was “entailed upon human nature.” Society was the “state of those who quarrel, as well as of those who agree.” Estrangement is not always a vice, nor association a virtue. Persons may assemble for contest, as well as for concord. And there are few individuals who have not their enemies as well as their friends: But, in the choice of friendship and enmity, the task of human wisdom begins, and is there only properly exercised, where the good of society is matter of free choice, not of necessity, nor even of invariable instinct.46

This remarkable reappraisal of discord, contest, and dissension was compatible with the emphasis on energy, movement, and activity that ran through the Essay. Man, Ferguson wrote, is not made for repose. In him, every amiable and respectable quality is an active power, and every subject of commendation an effort. If his

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment errors and his crimes are the movements of an active being, his virtues and his happiness consist likewise in the employment of his mind; and all the lustre which he casts around him, to captivate or engage the attention of his fellow-creatures, like the flame of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues: the moments of rest and of obscurity are the same.47

While this view certainly echoed classical and humanist preferences for the strenuous life of negotium (business or activity) rather than otium (leisure), its prominence throughout Ferguson’s writings gave his moral philosophy its highly distinctive character.48 According to Ferguson, mankind’s restless spirit demanded constant occupation. The higher satisfactions of human nature consisted “more in the exercises of freedom” than in the “possession of mere tranquillity, or what is termed exemption from trouble,” and “we mistake human nature, if we wish for a termination of labour, or a scene of repose.”49 From that perspective, Ferguson’s own Stoicism had none of the stress on detachment—apatheia or ataraxia—which characterized some rival versions of Stoicism.50 Ambition, he wrote, owed less to simple self-interest and more to the psychological uneasiness that accompanied inactivity.51 But it was also a desire for excellence, a drive toward “what is Esteemable.”52 This vision of human nature colored Ferguson’s analysis of virtue and happiness. Happiness and virtue were consequences of energetic engagement in difficult, and potentially hazardous, activities (particularly war), while a condition of ease and safety was usually one of languor and misery. Humans flourished in conditions of freedom (which inevitably gave rise to moral and practical struggles), and were diminished by a “termination of trouble.” “The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties, not in enjoying the repose of a pacific station.” Humanity’s “best qualities,” such as candor, courage, magnanimity, and resolution, were stimulated through confl ict. Confl ict gave “the human mind its most animating exercise, and its greatest triumphs.”53 All this had two major consequences for Ferguson’s political theory. The first was a model of a civil society that would be invigorated, not enervated, by competition, contest, and emulation. A healthy political order would be made up of active, dynamic, and independent (but not purely self-interested) actors. The classic expression of this view is a much-quoted footnote toward the end of the Essay:

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Our notion of order in civil society is frequently false: it is taken from the analogy of subjects inanimate and dead; we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature; we think it consistent only with obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the hands of a few. The good order of stones in a wall, is their being properly fi xed in the places for which they are hewn; were they to stir the building must fall: but the order of men in society, is their being placed where they are properly qualified to act. The first is a fabric made of dead and inanimate parts, the second is made of living and active members. When we seek in society for the order of mere inaction and tranquillity, we forget the nature of our subject, and find the order of slaves, not that of free men.54

Here Ferguson was laying the theoretical foundations for a distinctive model of “order” in a modern civil society. Since excellence and virtue were products of contest, not concord, a well-constituted state would be organized to give contest positive institutional expression. One illustration of this was the Spartan republic, where the virtues of citizens were kindled through “variance and dissension.” Tranquillity and inaction, by contrast, were characteristics of despotic or unfree regimes; as he put it in his later Principles, the “peace of society is, in many instances, evidently forced, and made to continue by a variety of artificial means.”55 This emphasis on contest stood in sharp contrast with the more unitary model of political association described by Rousseau in the Social Contract. Rousseau, unlike Ferguson, believed that divisions were incompatible with the unanimity he held to be of importance to a functioning republic and to the expression of the general will. For Ferguson, however, significant moral, social, and political benefits accrued to societies from faction and disagreement. Consensus was reached through opposition, not unanimity; unlike Rousseau, he viewed debates and dissensions as symptoms of political vitality.56 These ideas formed a constant thread running through Ferguson’s appraisal of Britain’s stability. As he wrote later in his Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price, the competition between different parties for office was a “noble contest, though an ignoble cause,” and remained a crucial “principle of life in our constitution.”57 These criteria of the quality of a political association also distinguished Ferguson’s account of civil society from that of Smith. Although Ferguson shared Smith’s famous opposition to the “man of system,” who

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could arrange the members of society “with as much ease as the hand arranges different pieces on a chess-board,” the two authors parted company over the broader criteria of “national felicity.” In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith had described happiness largely in terms of tranquillity, as an exemption from violent passions and psychological disturbance.58 This view seems also to have informed Smith’s politics, particularly his view of how much social disorder was compatible with the “felicity” or “prosperity” of states. In the Principles (not published, it is worth remembering, until after Smith’s death), Ferguson underlined how far Smith’s conception of happiness as tranquillity or security diverged from his own idea of “national felicity.” The key text here was Smith’s discussion, in the fi nal part of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, of the instabilities, wars, and confl icts that plagued ancient Greek politics. According to Smith, the “disorders” of Greek politics were expressions of the general absence of security that characterized ancient states, where even the most virtuous and patriotic behavior could give “no security to any man.” Ferguson quoted at some length Smith’s description of the “furious factions” and “sanguinary wars” that characterized Greek politics during and after the Peloponnesian War. He noted Smith’s claim that the threat of personal enslavement, in par tic ular, was a constant feature of Greek life. But he went on immediately to insist that none of this meant that the Greeks were a “wretched people.” In the Essay, Ferguson had compared human life to a game “fraught with difficulty and danger,” and in the Principles he reiterated the metaphor in order to emphasize that happiness and virtue were compatible with a high degree of danger and insecurity: The human mind gave similar proofs of a felicity no where more conspicuous than in Greece. And if human life can be compared to a game, it was played among ancient nations, and among the Greeks in particular, upon a stake no less indeed than is stated in the above [i.e. Smith’s] passage, of freedom as well as life. But their example should lead us to think that the spirits of men are not greatly damped by the risks they are made to run in the service of their country. The first citizens of every Grecian state, with this prospect of eventual slavery before them, took their post in the armies that were formed for the defence or advancement of their country: And in no quarter of the world was the military character held in higher esteem. Those nations, at the same time, in other respects, carried marks of felicity superior to what has ever been displayed in any other quarter of the world or age of mankind.

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The conclusion was a direct echo of the Essay: “men are not unhappy in proportion to the stake for which they contend.”59 The second consequence of Ferguson’s account of “war and dissension” concerned the nature of the international realm. Since, he argued, the dynamics of human association and dissociation played themselves out in a permanently divided world, international politics simply replicated mankind’s antagonistic sociability on a larger scale. Perhaps the most striking expression of this view was a reference to “the Cretan” (the figure of Cleinias in Plato’s Laws), whose notorious claim that “there always exists by nature an undeclared war among all cities” was a classical statement of the permanence of war between separate political societies.60 Ferguson’s endorsement of this passage, which he paraphrased as a claim that nations are “by nature in a state of hostility,” was a direct criticism of the view that national animosities were historical and artificial, rather than natural, in origin. As he wrote in part 1 of the Essay, “it would seem, that till we have reduced mankind to the state of a family, or found some external consideration to maintain their connection in greater numbers, they will for ever be separated into bands, and form a plurality of nations.” In the Institutes, he put it even more bluntly: “Separate societies are, for the most part, rivals or enemies.”61 This vision of international rivalry was a crucial feature of Ferguson’s conjectural history of the state. Instead of making international competition one of the grounds for an absolute sovereign (as Hobbes did explicitly in De Cive), Ferguson positively redescribed national rivalry as the foundation of the state and the cause of human civilization.62 Mankind, he wrote, “might have traded without a national convention,” but “without the rivalship of nations, and the practice of war, civil society itself could hardly have found an object, or a form. . . . The necessity of a public defence, has given rise to many departments of state, and the intellectual talents of men have found their busiest scene in wielding their national forces.”63 Furthermore, mutual hostilities between separate communities actually served the bonding purposes that, for Hobbes, could only be achieved by means of “union” under Leviathan. As Ferguson wrote in the Essay, it is “vain to expect that we can give to the multitude of the people a sense of union among themselves, without admitting hostility to those who oppose them. Could we at once, in the case of any nation, extinguish the emulation which is excited from abroad, we should probably break or weaken the bands of society at home, and

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close the busiest scene of national occupations and virtues.”64 He reiterated this view in the Principles, where he wrote that the “pressure of war from abroad” was required to “still the dissension of parties, and unite the citizens of Rome. Without this compressing cause, the bundle of rods, a childish emblem of union tied round the shaft of an axe, or instrument of force and terror, would have had little effect in uniting the minds of the people together.” In the same text, he noted that “separation has an effect in straightening the bands of society; for the members of each separate nation feel their connection the more, that the name of a fellow-countryman stands in contradistinction to an alien.” Again he underlined “the force with which nature has directed rival nations to pull against one another.” But the forces that divided the world tended simultaneously “to unite them in leagues more extensive than they would otherwise form.”65 In the Essay this account of international rivalry underlay a picture of Europe as composed of competing and patriotic, but nonaggressive, rivals in cultural, economic, and political life. Recalling Hume’s verdict on national emulation as a motor for improvement in the arts and sciences, Ferguson noted that it was the rivalry between Athens and Sparta that cemented the virtues of both. In the same way that social interactions and struggles were necessary to stimulate the faculties and virtues of individuals, the “rivalship and competition of nations” were necessary to “invigorate the principles of political life in a state.” Among the advantages which enable nations to run the career of policy, as well as of arts, it may be expected, from the observations already made, that we should reckon every circumstance which enables them to divide and to maintain themselves in distinct and independent communities. The society and concourse of other men, are not more necessary to form the individual, than the rivalship and competition of nations are to invigorate the principles of political life in the state. Theirs wars, and their treaties, their mutual jealousies, and the establishments which they devise with a view to each other, constitute more than half the occupations of mankind, and furnish materials for their greatest and most improving exertions. For this reason, clusters of islands, a continent divided by many natural barriers, great rivers, ridges of mountains, and arms of the sea, are best fitted for becoming the nursery of independent and respectable nations. The distinction of states being clearly maintained, a principle of political life is established in every division, and

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the capital of every district, like the heart in an animal body, communicates with ease the vital blood and the national spirit to its members.66

Seen from this perspective, the unsociable character of international relations ultimately served a positive purpose. Just as man’s weakness and neediness in relation to his physical environment drew forth his powers of invention and industry, so antagonism among “nations” served to awaken latent faculties and to promote patriotism. In this sense, mankind’s divided condition formed part of a “wisely ordered” universe, and discord and antagonism functioned as motors of mankind’s political development and moral flourishing. “What threatened to ruin and overset every good disposition in the human breast, what seemed to banish justice from the societies of men, tends to unite the species in clans and fraternities; formidable, indeed, and hostile to one another, but in the domestic society of each, faithful, disinterested, and generous.” The “principles of apparent hostility to men” were, therefore, “dispositions most favourable to mankind.”67

Inequality and Empire in Ferguson’s History of Nations The moral psychology set out in part 1 of the Essay provided the foundation for the theoretical history of civil society developed in parts 2 and 3. Encompassing the history of “rude nations” (savage and barbarous peoples), these sections of the Essay have generally been recognized by scholars as a major contribution to what Dugald Stewart later termed “theoretical or conjectural history,” which Stewart himself associated with Smith’s four-stages theory and conjectural history of language.68 Ferguson’s own version overlapped with those of his contemporaries in several ways. Like Smith, Kames, and Millar, he eschewed quasi-fictional accounts of powerful legislators like Romulus or Lycurgus, and instead fashioned a gradualistic account of the formation of political institutions over time, prioritizing unintended consequences over purposive design. He shared the widespread Scottish hostility to social contract theory, which had roots in Hume’s essay “Of the Social Contract” as well as Hume’s quasi-historical account of the origins of political obligation or “allegiance” contained in book 3 of the Treatise of Human Nature. More generally, Ferguson’s Essay overlapped with Smith’s

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ambition to develop insights from Montesquieu in the direction of a more comprehensive history of society, an endeavor which built upon the distinctions between savage and barbarous peoples set out in book 18 of The Spirit of the Laws as well as the broader account of the relationship between climate, geography, moeurs, jurisprudence, religion, history, and politics that ran through Montesquieu’s grand enterprise. The result was a complex, gradualistic, and explicitly empirical account of humanity’s progress from the “most rude to the most polished state of society.”69 As noted in the Introduction, many of the more distinctive features of Ferguson’s philosophical history were the outcome of his engagement with Rousseau’s Second Discourse. There were a number of direct echoes of Rousseau’s own text (the most notable example of these was Ferguson’s quasi-Rousseauvian suggestion that the fi rst to appropriate landed property was “laying the foundation of civil laws and political establishments”).70 Nevertheless, Ferguson’s conjectural history of politics differed from that of Rousseau in important respects. First, his picture of the earliest human societies assumed a quite highly developed set of sociable, moral, and political capacities. This fully-fledged social and political capacity meant that, against Rousseau, political institutions emerged naturally. Second, Ferguson offered a far more positive portrayal of the unequal distinctions of ranks that, in his account, were a natural feature of even the very smallest and most primitive societies.71 Subordination, inequal ity, and relations of authority and dependence were written into the history of mankind from the beginning. This enabled him to show that, before the establishment of formal conventions of government, individuals were already ranged into a system of orders or ranks that gave a certain stability and authority to government. Based on a positive evaluation of the graded inequalities that characterized the Iroquois, the ancient Germans and Celts, and the early Romans and Spartans, Ferguson described a model of disinterested aristocratic governance compatible not only with mankind’s natural “moral” equality but also with the unequal distinctions of ranks characteristic of developed societies. These aspects of the Essay were the products of Ferguson’s sustained interest in forms of “subordination” or distinctions of ranks (it is worth noting that the section of the Essay entitled “Of the History of Political Establishments” was, in the earliest editions, named “Of the

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history of Subordination”). As he wrote in his short Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, his 1766 prospectus for his Edinburgh lecture course, political government was grounded on subordination. Subordination could be either “casual” or “institutional.” Institutional subordination encompassed the relationships between magistrate and citizen as well as those between the legislative, judicial, and executive powers of the state. Casual subordination, by contrast, referred to informal distinctions of ranks, founded either on “fortune, character, [or] birth.”72 One of the key features of Ferguson’s political theory was its sensitivity to the interaction between institutional and casual forms of subordination in the progress of civilization. As he wrote in the Essay, the “progress of mankind” gave rise to “changes of condition, and of manners” that created “a nobility, and a variety of ranks, who have, in a subordinate degree, their claim to distinction.” Although the distinction of ranks, based on birth or property, was independent of formal constitutional arrangements, it was this structure that “bestows unequal degrees of influence, gives the state its tone, and fi xes its character.” Moreover, an unequal distinction of social ranks was, in some sense, a prerequisite for civil government itself. As Ferguson underlined, before the invention of government or jurisdiction, “men must be accustomed to the distinction of ranks; and before they are sensible that subordination is a matter of choice, must arrive at unequal conditions by chance.” Finally, an unequal distinction of ranks was compatible with mankind’s original equality of rights and with a kind of natural “order.” It is a common observation, That mankind were originally equal. They have indeed by nature equal rights to their preservation, and to the use of their talents; but they are fitted for different stations; and when they are classed by a rule taken from this circumstance, they suffer no injustice on the side of their natural rights. It is obvious, that some mode of subordination is as necessary to men as society itself; and this, not only to attain the ends of government, but to comply with an order established by nature.73

The starting point for Ferguson’s history of civil society was an analysis of “savage nations” without property. Drawing upon the accounts of various north American peoples by Joseph-François Lafitau and Pierre François-Xavier Charlevoix, the famous French Jesuit missionaries, as well as by Cadwallader Colden, the Scottish natural philosopher who was also surveyor-general of New York in the 1720s, he underlined the

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extensive moral and political capacities of the earliest human societies. His starting point was an assertion of the natural equality of mankind. Primitive man’s recognition of the rules of morality and justice sprang from his recognition of the equality of individuals. This “happy principle” gave the savage mind its sense of independence and left it open to the sentiments of generosity and kindness.74 The moral equality of all was, however, compatible with the exercise of natural authority by the brave and the wise. Here Ferguson was following insights contained in Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, a work of 1727 in which Colden had described the faint outlines of republican government among the Iroquois and had argued that the origins of political authority lay in the esteem that primitive peoples had for courage and wisdom.75 As Ferguson wrote, The old men, without being invested with any coercive power, employ their natural authority in advising or in prompting the resolutions of their tribe: the military leader is pointed out by the superiority of his manhood and his valour: the statesman is distinguished only by the attention with which his counsel is heard; the warrior by the confidence with which the youth of his nation follow him to the field: and if their concerts must be supposed to constitute a species of political government, it is one to which no language of ours can be applied. Power is no more than the natural ascendancy of the mind; the discharge of office no more than a natural exercise of the personal character; and while the community acts with an appearance of order, there is no sense of disparity in the breast of any of its members. In these happy, though informal proceedings, where age alone gives a place in the council; where youth, ardour, and valour in the field, give a title to the station of leader; where the whole community is assembled on any alarming occasion, we may venture to say, we have found the origin of the senate, the executive power, and the assembly of the people; institutions for which ancient legislators have been so much renowned.76

Ferguson went on to challenge the view of Kames and William Robertson, as well as Rousseau, that a “mere negation of our virtues is a description of man in his original state.” The moral capacity of savages was matched by their ability to defend themselves, to forge alliances and make treaties, and to live sociably together in security and order. “Without police or compulsory laws, their domestic society is conducted with order, and the absence of vicious dispositions, is a better security than

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any public establishment for the suppression of crimes.” Moreover, savage societies had valuable moral lessons for modern societies, which threatened to “introduce the spirit of traffic into the commerce of affection,” thereby dehumanizing and mechanizing what were originally the natural and spontaneous affections of the heart. The savage, possessing none of the contemporary vices of servility and envy, acted with courage, generosity, and fortitude, naturally deploying “his talents in the highest station which human society can offer, that of the counsellor, and the soldier of his country” (this strong emphasis on the courage of savages, incidentally, drew criticism from Kames). Foreshadowing his later inquiries into the constituents of nobility in modern societies, Ferguson wrote that savages possessed “an elevation, and a stateliness of carriage, which the pride of nobility, where it is most revered by polished nations, seldom bestows.”77 The next step was a history of “rude nations under the impressions of property and interest,” in which Ferguson made a series of interconnected points about the development of political authority. Echoing an argument Hume had made in the Treatise, he claimed that the fi rst rudiments of government were purely military, and that the chieftains of barbarous societies were never vested with “any species of civil authority.” This was due to the fact that “in every rude state, the great business is war,” which gave “the military leader a continued ascendant.” The emergence of private property, however, meant that the veneration originally attached to military heroism was soon extended to “the distinctions of fortune and those of birth.” This, Ferguson wrote, was the starting point for a system of “permanent and palpable subordination.” But the establishment of private property was not in itself a trigger for corruption. Rather, it gave birth to a species of subordination based on birth and wealth, as well as merit or personal qualities. Citing Tacitus’s Germania, Ferguson depicted a system of roughly graded preeminences and honors, revolving around loyalty to a preeminent chieftain, although this was not to be confused with “that establishment which is known in after ages by the name of monarchy.” The secondary chieftains retained a degree of independence from their leader, who remained a “common bond of connection” rather than a “common master.” The entire society was held together by powerful relations of allegiance and esteem that were strengthened by the constant threat of war, which provided barbarous societies with something like their principle of

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internal cohesion. This was approximately the structure of authority that had existed among the ancient Germans, the Homeric Greeks, and the nomadic peoples of Scythia and Tartary. At this point the broad picture was very similar to that drawn by Smith in his Glasgow Lectures, who had also referred to the shepherding societies of Central Asia, ancient Germany and prerepublican Greece as the first significant cases where wealth and birth became sources of political authority. More generally, the entire account amounted to a limited endorsement of Montesquieu’s interpretation of Tacitus, which had also strongly emphasized the voluntary character of the engagements between chiefs and lesser nobles, the predominance of military values, and— crucially—the emulation for distinctions of courage that motivated all the members of society to excel in war.78 At this point Ferguson inserted an argument about the vulnerability of barbarous societies to “political slavery.” The argument is significant, because it challenged the extraordinarily sharp distinction between European liberty and Asiatic slavery set out by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws. In books 17 and 18 of that work, Montesquieu had claimed that the divergence between Europe and Asia could be understood as the result of two radically different episodes of conquest. On one side were the Germanic nations who had conquered and settled the temperate and geograph ically mixed terrain of Europe. On the other were the Tartar nations of northern Asia who had conquered the uniform plains to their south. Although both, as pastoral peoples, should have possessed great liberty, the Tartars (“the most singular people on earth”) were an exception to this rule and, for a variety of moral and physical reasons, lived in a condition of political slavery. The political credo of the Tartars, Montesquieu noted, was that their ruler’s command should serve as a sword, a characteristic of the Tartar monarchy also noticed by Jean Bodin in his Six Livres de la République.79 Moreover, because Asia had no temperate zone and possessed none of the great rivers and mountain ranges found in Europe, the conquests made by the Tartars ended in the establishment of an enormous despotic empire. As Montesquieu concluded, the “peoples of northern Europe have conquered as free men; the peoples of northern Asia have conquered as slaves and have been victorious only for a master.” “When the Tartars destroyed the Greek empire, they established servitude and despotism

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in the conquered countries; when the Goths conquered the Roman empire, they founded monarchy and liberty everywhere.”80 These passages were discussed with great interest among the philosophical historians of late eighteenth-century Britain. Smith probably used Montesquieu’s discussion as the basis for his own analysis of conquering peoples in his jurisprudence lectures, while Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, explicitly criticized Montesquieu’s attempt to “explain a difference which has not existed between the liberty of the Arabs and the perpetual slavery of the Tartars.” Kames referred to the same section in making a similar distinction between Europe and Asia and their respective vulnerability to universal monarchy.81 Ferguson himself repeated much of Montesquieu’s account almost verbatim. Not only did he cite the same passage about the Tartars taking “the voice of the King as a sword,” but he also drew on the history of Asia to show how barbarous societies came to be united under a single military overlord, as had occurred in the ages of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Among the Tartars, Ferguson wrote, in the heart of a great continent, bold and enterprising warriors arose: they subdued, by surprise, or superior abilities, the contiguous hordes; they gained, in their progress, accessions of numbers and of strength; and, like a torrent increasing as it descends, became too strong for any bar that could be opposed to their passage. The conquering tribe, during a succession of ages, furnished the prince with his guards; and while they themselves were allowed to share in its spoils, were the voluntary tools of oppression. In this manner has despotism and corruption made their way into regions so much renowned for the wild freedom of nature: a power which was the terror of every effeminate province is disarmed, and the nursery of nations is itself gone to decay.82

Unlike Montesquieu, however, Ferguson insisted that these sequences had a direct relevance to the history of Europe, as well as Asia. Here he was making a point about the politics of empire in premodern Europe and the vulnerability of Europe to “political slavery.” To do so he gave a different gloss on a crucial passage from Tacitus’ Germania— Est apud illos et opibus honos, eoque unus imperitat (“Wealth, too, is held in high honour, and therefore a single monarch rules”)— to the gloss provided by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws. According to Montesquieu, this passage showed that luxury and monarchy fitted together; it formed

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part of his broadly positive endorsement of the compatibility of luxury, inequal ity, and monarchy.83 For Ferguson, by contrast, the passage was a clear indication of the link between wealth and political despotism. A switch from liberty to slavery occurred when war was bent to the logic of acquisition; when they made “rapine their trade, not merely as a species of warfare, or with a view to enrich their community, but to possess, in property, what they learned to prefer even to the ties of affection or of blood.”84 These are the terms to which the stubborn heart of the barbarian has been reduced, in consequence of a despotism he himself had established; and men have, in that low state of commercial arts, in Europe, as well as in Asia, tasted of political slavery. When interest prevails in every breast, the sovereign and his party cannot escape the infection: he employs the force with which he is intrusted, to turn the people into a property, and to command their possessions for his profit or his pleasure. If riches are by any people made the standard of good and of evil, let them beware of the powers they intrust to their prince. “With the Suiones,” says Tacitus, “riches are held in high esteem; and this people are accordingly disarmed, and reduced to slavery.”85

The passage serves to clarify the connection between wealth and political slavery in Ferguson’s political theory. As he reiterated later in the Essay, political corruption was by no means exclusive to advanced commercial nations; the underlying mechanisms which produced despotic rule were moral, psychological, and political, but not strictly economic. In this sense, the history of barbarism sketched in the Essay was in line with Ferguson’s moral psychology, which was consistently sensitive to the dangers of allowing wealth or property to become the single standard of excellence or “estimation.” Toward the end of the Essay, he returned to the passage from Tacitus, reminding his readers that nations “in times of degeneracy, verify likewise the maxim of Tacitus, that the admiration of riches leads to despotical government.”86 In the part 3 of the Essay, Ferguson connected this account of barbarism to the history of post-Roman Europe. He argued that the same sequences of conquest, empire, and despotism had “threatened Europe for ages” following the conquest and settlement of the Germanic peoples, and he was quite explicit about its continuation in England at least until the sixteenth century. Referring in a note to Hume’s view that Tudor England had come close to the condition of a despotic monarchy,

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he noted that the “progress of empire” threatened to “bury the independent spirit of nations in that grave which the Ottoman conquerors found for themselves; and for the wretched race they had vanquished.”87 Europe’s avoidance of Asia’s fate served to highlight the importance of an independent military nobility in the maintenance of liberty. What had prevented the emergence of unitary despotic government at earlier stages of modern Europe’s past was a permanent distinction of military ranks, embodied in what Ferguson described as a system of subordination: “There is not distinction of rank, among men in rude ages, sufficient to give their communities the form of legal monarchy; in a territory of considerable extent, when united under one head, the warlike and turbulent spirit of its inhabitants seems to require the bridle of despotism and military force.”88 Without its system of military-aristocratic ranks, Europe might easily have undergone the same cycle of conquest, empire, and despotism that had occurred in Asia.89 In this respect, the history of barbarism had a direct bearing on the politics of modernity.

4

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Trajectories of the Modern Commercial State

T HE FINAL parts of Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society contain an extended investigation into the causes of stability and decline among wealthy commercial states. In these sections of the work, Ferguson evoked a central preoccupation within eighteenth-century thought about the causes of the rise, decline, and collapse of states, empires, and civilizations. Although the most significant nearcontemporary discussion of this issue was Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, the theme was prominent in earlier eighteenth-century Scottish thought. In his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy, for example, Francis Hutcheson had concluded with melancholy remarks about the “seeds of death and destruction” within bodies politic, the analogies between political and animal bodies, and the transitory nature of empires.1 Ferguson’s own writings frequently echoed this preoccupation. The entirety of part 5 of the Essay was essentially a meditation on the ancient topos of decline and its applicability to the modern world, and was rich in original observations on the “spontaneous return to obscurity and weakness” that characterized the histories of ancient and modern states.2 Ruminations on the vicissitudes of extensive and prosperous states appear in the notes for his moral philosophy lectures, and the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic concluded with remarks on the “retrograde motion” into which human nature had fallen after the decline of the Roman empire.3 And as he noted in his Principles of Moral and Political Science, human affairs were “subject to vicissitudes; and the human species is observed to decline in some

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periods, no less than to advance in others.”4 While these passages evince an interest in the causes of gradual decline, Ferguson was equally fascinated by the “violent and abrupt” changes that characterized constitutional transformation and revolution. As he taught the students in his lectures at Edinburgh, “the Transition from Republic to Monarchy or the Converse is Violent,” and the “Progress of States in Extension and Wealth is fraught with political Change and Vicissitude.”5 This chapter explores Ferguson’s thinking about the trajectories of modern Europe’s commercial states by focusing on his underlying account of modern commerce. Crucially, his verdict on commerce was more nuanced than is usually assumed, and was by no means a simple anticommercial jeremiad. Rather than offering a straightforwardly moralistic critique of commerce or luxury, the analysis he developed in both the Essay and in his moral philosophy texts was based on a sophisticated analysis of commercial society’s compatibility with different forms of government. Nevertheless, Ferguson was highly critical of what he took to be the most pathological features of advanced commercial societies, notably the division of labor and its application to the departments of state. The later parts of the Essay were designed to demonstrate that a highly legalistic conception of civil society, where the state was conceived in quasi-Hobbesian terms as the centralized guarantor of an extensive division of economic labor, was bound to default in despotism. All European states, to a greater or lesser extent, were caught up in a shared trajectory in which the logic of the division of economic labor was gradually encroaching upon the institutions of the state itself, a process which would underwrite the distinction between civil and military institutions that was Ferguson’s main criterion of an unfree state. His preferred example for the future of this kind of commercial society was the enormous centralized despotic state of China. Ferguson’s claim that modern commercial nations remained vulnerable to empire, conquest, and military government was an amendment to Montesquieu’s own assessment of Europe’s future. As we saw in Chapter 1, Montesquieu’s works contained a confident endorsement of Europe’s future as a system of peaceful commercial states or “civilized monarchies.” The representative Scottish version of this argument, appearing two years after the Essay in 1769, was William Robertson’s View of the Progress of Society in Europe, a self-consciously modernist work which depicted Europe’s post-Roman and post-Gothic history in

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terms of a shift away from conquest, empire, and universal monarchy and toward peace, commerce, and plurality.6 In parts of the Essay, Ferguson paid lip ser vice to this view. He stressed the moderation of large and powerful monarchies in maintaining the balance of power, and identified an apparently widespread aversion to military conquest. But in the fi nal three Parts of the Essay he fi rmly rejected the idea that commerce had tamed the pathologies of empire and despotism. Instead, he sought to demonstrate that Europe’s large commercial monarchies stood little chance of surviving the unprecedented pressures placed upon them by accelerated economic development and commercial rivalry. This represented a strong rejection of Montesquieu’s more confident vision of a pacified European order made up of constitutional or semiconstitutional states competing purely econom ical ly. It found expression in an important argument about the revival of the spirit of conquest under conditions of global commerce.

Commerce and Politics in Ferguson’s Thought Ferguson’s nuanced assessment of commercial society began with a claim about the compatibility between the commercial arts and nature’s plan. In the Essay he described the progress of commerce as an outgrowth of human instinct, as much in line with the “wisdom of nature” as the artifices of the beaver, the ant, and the bee.7 Commercial development and the division of labor followed nature’s tendency toward complexity. Ferguson defended similar claims in his moral philosophy classes at Edinburgh, in which he adumbrated an embryonic history of commercial arts as a subsection of his history of mankind. Commerce, Ferguson taught his students, was originally humanity’s response to the uneven distribution of commodities among the different regions of the earth. It developed because of the mismatch between human needs and the limited bounty of nature, which stimulated skill, labor, and exchange. In its earliest form commerce was simply a kind of barter, but ultimately it became “an expedient which connects all the arts & tends to communicate or distribute in some measure the fruits or effects of the whole.” It was the “Art which unites the world together in a confederacy of mutual Support & mutual Supply.” Furthermore, it could have positive moral and political consequences. Repeating a standard line of eighteenth-century argument,

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Ferguson noted that commerce enlarged “Observation and knowledge” and extended “the Pacific intercourse of Men.” This was one reason for the “Ferocity of Ancient nations compared with the Moderns.”8 Ferguson summarized these claims in the section entitled “Of Commercial Arts” in the Principles. There he noted that the invention, practice, and progress of commercial arts had been of unquestionable value to mankind, at least insofar as they furnished “materials” for human ingenuity, ambition, and labor. Furthermore, although mere wealth, suddenly acquired, could lead mankind to a condition of debasement and brutality, the habits of industriousness and moderation which accompanied commercial life bred habits of justice and virtue.9 Although the Essay contained nothing quite this positive about the moral and political benefits of commercial exchange, it was by no means simplistically anticommercial. Rather, Ferguson adopted a nuanced stance toward Europe’s long-term commercial development, and stressed above all the importance of political context in assessing the consequences of commercial development. On the one hand, he acknowledged David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s point that the rise of modern commerce had favored the establishment of civil liberty and personal security, at least in Britain. Thus in some nations, he wrote, “the spirit of commerce, intent on securing its profits, has led the way to political wisdom.” With wealth came the motivation to seek laws and securities for its possession and enjoyment. Commerce and civil liberty had in the history of England been “so interwoven, that we cannot determine which were prior in the order of time, or derived most advantage from the mutual influences with which they act and re-act upon one another.”10 On the other hand, the usual course of Eu ropean history suggested a close connection between the “lucrative arts” and the progress of political despotism (exemplified primarily by the history of absolutism in France). Nevertheless, the overall picture was that of a cautious acceptance of the utility of commercial progress. Corruption certainly did not “arise from the abuse of commercial arts alone; it requires the aid of a political situation.” As he wrote at the end of the Essay, the history of mankind demonstrated that corruption of this nature was “not peculiar to nations in their decline, or in the result of signal prosperity, and great advances in the arts of commerce.”11 This nuanced view of the relationship between commerce and politics set the Essay apart from several contemporary Scottish writings

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of the later 1760s. On the one hand, it distinguished Ferguson’s position from the outright hostility to commerce and trade expressed by John Gregory, the self-confessed admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who supplied a more critical verdict on mankind’s passage from barbarism to commercial society in the “Preface” to later editions of his 1765 work, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World.12 Gregory emphasized the dangerous moral and political consequences that followed from an “intercourse and commerce with foreign nations,” which included the growth of imaginary and insatiable needs, the exclusive love of money, and the pursuit of commercial greatness and empire. “When a nation arrives at this pitch of depravity,” he wrote, “its duration as a free state must be very short, and can only be protracted, by the accidental circumstances of the neighbouring nations being equally corrupted, or of different diseases in the state ballancing and counter-acting one another.”13 Ferguson’s assessment also clashed with the more positive endorsement of modern trade set out, also in 1767, in Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Crucially, Steuart deemphasized the relevance of forms of government in establishing the liberty of states. Although liberty may have been more secure under democracy, it was equally compatible with monarchy. Liberty could be coupled with prosperity within the framework of a strong centralized state, where the economy was kept in order by the careful management of the statesman. Moreover, Steuart suggested that economic development constituted a bulwark against despotic politics, and described in detail the ways in which trade and commerce were promoting general liberty and extinguishing illegitimate subordination. Since a “modern oeconomy,” he wrote, was “the most effectual bridle ever invented against the folly of despotism; so the wisdom of so great a power shines no where with greater lustre, than when we see it exerted in planning and establishing this oeconomy, as a bridle against the wanton exercise of power in succeeding generations.”14 While Ferguson’s own position was nowhere near as anticommercial as is sometimes assumed, it represents a distinctive alternative within the spectrum of Scottish writings on commerce. He rejected the identification of commercial society and civilization that he perceived in the writings of his more famous contemporaries. This argument, which was developed only embryonically in the Essay, was almost certainly directed against the defense of modern refi nement and com-

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merce running through Hume’s essays, notably “Of Refi nement in the Arts” and “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” although it was probably also targeted against the account of civilization set out in Montesquieu’s writings. Civilization, Ferguson insisted, was unrelated to either prosperity or commerce. As he wrote in the Principles, civilization referred “rather to the effects of law and political establishment, on the forms of society, than to any state merely of lucrative possession or wealth.” This political, rather than commercial, defi nition of civilization underpinned Ferguson’s view that noncommercial Rome and Sparta were, in fact, highly civilized: Civilization has been conspicuous in nations, who made little progress in commerce, or the arts on which it proceeds. The Romans had formed a very accomplished republic, and exhibited many an illustrious character; whilst, in respect to family estate, and manner of life, they were nearly in the condition of peasants and husbandmen. The policy of Sparta arose from a principle directly opposed to the maxims of trade, and went to restrain and to suspend the commercial arts in all their effects. The nation would not have a citizen admired for his wealth, or the equipage of his person: They would not have him occupied with the care of his subsistence or private fortune; and, to procure this exemption for free men, they so far dispensed with the laws of nature and humanity, as to devote, in the capacity of slaves, a particular race of men to perform the labours necessary for the maintenance of the people: They would leave the citizen nothing to care for but his own personal character and the ser vice of his country. And they succeeded so far, that, without riches, in the midst of nations who were admirers of wealth, and in the most cultivated part of the earth, they enjoyed a degree of consideration, superior to that which the lustre even of literary genius and the fi ne arts, as well as commerce, bestowed on their neighbours.15

This redefi nition of the term “civilization” formed part of a broader effort to maintain a clear distinction between economics and politics. Throughout the Essay, Ferguson fiercely resisted the idea of reducing “national felicity” to external factors like wealth, commerce, or populousness. The main aim of the two sections of the essay dealing with “National Objects in general” and “Of Population and Wealth” was to underline the priority of manners and military preparedness over narrowly economic utilities. A similar argument carried through to the Principles, where he also stressed the “wisdom of guarding, in every state, the manners of a brave and ingenious people, in preference to

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their numbers or their wealth.”16 At a more specific level, he sought to redress the balance between domestic and foreign trade, and to curtail the nation’s dependence upon foreign trade and public debts. In this respect at least, Ferguson did come close to Gregory’s view that foreign trade and commercial empire had come at the expense of the nation’s internal development and prosperity (this line of thinking, it is worth noting, became very prominent in Scotland in the immediate aftermath of the American War of Independence).17 Ferguson devoted an entire section of the Essay to a criticism of national “waste” and immoderate public expense.18 But his opposition to the combination of foreign trade and luxury consumption was most clearly revealed in his unpublished lectures. Although he praised freedom of commerce, and unhesitatingly condemned commercial monopolies, he strongly criticized the “false idea of profit, which is supposed to arise from foreign trade alone.” At one point he came close to praising both China and the Roman empire for having concentrated on internal, rather than external, commerce. Similarly, he reiterated his argument for “frugality,” emphasizing that necessities should not be traded for foreign luxuries.19 Ferguson’s critical assessment of the modern commercial economy was, therefore, cautious and sophisticated. He accepted the utility of commercial exchange between individuals and nations as part of nature’s overall plan and as a source of human ingenuity, industriousness, and activity. He recognized that Europe’s commercial development had brought substantial political benefits. Nevertheless, he also identified features of modern commerce which might undermine Britain’s stability and security. One of these features was its tendency to divert attention from national defense, and a second concerned the overemphasis on extensive international trade. The broader issue—the consequences of the division of economic labor which characterized the advancement of the commercial arts and the kind of political regime which accompanied a highly commercialized society—must now be considered in more detail.

Commerce and Despotism in Europe and China The more detailed analysis Ferguson elaborated about the impact of commerce on politics began with a conjectural history of the division of labor. Neither savage nor barbarous societies made much real prog-

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ress in the separation of economic tasks. Only once civil societies had attained a reasonable level of internal peace and order did their members begin to be driven by a sense of utility to subdivide their respective tasks and professions. This process, Ferguson wrote, opened up new sources of wealth and underwrote the increasing perfection of the various manufactures, arts, and sciences. In principle it could continue almost indefi nitely.20 The broader consequence of the division of labor, however, was the introduction of additional grounds of inequal ity and subordination among mankind, which arose as a consequence of the effects different occupations had upon the human character. This kind of subordination was analytically distinct from inequalities of property and the “natural” variations in talent and virtue that constituted the usual basis of the distinction of ranks. The analysis proceeded by means of a comparison between ancient and modern forms of the division of labor. Among ancient states, notably those of Greece, there had existed a crude division of economic and political labor, expressed in the “cruel” distinction between slave and free citizen. A second division, however, developed within the citizen group itself, as a consequence of the different moral attributes of rich and poor. Something similar to this was now manifested in the distinction between “liberal” and “mechanic” arts which, Ferguson claimed, had created new grounds of moral and political subordination. The immersion of laborers in mechanical tasks, and their concentration in large urban centers, tended to suppress natural “sentiment and reason.” Priority, even authority, naturally came to be associated with those exempt from mechanical occupations. It was, Ferguson wrote, “certainly reasonable to form our opinion of the rank that is due to men of certain professions and stations, from the influence of their manner of life in cultivating the powers of the mind, or in preserving the sentiments of the heart.”21 The initial conclusion Ferguson drew from this analysis was the unsuitability of democracy for modern commercial societies. He underlined this point very strongly, building on Montesquieu’s comparative analysis of regime-types. “Luxury,” he wrote, was “apart from all its moral effects, adverse to the form of democratical government.” Since commercial development established significant social stratification and reinforced existing differences in human capacities, the extension of political responsibilities to the entire population was fraught with danger. In this, Ferguson wrote, “we do but plead against the form of

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democracy, after the principle is removed; and see the absurdity of pretensions to equal influence and consideration, after the characters of men have ceased to be similar.” Commercial development and the progress of the division of labor may not have made legitimate politics impossible, but it did necessitate the restriction of political authority to a suitably uncontaminated patriotic elite who possessed enough public spirit to keep their country on track. All this formed a crucial part of Ferguson’s view of the division between political and economic roles in a modern state. Commercial states needed a noneconomic elite that could serve as “an object of ambition, and a rank to which the busy aspire.” As he put it in his Lectures, “if the Species in the advanced ages of Manufacture have improved their faculties we must look for this Effect in some other order of men not among the labouring men. It is among those who are exempt from lucrative pursuits. Who are instructed in History & Science, are destined to liberal or improving occupations in the government and ser vice of their Country.”22 This acceptance of a differentiation of economic and political labor fits readily with Ferguson’s criticism of Athens, the standard eighteenthcentury example of a commercial democracy. Although criticism of Athens was a contemporary commonplace, Ferguson’s attack on the Athenian combination of commerce and democracy went further than that of Montesquieu, who had discerned a resemblance between the commercial empires of Britain and Athens.23 The “pretensions to equal justice and freedom” that marked out Athens’ democratic citizens would, under commercial conditions, serve to make “every class equally servile and mercenary,” producing a “nation of helots” with “no free citizens” (ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, when Karl Marx quoted this passage in Das Kapital, he ignored its inegalitarian implications).24 As the history of Athens showed, the combination of ancient liberty and commercial development led to populism, demagogy and dictatorship: The Athenians retained their popular government under all these defects. The mechanic was obliged, under a penalty, to appear in the public market-place, and to hear debates on the subjects of war, and of peace. He was tempted by pecuniary rewards, to attend on the trial of civil and criminal causes. But notwithstanding an exercise tending so much to cultivate their talents, the indigent came always with minds intent upon profit, or with the habits of an illiberal calling. Sunk under the sense of their personal disparity and weakness, they were ready to resign

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themselves entirely to the influence of some popu lar leader, who flattered their passions, and wrought on their fears; or, actuated by envy, they were ready to banish from the state whomsoever was respectable and eminent in the superior order of citizens; and whether from their neglect of the public at one time, or their male-administration at another, sovereignty was every moment ready to drop from their hands.25

The division of labor among the moderns had two further consequences. First, it acted as a solvent of patriotism and undermined the cohesion of the political community. With the “distinction of callings,” Ferguson argued, “every individual is supposed to possess his species of talent, or his peculiar skill, in which the others are confessedly ignorant; and society is made to consist of parts, of which none is animated with the spirit of society itself.”26 At this point he introduced the metaphorical image of society as an engine or machine (a metaphor that found its most famous echo in Johann Gottfried Herder’s critique of Europe’s machine-states and mechanical civilization in This Too a Philosophy of History of 1774).27 Societies with a well-developed division of labor resembled soulless “engines” or automatic machines. Under these conditions, individuals lost the capacity to forge sociable connections any wider than those of family and immediate locality. The members of a community may, in this manner, like the inhabitants of a conquered province, be made to lose the sense of every connection, but that of kindred and neighbourhood; and have no common affairs to transact, but those of trade: Connections, indeed, or transactions, in which probity and friendship may take place; but in which the national spirit, whose ebbs and flows we are now considering, cannot be exerted.28

The second effect of the division of labor was its impact on the structure of government itself. For Ferguson, the single most significant source of modern states’ vulnerability to despotic government was the division that had developed between their civilian and military departments. By subdividing the tasks of “the clothier and the tannier,” he pointed out, “we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth.” But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve. By this separation, we in effect deprive a free people of what is necessary to their safety; or

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These divergent outcomes were illustrated by the history of Greece and Rome respectively. Before their incorporation into the Macedonian empire, Ferguson argued, the Greeks were reputed “the best soldiers and the best statesmen of the known world.” But the multiplication of interests and pleasures that accompanied commercial development led ultimately to a separation between the departments of state and war. Here Ferguson drew directly from Plutarch’s life of Phocion, in which Phocion was presented as a figure who sought to reverse the separation of civil and military professions that had occurred in Athens: It is, however, true, that in the age of Philip, the military and political spirit of those nations appears to have been considerably impaired, and to have suffered, perhaps, from the variety of interests and pursuits, as well as of pleasures, with which their members came to be occupied: they even made a kind of separation between the civil and military character. Phocion, we are told by Plutarch, having observed that the leading men of his time followed different courses, that some applied themselves to civil, others to military affairs, determined rather to follow the examples of Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles, the leaders of a former age, who were equally prepared for either.30

Rome’s fate, by contrast, was not conquest and subjection, but rather military usurpation at the hands of its own citizens. The Romans forgot, Ferguson wrote, “that in assembling soldiers of fortune, and in suffering any leader to be master of a disciplined army, they actually resigned their political rights, and suffered a master to arise for the state.” However, there was in the end little to differentiate the “mild” fate of the Greeks and the “violent and acute” death of the Roman constitution.31 Although he held out the Greek and Roman examples as real threats to eighteenth-century states, the fi nal two parts of the Essay explored a more distinctively modern sort of despotism. Building on the idea of mankind’s natural restlessness and energy examined in Chapter 3, Ferguson insisted that the immediate danger facing modern states was not that of war between brutalized military commanders, but of a peculiarly modern version of despotism grounded on “tranquillity” or “lethargy.” Here Ferguson prefigured, and almost certainly helped to shape, the anxieties about “soft despotism” in commercial societies that ran

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through much subsequent Eu ropean thought, ranging from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fear that tranquil, peaceful, and prosperous states might breed a “multitude of well-cared for slaves” to Alexis de Tocqueville’s worries about the despotic potential of mass democracies.32 The extension of the principles of the division of labor to more and more areas of economic and political life, Ferguson warned, was transforming the state into a kind of economic guardian, acting as the arbitrator of diverse economic interests and as the custodian of security. This, he added, was perfectly compatible with a high level of legal and constitutional development. The state-form that matched an econom ical ly advanced, legalistic, but also atomized society would be a kind of benevolent despotism, in which the values of order and security took priority over those of independent political activity. In this respect, economic development and “refi nement in the arts” were far from fostering the guarantees against despotism that Montesquieu, Hume, and many others had associated with it. Despotism was one of the unintended consequences of the “refi nement” of civil society itself: “we may expect that many of the boasted improvements of civil society, will be mere devices to lay the political spirit at rest, and will chain up the active virtues more than the restless disorders of men.”33 The most significant exemplification of this tendency, Ferguson argued, was the combination of commerce with despotism in China. Overturning the more positive picture of the Chinese monarchy set out by a number of his British predecessors (William Temple, Andrew Fletcher, and Hume had described the Chinese government as a distinctive form of tempered, law-governed monarchy, while others had underlined its meritocratic foundations), Ferguson stressed the despotic character of the state and the mediocrity of its administrative and political elite.34 In describing China as despotic, Ferguson came closer to Montesquieu’s position. Drawing on the compilation of sources contained in Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s Description of the Chinese empire, Montesquieu had described China as a special kind of despotism, modeled upon domestic or paternal government (the emperor was the “father of his people”). As a result of its enormous population and the regularity of famines and rebellions, the laws of China aimed solely at the preservation of public tranquillity and at the maintenance of industriousness throughout the population. This, Montesquieu claimed, made it impossible to compare the morality of

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China with that of Eu rope.35 Where Ferguson differed from Montesquieu was in viewing the Chinese state as a real image of Europe’s own future. According to him, in China the division of labor had developed in an extreme form beyond anything yet known in Europe. The Chinese, Ferguson wrote, “have done what we are very apt to admire; they have brought national affairs to the level of the meanest capacity; they have broke them into parts, and thrown them into separate departments.” China, he remarked, had been engaged in manufacture and commerce for a millennium. The fragmentation of its government into discrete departments of war, revenue, and literature ensured that, despite its great resources and enormous population, it could produce no truly patriotic citizens capable of defending its territory. China could, therefore, only be held together by a “rigorous and severe police”— or by the rule of the whip and the cudgel. Ferguson suggested quite explicitly that this “Chinese model” constituted a viable future for Europe in the concluding pages of the Essay: When we suppose government to have bestowed a degree of tranquillity, which we sometimes hope to reap from it, as the best of its fruits, and public affairs to proceed, in the several departments of legislation and execution, with the least possible interruption to commerce and lucrative arts; such a state, like that of China, by throwing affairs into separate offices, where conduct consists in detail, and in the observance of forms, by superseding all the exertions of a great or a liberal mind, is more akin to despotism than we are apt to imagine.36

Seen from this perspective, China’s current situation offered a glimpse into the future for Europe’s increasingly prosperous, but also increasingly centralized, commercial monarchies. In establishing political institutions that guaranteed to individuals a space for the unhindered pursuit of private and material interests, modern commercial states had unintentionally opened themselves up to the concentration of state power, on the one hand, and to a high level of psychological complacency among their citizens on the other. China was in this respect “the most perfect model of an arrangement, at which the ordinary refinements of government are aimed.”37

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Commerce, Empire, and the Militarization of Europe A second dimension of Ferguson’s assessment of Europe’s future concerned the impact of commerce upon the external relations of states. Although this aspect of his political thought has received significantly less attention from recent commentators than his concern with the internal arrangements of states, the Essay contained significant discussion of the problems raised by international commerce and its relationship to war and empire. Like many other eighteenth-century thinkers in Scotland and elsewhere, Ferguson argued that trade and empire had become dangerously entangled in the modern world.38 His own assessment of this feature of modernity was almost certainly sharpened by the experience of the Seven Years War and the par tic ular problems of imperial government, national defense, and commercial competition that the war had brought into focus.39 Commerce functioned as a source of decline and despotism for Ferguson not just because it undermined the moral and political virtues, but also because sectional mercantile interests drove commercial and ultimately military expansion. This, in turn, distracted statesmen from genuine military and economic priorities, and generated instabilities which fueled the rise of despotic government at home. Commercial and colonial rivalry went hand in hand with the militarization of European states. The outcome of commercial competition between Europe’s great powers, Ferguson conjectured, would ultimately be conquest and empire on a global scale. Ferguson’s account of the relationship between commerce, conquest, and empire represents a reworking of Montesquieu’s verdict on the brief duration of commercial empires. As I noted in Chapter 1, Montesquieu’s own evaluation of international commerce had been largely positive. He admired the way England subordinated its political to its commercial interests and explicitly denied that England would face the same fate as the expansionist empires of the past. But in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, and following British territorial acquisitions in the East Indies in the 1760s, the image of Britain as a benign maritime empire became far harder to maintain.40 Ferguson’s Essay was sometimes recognized as an interesting commentary on this transformation. As Ferguson’s friend, George Johnstone, commented in 1771, the Essay threw a frightening light on the nature of the rule of the British East India Company in Bengal which, Johnstone claimed, might produce the

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“same effects that followed the annexation of the rich orders of St. Jago, Calatrava, and Alcantara, to the crown of Spain.”41 Ferguson himself was well aware of the intimate connections between the commercial and imperial ambitions of modern Eu ropean states. “Some modern nations,” he declared, “proceed to dominion and enlargement on the maxims of commerce; and while they only intend to accumulate riches at home, continue to gain an imperial ascendant abroad.”42 Ferguson’s thinking on these topics resembled that of a number of contemporaries who were exploring the instabilities unleashed by the pursuit of commercial empire by European states. One of the most significant inquiries along these lines was developed by the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, in works such as his Observations on the Romans (1751) or his Phocion’s Conversations (1763). Mably argued that Europe’s large trading states had come to resemble ancient Carthage in their unhealthy pursuit of commercial superiority and, as he argued in Phocion’s Conversations, the history of Carthage could indeed be seen as “horoscope” of Europe’s future. “All the powers of Europe are now become commercial,” Mably wrote, “and this defect in their politics being general, none of them feel the inconveniencies of it, with regard to their enemies: they fight on equal terms; but should a republic be formed, on the Roman system, what would become of such commercial states?”43 As he had argued in his Observations on the Romans, the elaborate diplomatic and commercial ties between European nations would not be able to prevent a sufficiently determined aggressor from undermining Europe’s liberty: At present, should one of the powers of Europe possess superior forces to any other par tic u lar state, even surpass them all in the knowledge of military discipline and experience in war; suppose this power to be always guided by the same principles, to be neither dazzled by prosperity nor dejected by adversity, to possess such fi rmness as never to give over its enterprizes, and to be so intrepid as even to prefer utter ruin to an inglorious peace; were there such a power in being, we should soon see these leagues, confederacies, and alliances vanish, whereby the independence of each state is maintained. In regard to our modern policy, one thing deserves to be particularly attended to, and that is, that it is entirely the work of two passions. One of these is the jealous fear, occasioned by some ambitious people; the other is the hope of being able to resist them, as not having within themselves all the qualities or resources necessary to raise them to universal empire. Should the wisdom, policy, and courage of any state ex-

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tinguish this hope, fear would be the only passion remaining, and then Europe would soon lose its liberty.44

A detailed investigation into the nature of European commercial rivalry was set out in the abbé Raynal’s famous Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Deux Indes, the most significant near-contemporary investigation into the relationship between commerce, war, and the future of Eu ropean states. The Histoire, a collaborative work which appeared in a series of revised editions between 1770 and 1783, has long been recognized as an original contribution to Enlightenment inquiries into the progress of society and offers an interesting set of contrasts with Ferguson’s own history of civilization. Raynal, like Ferguson, was deeply critical of the distortions modern economic institutions were imposing on Europe’s states, and he directly attacked both public debts and monopoly companies for their tendency to promote external aggrandizement. Along with Denis Diderot, his main collaborator, he also emphasized the vulnerability of modern states to political and economic decline, and painted an equally frightening picture of the tendency toward militarism and despotism within Europe itself. Both Ferguson’s Essay and Raynal’s Histoire should therefore be recognized as expressing overlapping analyses of the predicaments of empire, militarism, and political despotism in the crucial period between the Seven Years War and the end of the American Revolution. But despite these similarities, Raynal’s evaluation of commercial society was far more positive than that of Ferguson. Commerce, Raynal argued, had the capacity to unite the world in peaceful reciprocity. But the legacies of European great power rivalry had contaminated commercial relations. The task for Europe as a whole was to liberalize its trade and to dismantle the historically generated institutions of economic protectionism in order to favor the cause of peace. Raynal’s analysis rested upon a conjectural history of commerce and its meteoric rise as the “new principle of the moral world.” Echoing the histories of commerce sketched in Scotland by Smith and Robertson, Raynal explained that commerce had undermined Gothic institutions and had destroyed the feudal nobilities that dominated Europe after the fall of Rome. Montesquieu’s suggestion that the abolition of slavery in Europe was due to Christianity was, therefore, wide of the mark; it was rather “that sound policy, which commerce always introduces, and not through the spirit of the Christian religion, that kings were induced to

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bestow freedom on the slaves of their vassals.”45 With the progress of commercial arts, the morals and politics of Europe had been utterly transformed. Mankind’s taste for conveniences gave rise to the love of labor among modern populations, and— although sedentary labor was occasionally injurious to health— it was “better that the human race should be enervated under the roofs of workshops, than inured to hardships under tents; because war destroys, while commerce, on the contrary, gives new life to everything.” Commercial arts also contributed to a “more equitable repartition of property,” and thus “prevented that excessive inequal ity among men, the unhappy consequence of oppression, tyranny, and lethargic state of a whole people.” These changes had repercussions at the political and international level. It was no longer possible for a poor but hardy nation to defeat a wealthy one. Poverty, Raynal pointed out, was “no longer the bulwark of liberty.” This sympathetic presentation of the moral and political consequences of Europe’s commercial development was matched with a positive theoretical account of commercial sociability. Commerce favored the “principles of social intercourse among men,” which Raynal described as the “inclination and liberty of procuring enjoyments.”46 The enjoyment of luxury products was not incompatible with the best qualities of human nature. More broadly still, nature had a “plan of universal benevolence,” which would make every state “opulent, powerful and happy” from its commercial interactions with all the others. The tragedy and failure of the modern world was that it had become almost impossible to unlock the benign potential of commercial sociability. At the heart of the problem was what Raynal called “jealousy of power” and, underlying this, the division of the world into opposed national communities. Raynal consistently attacked the national “animosities,” “jealousies,” “antipathies,” and “hatreds” which he saw as characterizing European politics since the Renaissance. These had prompted a shift from “true” to “false” commerce. Systemic structural distortions had become deeply embedded in the global economic order. Some states, like China and Japan, had followed in the footsteps of ancient Egypt and Sparta by retreating from international commerce altogether; their “ambition hath led them to insulate themselves; and this solitary situation hath made them desirous of an exclusive prosperity.”47 The system of tariffs, trading companies, and monopolies that had grown

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up over the past two centuries was, in a weaker sense, a parallel expression of how far national rivalries had distorted the natural tendency of commerce to promote harmony among nations. From this it was a short step toward the ambition for “commercial empire” and the deployment of states’ military and naval power to secure a universal monopoly of commerce. This, in Raynal’s view, was precisely what the Dutch had aimed at in the seventeenth century, and it was clearly what England had achieved by the early 1760s. Raynal recounted in detail both the human and political costs of national animosity. He stressed the barbarism of European expansion, the destruction of native peoples, and the inexplicable cruelty that often characterized relations between colonial powers (an example was the English massacre of pacific French colonists of the “neutral” territory of Acadia). He underlined the serious imbalances that commercial and colonial rivalry imposed upon domestic economies, tracing the decline of agriculture, industry, and population in Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, and France. But he reserved par tic ular criticism for the system of commercial monopoly established by England during the eighteenth century. Although he hinted that England may have established a genuinely “new system,” he more strongly emphasized its similarities to a line of earlier empires.48 Noting the transformation of the British East India Company from a “commercial society” to a “territorial power” (here he echoed the path-breaking “Enquiry into the State of Bengal” by Alexander Dow, the East India Company employee, whose History of Hindostan had appeared in 1765), Raynal argued that English imperial ambitions, coupled with French short-sightedness, now threatened to reduce the planet to a scene of perpetual instability and warfare.49 Ultimately, Britain would share the same fate as Carthage, Rome, Portugal, and Spain. Raynal and Diderot rejected martial republicanism on the ancient model as a viable antidote to these developments. Rome, they argued, had little in common with modern states and, following Thomas Hobbes, they described its main features as those of war, militarism, and expansion. Echoing Montesquieu, Raynal argued that a martial nation on the Roman model would inevitably collapse in the “despotism of a military government.”50 Instead, Raynal put his faith in reform of Eu rope’s trading system, seeking to liberalize commercial relations

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between states, and disconnecting commerce as far as possible from the residues of the “jealousy of power.” While part of his strategy was focused on the rebalancing and revival of the French economy through establishing an unrestricted freedom of trade in agricultural products, the broader aim was to remove the various protectionist barriers between nations. As Raynal put it, the fi rst Eu ropean nation which dismantled the institutions of protectionism would immediately gain a massive advantage over its rivals (“the ships, the productions, the commodities, and the merchants of all countries, will crowd into their ports”), and these advantages would inspire neighboring nations to follow suit.51 This optimistic vision, however, was offset by a prominent strain of melancholy running through the work. As Raynal wrote in book 6, the “history of the world is become insipid and trifl ing,” and although the world was no longer subject to the revolutions of antiquity, the violence and tumults of an earlier age had been succeeded by a “regular and constant system of oppression.” Enlightenment had not delivered happiness. The concluding book of the Histoire, which was largely written by Diderot, provided a general interpretation of the means by which Europe had arrived at the “state of civilization in which it now exists.” What he offered, however, was less a paean to modern civilization than a critical appraisal of the causes promoting military government, or empire, both within and outside Europe. Raynal, in his earlier book on the Dutch stadtholderate, had written about the causes transforming a free commercial republic into something resembling a military empire.52 Diderot tracked a similar process on a much larger canvas in book 19 of the Histoire. According to him, a “law of nature” required that “all societies gravitate towards despotism and dissolution, that empires should arise, and be annihilated.”53 He described Europe’s future as characterized by the gradual encroachment of military power on civil institutions. From Diderot’s perspective, the dynamics of commercial and colonial competition had to be understood as linked aspects of a single malign system of national animosity that had already severely distorted the social and political organization of Europe. Modern wars, he claimed, “tended not to make states more extensive,” but they did have the effect of substituting military government in place of the “mild and gentle influence of laws and morality.”

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The barbarous ages are spoken of with horror; and yet war was then only a period of violence and of commotions, but at present it is almost a natural state. Most governments are either military, or become so; even the improvement of our discipline is a proof of it. The security we enjoy in our fields, the tranquillity that prevails in our cities, whether troops are passing through, or are quartered in them; the police which reigns around the camps, and in garrisoned towns, proclaim indeed that arms are under some kind of controul, but at the same time indicate that everything is subject to their power.54

Ferguson’s own reconstruction of the imperial proclivities of modern commercial states culminated in a similar prognosis of European military government. But the intermediate steps in his argument were different. His own analysis began with a critique of the spirit of conquest. The essence of this critique was that imperial states stifled the patriotic activity generated by the “rivalship of separate communities” and hence narrowed the scope for the exercise of military and political virtue. It followed that clusters of independent, mutually competitive states— as existed in ancient Greece and eighteenth-century Europe—were preferable to large territorial empires. “The citizen has no interest in the annexation of kingdoms; he must find his importance diminished, as the state is enlarged: but ambitious men, under the enlargement of territory, find a more plentiful harvest of power, and of wealth, while government itself is an easier task.” Moreover, large empires necessitated a degree of political centralization that was incompatible with the maintenance of liberty. For this reason, as Ferguson emphasized particularly strongly in his Lectures, the principle of cohesion in empires was force.55 Both conqueror and conquered ultimately met the same fate: “Hence the ruinous progress of empire; and hence free nations, under the shew of acquiring dominion, suffer themselves, in the end, to be yoked with the slaves they had conquered.”56 Ferguson’s critique of large territorial empires looked back to a significant Scottish tradition of reflection on the related issues of conquest, universal monarchy, and the balance of power. The most significant texts in this tradition were by Fletcher, Hutcheson, William Grant (the translator of François Fénelon’s essay on the balance of power), Hume, Lord Kames, and Robertson.57 Both Fletcher and Hutcheson had expressed hostility to “enormous monarchies” and a corresponding

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preference for a Europe made up of smaller, more balanced, and potentially less aggressive political units. Hutcheson, in his A System of Moral Philosophy, preceded Ferguson in claiming that large states necessarily restricted the exercise of talent and virtue to a minority. The greater the multitudes are which thus united into one state, the numbers of states into which mankind are cantoned must be so much the fewer, and consequently a smaller number of mankind can arise to eminence, or have opportunities of exerting their abilities and political virtues, or of improving them for the benefit of mankind. In some vast states consisting of many millions, there is but a small number who are admitted to the supreme councils or have any considerable share in the administration. The rest are either wholly excluded, or have no other share than blindly obeying the orders of their superiors. If the same multitude had been divided into many smaller states, there had been room for many men of finer genius and capacity, to exert their abilities, and improve them by exercise in the service of mankind; whether by forming men to virtue, cultivating in them all social dispositions, and training them in publick offices civil or military; or improving the ingenious arts. Accordingly we find that all the virtues and ingenious arts flourished more in the little states of Greece than in any of the great empires.58

It is worth considering in more detail the arguments put forward by Fletcher in his “Account of a Conversation,” the immediate purpose of which was to demonstrate that “the only just and rational kind of union” between England, Scotland, and Ireland would be an equal federation.59 Fletcher’s position was shaped by his assessment of the damage caused by William III’s wars of the 1690s, by his rejection of the “incorporating” union that would bind England and Scotland in 1707, and by his broader anxieties at the progress of universal monarchy in Europe. The most striking aspect of Fletcher’s argument in this pamphlet was his hostility to the degree of political centralization engendered by empires. He pointed to the disastrous imbalances in wealth and power produced by large cities like ancient Rome or modern London (he compared the latter to “the head of a ricketty child”). He noted that Rome’s provinces “might have lived more happily under another kind of regulation” and that “all great governments, whether republicks or monarchies, not only disturb the world in their rise and fall; but by bringing together such numbers of men and im mense riches into one city, inevitably corrupt all good manners, and make them uncapable of order and discipline.” These imbalances, furthermore, made states militarily vul-

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nerable (a conquest of London, he argued, would easily secure to any foreign conqueror the entire realm). Fletcher also developed an important critique of the tightening relationship between economic interests and military aggression in the modern world. He pointed to the tendency, under modern conditions, for localized wars to become “general” or “universal” wars. With these sources of instability in mind, he argued for a complete institutional redesign of modern states, claiming that “all such governments as are of a sufficient force to defend themselves should be rendered either uncapable or unfit to make conquests.” The key institutional components of this program were to be local patriotic militias and, more radically, the decentralization of all European states into federal leagues made up of smaller “governments” or “sovereignties.”60 By strengthening the defensive capacity of states while simultaneously disabling them from launching aggressive wars, these measures would ultimately link the interests of individual states with those of the international community. There was some continuity between Fletcher’s and Ferguson’s critical analyses of conquest. Crucially, Ferguson preserved Fletcher’s core message about the overriding value of national security in an aggressive and unpredictable world. He also repeated Fletcher’s warnings against the Machiavellian ideal of republics for expansion and against the degree of political centralization that developed under empires. Although Ferguson went further than Fletcher in conceding the occasional necessity for preemptive strikes against aggressive neighbors, he was just as concerned as Fletcher had been to distinguish defensive wars of “preservation or safety” from expansionist wars of “acquisition.” Ferguson was often quite critical of Britain’s imperious aggressiveness.61 Moreover, Ferguson followed Fletcher’s identification of trading relations as a primary threat to international stability. Echoing Fletcher’s concern with the tendency of wars to spread outward, ultimately involving more and more states in conditions of global trade, Ferguson developed a critical appraisal of wars of “traffic” as those most likely to reignite the spirit of conquest. Despite these similarities, Ferguson differed from Fletcher in fully accepting the idea of an incorporating union between the nations of Britain. This difference rested on a realistic assessment of the changing nature of European power politics. In the Essay Ferguson had argued that the incorporating union of 1707 was a necessary response to the

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consolidation of Europe’s large monarchies.62 He used precisely the same argument in 1779–1780 in several unpublished interventions, set out in private correspondence, in debates about the future of AngloIrish politics and trade. Writing at the height of the American War, and two years before Ireland’s achievement of legislative independence in 1782, Ferguson justified his preference for a “complete union” between England and Ireland on the overriding claim of military security. As he wrote to John Macpherson in 1779, a full union would almost double the “compacted Strength of these Kingdoms.” He was at his most explicit about this in a long letter of January 1780 to the British statesman William Eden, in which he assessed Eden’s 1779 Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle. Although in this letter he acknowledged his theoretical sympathy for the Fletcherian ideal of “small states” and “separate legislatures,” he immediately went on to claim that the realities of AngloFrench rivalry now made an Anglo-Irish union necessary for Britain’s national security.63 This preference represents a clear shift from Fletcher’s vision of a decentralized Europe based on small republican federations toward a vision of Europe composed of medium-sized national states existing in a balance of power. But it also evinces a degree of skepticism about Fletcher’s ideal of purely defensive states and about fully separating the balance between defense and conquest. As Ferguson noted, any state prepared to defend itself was “in hazard” of making conquests. These aspects of Ferguson’s inquiry followed the moral psychology that he had sketched out in part 1 of the Essay. Echoing the distinction he had drawn there between the “principles of war and dissension” (from which sprang the noble “rivalship” of nations) and the “unhappy and detestable passions” (under the influence of which mankind possessed an “aspect more terrible and odious, or more vile and contemptible, than that of any animal which inherits the earth”), Ferguson went on to separate wars of genuine “national animosity” from those of “traffic” and “commerce.” His polemical purpose in this respect was to warn that the pursuit of commercial hegemony would prove every bit as misguided and impermanent as had the territorial conquests of the past. By contrast, wars of genuine patriotism, originating either in the demands of national defense or, very occasionally, in the assessment that a neighboring state should be disarmed, retained considerable value for the

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cohesion and liberty of the political community. Ferguson was most explicit about the need to distinguish wars of traffic from wars of defense in his Principles. Wealth, he wrote there, could be taken as a symptom of “national felicity” when it was accompanied by industry, frugality, skill, security, and justice. But, he went on, if we suppose wealth to come from any other source than these; or, to come as it does to conquering nations, by rapine, and to the courts and capitals of great empires, by the oppression of provinces; it is not, in respect to its source, or in respect to the effects it is likely to produce, either symptomatic, or productive of any national good whatever.64

There were two important passages in the Essay where Ferguson focused upon the relationship between commerce, war, and empire. One of the most interesting of these described an imaginary meeting between a barbarian American chieftain (later described as a “simple warrior”) and the British governor of Jamaica who, in Ferguson’s conjectured scenario, is preparing for war against the Spanish. At one level, this episode simply provided Ferguson with the opportunity to represent the mutual incomprehension generated by an encounter of “barbarism” and “civility.” From this perspective, the immediate purpose of the passage was to cast the distinction that had grown up between merchant and warrior in modern Eu rope in a negative light, contrasting it with the values of a more primitive culture in which military ser vice remained the responsibility of the entire (male) community. Thus the “American” comments: “ ‘When I go to war, I leave nobody at home but the women.’ ” But the passage concluded with an interesting twist. While registering the surprise of the “simple warrior” at the fact that merchants and others failed to play any significant role in the armed confl icts between modern European powers, Ferguson went on to underline the extent to which mercantile interests, in eighteenth-century Europe, now generated war. Merchants themselves, in other words, were far from exhibiting the “neutrality” in international politics that the simple warrior had wrongly assumed: It should seem that this simple warrior considered merchants as a kind of neutral persons, who took no part in the quarrels of their country; and that he did not know how much war itself may be made a subject of traffic; what mighty armies may be put in motion from behind the

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A second example of Ferguson’s critique of mercantile jealousy can be found in the section of the Essay entitled “Of National Waste.” This section, which also contained a brief discussion of the dangers unleashed by public credit, focused upon the history of the Dutch Republic as the major modern example of the dangers of commercial empire. According to Ferguson, the prodigious rise of the Dutch Republic to the status of a great power had been a consequence of the patriotic energies unleashed by the experience of war and revolution. Nevertheless, although the Dutch case showed what could be achieved by a sufficiently determined political community, combining industriousness with the patriotism and military virtues of the ancients, the lamentable condition of the Dutch by the middle of the century showed how misguided the republic’s quest for economic hegemony was: We are told of a nation, who during a certain period, rivalled the glories of the ancient world, threw off the dominion of a master armed against them with the powers of a great kingdom, broke the yoke with which they had been oppressed, and almost within the course of a century, raised, by their industry and national vigour, a new and formidable power, which struck the former potentates of Eu rope with awe and suspense, and turned the badges of poverty with which they set out, into the ensigns of war and dominion. This end was attained by the great efforts of a spirit awakened by oppression, and by a rapid anticipation of future revenue. But this illustrious state is supposed, not only in the language of a former section, to have preoccupied the business; they have sequestered the inheritance of many ages to come.66

Here the key issue was the “extremely dangerous” character of public credit and the relevance of the Dutch case for Britain’s stability. As Ferguson would later observe, public credit tended to inject into the public realm the “vicissitudes of a gaming table, turning the industry and skill of those involved into instruments of mutual destruction.”67 It was for this reason that public debts had to be “reckoned among the causes of national ruin.”68 Ferguson’s discussion of commerce and conquest concluded with a powerful image of the imperial proclivities of modern European

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states. Not unlike Diderot’s near-contemporary discussion of the transformation of European states into military governments, this section highlighted the fragility of the state system within a global system of competitive commerce: In Eu rope, where mercenary and disciplined armies are every where formed, and ready to traverse the earth, where, like a flood pent up by slender banks, they are only restrained by political forms, or a temporary balance of power; if the sluices should break, what inundations may we not expect to behold? Effeminate kingdoms and empires are spread from the sea of Corea to the Atlantic Ocean. Every state, by the defeat of its troops, may be turned into a province; every army opposed in the field today may be hired tomorrow; and every victory gained, may give the accession of a new military force to the victor. The Romans, with inferior arts of communication both by sea and land, maintained their dominion in a considerable part of Eu rope, Asia, and Africa, over fierce and intractable nations: What may not the fleets and armies of Eu rope, with the access they have by commerce to every part of the world, and the facility of their conveyance, effect, if that ruinous maxim should prevail, That the grandeur of a nation is to be estimated from the extent of its territory; or, That the interest of any par tic u lar people consists in reducing their neighbours to servitude?69

The globalization of international commerce, by uniting the world ever more closely as an economic and physical entity, had dangerously raised the stakes in the ancient quest for territorial empire. The incessant expansion of Europe’s military establishments had, simultaneously, exposed the weaknesses of the balance of power, and had increased the prospect that continental Europe might soon become subject to the dominion of a single military state. Here Ferguson brought the different aspects of his analysis together, invoking simultaneously both earlier anxieties at the prospects of “universal monarchy” in continental Europe and the more novel patterns of empire made possible by the expansion of global commerce. All this had crucial implications for British policy. The prospect of a new military imperium emerging on the European continent not only would have spelled the end for Europe’s existing monarchies and republics, but would also have severely threatened Britain’s existence as an independent state, since the highly centralized, despotic regime he envisaged emerging in Eu rope would have been able to

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command far greater military and economic resources than any of the monarchies that currently made up the state system. This partly explains why Ferguson continued to insist so emphatically upon Britain’s vulnerability to foreign invasion, even after the victories of the Seven Years War.70

5

Q

Britain’s Future in a Roman Mirror

O V ER fi fteen years stood between the publication of the Essay on the History of Civil Society and that of the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, the fi rst edition of which appeared early in 1783.1 The project for a history of the republic had, however, occupied Adam Ferguson for much of the intervening period. He probably began work on the book in 1769 or 1770, which suggests that the History was initially conceived as a continuation of questions that had been left unresolved by the Essay.2 One of the purposes of the work was certainly to develop the history of human nature that Ferguson had fi rst adumbrated in 1767. As he wrote to Edward Gibbon while working on the History, “I comfort myself that as my trade is the study of human Nature I could not fi x on a more interesting Corner of it than the end of the Roman Republic.”3 Moreover, the republic exhibited “what may be thought the utmost range of the human powers,” and “to know it well, is to know mankind.”4 At the same time, Ferguson clearly intended that the History might impart moral and political lessons to its readers. This second aim fitted with the didactic and pedagogic purposes that were traditionally and conventionally associated with the writing of history in the Scottish universities, and with Ferguson’s own view of the moral importance of history. In the “Advertisement” to the revised edition, he commented that historical knowledge ought to aid its students to “infer, as they may, from the past, what in like circumstances, and from actors of a similar cast, they should lay their account with in human life.” At this point too, he invoked standards of impartiality, noting that he would avoid explicit moral judgment, or “praise and blame.” Impartiality was

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designed to amplify history’s moral and political utility, thus “furnishing those who are engaged in transactions any way similar, with models by which they may profit, and from which they may form sound principles of conduct, derived from experience, and confi rmed by examples of the highest authority.”5 The History was a crucial component of Ferguson’s inquiry into Europe’s political prospects. A broad interpretation of Rome’s transformation from a mixed republic to an unfree imperial state, the book was essentially an elaborate analysis, in historiographical guise, of the causes that in Ferguson’s view were undermining the British constitution and laying the foundations for a new kind of centralized, militaristic, and despotic regime. From this perspective, the History was certainly the most sophisticated intellectual product of the Scottish Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the prospect of instability and revolution in the British state, and— as I argue more fully below—was in some respects a product of the acute sense of crisis generated among British writers by the American Revolution. The book can therefore be described as a study of ancient revolution and its applicability to the British case (the theme of revolution in the ancient and modern world fitted with Ferguson’s own description of the book as a study of Rome’s “complete Revolution in a confessed and hereditary Monarchy”).6 More broadly, the History can serve as a starting point for considering a number of wider themes in late eighteenth-century debates about the future of modern governments. Although it was adapted primarily to an understanding of the British case, a contextual understanding of the History serves to open up contemporary discussions about the future of Europe’s large territorial monarchies in the two decades before the French Revolution. While the History was in some sense a recognizably republican work, it was by no means a simple or conventional expression of civic humanist anxieties about luxury and inequal ity. Although Ferguson did occasionally condemn the luxury of Rome’s senatorial aristocracy, his commitment to Montesquieu’s more comparative science of politics meant that luxury was merely incidental to his account of the republic’s demise. Instead, this chapter identifies two more prominent themes in Ferguson’s account. The fi rst of these was a reworking of the critique of republican expansion set out in Montesquieu’s Considerations. In developing this theme, Ferguson connected Montesquieu’s attack on Rome’s republican empire to a broader account of the chasm that opened up

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between civil authority and military power. The second theme centered on the dangers of republican democracy as a form of government for large and prosperous states. As Ferguson presented it, the political origins of the republic’s demise lay in the disastrous series of attempts, initiated by Tiberius Gracchus, to establish a more democratic and more egalitarian system of republican government in conditions of extensive empire. This meant that the establishment of the Roman empire was the culmination, rather than the betrayal, of a long-term tendency in the republic’s history toward democracy, equality, and “popular government.” Seen from this perspective, the History was a study of the democratic origins of imperial rule. The result was a depiction of Britain’s future as a postrepublican empire or unfree republic in which the constitution served merely to disguise the state’s despotic character.

The Roman Constitution in British Political Discourse Ferguson’s History stood toward the end of a long tradition of eighteenthcentury analysis of the British constitution through the prism of ancient Rome.7 The Rome-Britain analogy was central to discussions of the mixed system of government established in 1688–1689, and throughout the eighteenth century the history of Rome’s shift from libertas to imperium became the main interpretative model for understanding Britain’s prospects as a free state. In particular, Rome’s history came to represent and illuminate the perceived shift from civilian to military government which a number of thinkers writing in the first half of the eighteenth century believed to be the primary threat to modern Britain. As Thomas Gordon wrote in a contribution to Cato’s Letters, Britain’s reliance on standing armies was promoting a return to Roman-style “military government,” which he believed would be the fate of any state “where the army is the strongest power in the country.”8 One of the most contentious issues in the earlier eighteenth-century debate concerned the correct interpretation of a famous sentence from Livy—ex auctoritate patrum ac populi iussu (“by the authority of the fathers and the command of the people”).9 This passage had an intricate history in early modern political thought, and had a par tic ular relevance for analyses of the mixed, or compound, structure of the English constitution. For James Harrington, writing in Oceana (1656), the phrase could be taken as a model for the division of legislative power in a mixed

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commonwealth or republic. Algernon Sidney invoked the phrase jussus populi in order to highlight the elective, or at least popular, basis of monarchy and to condemn Tarquin the Bold, who took it upon himself to rule sine jussu populi.10 Sir William Temple, in his 1671 “Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government,” cited the distinction in the course of warning against the confusion between popular command and popular access to magistracies. Rome’s decline began, Temple suggested, when the people usurped the executive magistracies. This distinction is plain in the forms of the old Roman State, where laws were made, and resolutions taken, authoritate senatus, and jussu populi. The senate were authors of all counsels in the State; and what was by them consulted and agreed, was proposed to the people, by whom it was enacted, or commanded; because in them was the power to make it be obeyed. But the great opinion which the people had at fi rst of the persons of the Senators, and afterwards of their families (which were called Patricians) gained easy assent to what was thus proposed, the authority of the persons adding great weight to the reason of the things. And this went so far, that though the choice of all magistrates was wholly in the people, yet, for a long course of years, they chose none but Patricians into the great offices of State, either civil or military. But when the people began to lose the general opinion they had of the Patricians, or at least so far as to believe some among themselves were as able and fit, as these, to advise the State, and lead their armies, they then pretended to share with the Senate in the magistracy, and bring in Plebeians to the offices of chiefest power and dignity. And hereupon began those seditions which so long distempered, and at length ruined, that state.11

These controversies about the relationship between power and authority in the Roman constitution entered eighteenth-century discourse in the form of a focused debate about the origins and authority of the Roman senate. A veil for the discussion of more substantive issues about power and authority in Hanoverian Britain, this topic generated significant controversy among British historians and publicists between the 1720s and 1750s, and constitutes an important context for Ferguson’s own analysis of the Roman constitution. The initial impetus for the debate came from a query that the English Whig statesman, the fi rst earl of Stanhope, had addressed to the abbé Vertot during the debates over the Peerage Bill of 1719. In his reply to Stanhope, Vertot made a case for the royal, and later consular, nomination of senators from the body of Roman patricians, and denied that the Roman people had any power to

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create senators.12 Vertot’s brief text sparked a fierce controversy among historians and publicists in the subsequent three decades. The major alternatives are exemplified in the polite but critical scholarly exchange that took place in the 1730s between Conyers Middleton, the historian and clergyman, and Lord Hervey, a key ally of Horace Walpole and a critic of Lord Bolingbroke’s Country opposition.13 Middleton’s purpose was to demonstrate that senatorial authority, like that of the first kings of Rome, rested ultimately upon the consent of the Roman people. Since election to public magistracy automatically qualified individuals for senatorial office, and since the great annual magistracies were elected “promiscuously and indifferently from the whole body of the citizens,” the Roman constitution could be described as popular and elective “from one end to the other.”14 Middleton’s claims about the popular basis of legislative authority were briskly countered by Hervey, who asserted the right of Rome’s kings, and later its censors and consuls, to create or nominate senators. Citing both Justus Lipsius’s and Carlo Signonio’s much earlier studies of the Roman constitution, Hervey argued that it was not until late in the republic’s history that the Roman people had any role in the election of senators. The enormous power that was left over to the executive officers of the state as a result of the absence of popular “checks” was not, however, incompatible with freedom: The Romans were not so ignorant of the nature of Government, as not to know, that the most absolute government, provided it were well administered, would always be the most beneficial government to any society, but more especially to a military state, and a nation desirous to extend its bounds and enlarge its dominions. Their maxim therefore seems to have been, after the expulsion of the Kings, not to enervate the sovereign power in any par tic u lar branch, but as the State increased, and its sway grew more extensive, to divide the branches, and rather to provide against the abuse of power, than to lessen its force. And for this reason, they did not tie up the hands, into which they put the executive power of their Government, but made their policy consist in often changing the hands, to which it was consigned.15

Several further writers joined the debate in the 1740s and 1750s. In 1743, the formidable classical scholar Edward Spelman published A Fragment out of the Sixth Book of Polybius, to which was appended a “Dissertation upon the Constitution of the Roman Senate.” Spelman offered a more democratic and popular interpretation of senatorial authority, claiming

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that there existed no property qualification for election to the senate and that the Roman people collectively determined all offices and honors in the Roman state. This fitted with his demand for annual parliaments, his antipathy to the unequal land tax, and his defi nition of monarchy as “the gift of a willing people.”16 Middleton elaborated his own interpretation in his Treatise on the Roman Senate of 1747, which included a summary of his letters to Hervey but also incorporated new material on the power and jurisdiction of the senate. Although in this work Middleton maintained his position on the democratic origins of the senate, he did now insist upon a property qualification for senatorial office.17 A fourth contribution to the debate, entitled An Essay on the Roman Senate, was published in 1750 by Thomas Chapman, the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Although Chapman’s argument overlapped with that of Middleton in many respects, he rejected Middleton’s emphasis on property as a qualification for office. Instead, like Spelman, Chapman claimed that a senatorial career was open to anybody who had completed the requisite periods in civil magistracy and military ser vice.18 All the principal contributions to this debate were reviewed in a work of Observations published in 1758 by Nathaniel Hooke, a man of well-known Jacobite sympathies and the author of a massive, four-volume history of the Roman republic published between 1738 and 1770.19 Hooke, whom Spelman later denounced as a man with a “passion for the despotic form of government,” sought to demolish every aspect of the theses propounded by Vertot, Middleton, and Chapman (although, as he admitted, he found much to admire in Hervey).20 Hooke’s interpretation of Rome’s early constitution rested on a distinctively Jacobite theory of virtuous kingship, which led him to emphasize the absolute power of Rome’s first six kings, the absence of any genuine distinction between plebeian and patrician under the regal government, and the salutary effects of Rome’s agrarian laws.21 Hooke’s royalism, and his antipathy toward Rome’s patricians, set his work apart from the mainstream of eighteenth-century Roman histories. Chapman and Middleton, he argued, had simply offered a species of “monumental” historiography, by which he meant that they had been blinded by their Whiggish preference for a mixed form of government and their childish belief in an “original constitution.” As Hooke sneered, the “first gang of Roman banditti do not seem to have been qualified for building systems of any sort.”22

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The overriding effect of Hooke’s critique was to close off the possibility that an elective, but virtuous, patriciate might hold the balance between Crown and people within a mixed constitution. Instead, the power of an absolute monarch held out greater hope for maintaining the liberties and privileges of the people. According to Hooke, Rome’s patrician order was not based on virtue or on noble descent, but was a straightforward creation of the kings. Both Vertot and Middleton had therefore severely distorted the meaning of the Livian passage ab regibus lecti, aut, post reges exactos, jussu populi (“having been chosen either by the kings, or, after their expulsion, by the decree of the people”).23 Neither popular command ( jussus populi) nor senatorial authority (auctoritas senatum or auctoritas patrum) were necessary to give validity to the laws made by Rome’s kings. Still, the kings themselves often acted selflessly for the public good. As Hooke claimed, “in all states, the magistrates, even the most absolute of kings, are, in some sense, ministers of the people; and in all states there must be a power of rectifying gross abuses of that authority with which magistrates are legally invested.” Interestingly, Hooke found support for these claims in a passage from David Hume’s History of Great Britain, in which Hume had suggested that “no contradiction” existed between sixteenth-century conceptions of the English monarchy as “absolute” and the “many privileges” that rested with the people.24 The second part of Hooke’s argument concerned the correct designation of the republican constitution, and the real nature of the distinction of parties that arose in the republic. According to Hooke, since there existed no real distinction between plebeian and patrician under the regal government, the aristocratic republic that emerged immediately after the expulsion of the Tarquins was a clear and unambiguous case of oligarchic usurpation. This argument had the effect of reducing the authority of the senatorial patriciate to a cynical ability to use their wealth to dominate the poorer members of the republic. The “dominion of the senate” during this period thus had no relevance for understanding the form of Rome’s constitution. An aristocracy, within a few years after the expulsion of the kings, did, in fact and reality, taken place, but this, not by the explicit and deliberate choice of the people; nor was the form of the Government aristocratical. The form was manifestly democratical, as the supreme power was by law vested in the general assemblies of the people; in which the assemblies of the nobles had not the majority of voices.25

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Hooke went on to claim that the meaning of the relationship between potestas and auctoritas had been grossly distorted by his opponents and predecessors. Here he cited a passage from a work of eighteenth-century jurisprudence entitled Elements of Civil Law, fi rst published in 1755, by a Cambridge-based lawyer named John Taylor: For the Roman Constitution, in the great article of Legislation, may not improperly be compared to the Condition of Guardian and Minor in the Roman Law; where the Property, the Free-hold, the Dominium, was in the Minor, but no Act of his could be good, unless confi rmed by the Authority of the Guardian. Thus the Imperium or Majestas was properly in the People (looking upon this System of Government as purely Democratical) yet the Auctoritas was as properly in the Senate.26

Hooke deployed this passage to reduce the senate to a merely confirmatory role, claiming that the power (potestas) of the people, after the regal period, was “legally and constitutionally” superior to the authority (auctoritas) of the senate. Taylor’s guardianship analogy, Hooke argued, showed that the senate possessed neither “power” nor “sovereignty” by right. Senatorial auctoritas did not indicate “Power or Command,” but merely the idea of “Ratification, the Concurrence of those, whose Consent is necessary to make the Acts of others good in Law.” All this was in keeping with his insistence that the republic was truly a “democratical” state.27

Ferguson’s Roman Constitution Ferguson outlined his own interpretation of the republican constitution in the fi rst three chapters of the History. Like Middleton and Chapman, he argued that Rome was originally a mixed state with a tripartite division of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, and that it exhibited a primitive division of social ranks. In both these respects, his account was much closer to standard Whig conceptions of the republic than it was to Hooke’s description of Rome as a democratic monarchy. Nevertheless, Ferguson provided a broader and more philosophical perspective on the Roman constitution than most of his British predecessors. Dismissing the antiquarian quest for an “original constitution,” he maintained that Rome’s institutions had evolved gradually, and that the Romans were at fi rst no different from other barbarian

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peoples.28 What he did offer, almost from the work’s opening pages, was a positive evaluation of Rome’s linked system of civil and military offices and an endorsement of the leadership and authority of the senate. Although some contemporary critics saw this idealized picture of the senate as an expression of narrowly aristocratic sympathies, the History by no means legitimized the rule of a propertied or hereditary elite.29 Rather, as Ferguson presented it, the key to the success of the Roman constitution lay in its creation of a civil and military elite of merit and ser vice, which served to balance the republic’s tendency toward popular government while neutralizing the influence of wealth and property. As he emphasized in his lectures of the 1770s and 1780s, “the State was an admirable School of Men in whose Hands no State can miscarry or suffer.”30 The fi rst part of this analysis was laid down in the work’s fi rst three chapters. Citing the famous passage from Tacitus’s Germania that Montesquieu had placed at the center of his discussion of the English constitution—De minoribus rebus principes consultant; de majoribus omnes— Ferguson noted the early existence of a division of deliberative powers between “chiefs” and “people,” and “hence probably the existence of a Senate, and of the comitia, or popular assemblies, institutions of so early a date as to be ascribed to the fi rst of their kings.” He also pointed to the existence of a genuine social hierarchy in the regal period, noting that “to be Noble and to be of the Senate were probably synonymous terms.” Yet the problematic effects of the division between democratic and aristocratic forces revealed themselves early on. Tensions between the comitia curiata and comitia centuriata “went to the foundation of the constitution, and implied a doubt whether the state should incline with the preponderance of numbers, or of property.” The “revolution” that occurred with the expulsion of the kings did very little to remedy this state of affairs, ushering in a narrow, hereditary aristocracy that was incompatible with a free state (this ran parallel to JeanJacques Rousseau’s description of “hereditary aristocracy” as the “worst of all legitimate administrations” in the Social Contract). The aggressiveness of the patricians in exercising their newly acquired power against the plebeians, who were also their social and economic dependents, produced a second revolution and the establishment of the plebeian tribunes and the comitia tribunata. Henceforth Rome possessed a “singular constitution,” with “three distinct sources of legislation” (i.e., the

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senatus consulta of the senate, the plebiscita of the tribes, and the leges of the comitia centuriata). The sheer complexity of the system, along with the underlying division between aristocratic and democratic social orders, “threatened to render the administration of the Republic a continual scene of contradictions and inconsistencies.”31 While one purpose of Ferguson’s analysis was to underline the inferiority of the Roman constitution vis-à-vis its British counterpart, his more unusual purpose was to stress Rome’s cohesion and political vitality up until the Second Punic War. Crucially, the History offered a markedly positive evaluation of the rivalry, competition, and emulation between the republic’s social orders and assemblies, a view that was in line with Ferguson’s distinctive moral philosophy and that set him apart from most contemporary British critics of the Roman constitution. As one reviewer of the French version of the work wrote in 1785, Ferguson described the “dissensions” between Rome’s social orders as “useful movements” (mouvemens utiles) which maintained and augmented the energies of the nation.32 One of Ferguson’s targets here may have been Hume (who viewed the instabilities generated by the division of Rome’s comitia as yet another example of the disorders that plagued ancient states), and another may have been Jean-Louis Delolme (who, in his Constitution of England, identified the absence of unified executive power in republics as a principal cause of their instability).33 As Ferguson observed, the republic “was far from being so well compacted, or the unity of power so well established, as speculative reasoners sometimes think necessary for the order of government.” Parts so detached were not likely to act as one body, nor to proceed with any regular concert; and the State seems to have carried, in all its establishments, the seeds of dissension and tumult. It was long supported, nevertheless, by the uncommon zeal of its members in favour of a commonwealth, in which they enjoyed so much freedom, and in which they were vested with so much personal consideration and power.34

Ferguson expressed particular admiration for the way in which virtue, or merit, served as the main criteria for access to the higher civil and military offices. As the ancient distinction between patrician and plebeian faded away, he argued, the republic lost its earlier character as a closed, hereditary aristocracy and entered a new phase in which merit or virtue became the principal prerequisite for magistracy (this followed

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the brief discussion of the Roman constitution contained in the Essay, in which he noted the eradication of “legal disparity of privilege” and praised its replacement by a “happier species of aristocracy,” founded on the “honours of family” and the “lustre of personal qualities”).35 Echoing Livy’s praise for the aequa libertas thereby established, he noted that the republic now contained a principle of “political equality,” according to which every citizen possessed “equal pretensions to preferment and honours.”36 It was this, at least in part, which harnessed the commitment of the plebeians to the state. Since the exercise of public office, and not birth or wealth, was now the principal criterion of honor and nobility, the way was open for plebeians to enter the patriciate. For a significant length of time, emulation without jealousy was the norm. Citizens “of every rank made great efforts of industry in a State in which men were allowed to arrive at eminence, not only by advantages of fortune, but likewise by personal qualities.”37 The high level of liberty and power enjoyed by Rome’s citizens was, however, by no means incompatible with the authority vested in Rome’s patrician order, as represented in the senate and in the aristocratically weighted comitia centuriata. Ferguson emphasized a range of powers at the disposal of the senate. In addition to its control of public fi nances and its importance in determining foreign policy, the most important of these was its right, in conjunction with the consuls, to nominate a dictator. Unlike Rousseau, who presented the dictatorship more neutrally as an office whose holder “silences the laws and provisionally suspends the sovereign authority,” Ferguson— probably following Montesquieu as well as Cicero— described the dictatorship primarily in terms of its efficacy as an instrument of patrician governance. The significance of the dictatorship was as much internal as external; it was an expedient “devised by the Senate, to repress the disorders which broke out among the people, and to unite the forces of the commonwealth against its enemies.”38 More generally, Ferguson consistently emphasized the senate’s natural authority and prestige as keys to maintaining Rome’s liberty. The people “submitted to the Senate, as possessed of an authority which was founded in the prevailing opinion of their superior worth,” while the opportunities for ascending through the ranks of magistracy minimized popular jealousy. The “people” retained their sovereignty “no longer than they were allowed by the Senate and Consuls to hold this character.” Legislative proposals were “not carried to

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the People, without the sanction of the Senate’s authority.” The tribunes served only a “prohibitory or defensive” function. The popu lar assemblies, furthermore, with “an uncommon superiority to envy, or jealousy, for the most part suffered themselves to be governed by the counsels of a few able and virtuous men.” In this way the “democratical” spirit of the Romans was kept at bay by the “silent influence of personal authority in a few of their citizens.” Finally, toward the end of the work, he described the senate’s role to consist in the leading, control, and restraint of a “pretended popular assembly, in whom the legislation and sovereignty of the empire were nominally vested.”39 Beyond these intricate constitutional considerations, the broader character of Ferguson’s analysis stemmed from the prominence he attached to the military in underpinning Rome’s civilian leadership. Drawing mainly from Polybius’s famous account of the Roman constitution, he argued that the republic had “no military force apart from its civil constitution, no soldiers besides their civilians, and no officers but the ordinary magistrates of the commonwealth.”40 This served to generate both patriotism and military ability. Since, Ferguson argued, military ser vice was the principal route to public eminence or prestige, institutions like the triumph harnessed the citizens’ love of honor and fear of shame. Military honors and rewards were, therefore, the centerpiece of a merit-based system that strengthened Roman patriotism. Under the “influence of councils so fertile in the invention of military distinctions, and in armies of which the soldier was roused by so many incentives to military ambition, the frequent change of commanders, which is commonly impolitic, proved a perpetual renovation of the ardour and the spirit with which armies were led.”41 Even more importantly, Rome’s military institutions served the crucial function of ensuring that civil authority was grounded on merit and ability. Since the “officer of state was understood to command in virtue of his civil magistracy, or in virtue of a military qualification and rank which never failed to accompany his office,” the entire system worked to maintain the caliber of Rome’s “statesmen and warriors”: Equal care was taken to furnish the rising statesman and warrior with the technical habits of either profession; or rather to instruct him, by his occasional application to both, not to mistake the forms of office in either for the business of state or of war, nor to rest his pretensions to command on any accomplishment short of that superior knowledge of

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mankind, and those excellent personal qualities of penetration, sagacity, and courage, which give the person possessed of them an ascendant, whether as a friend or as an enemy, in any scene or department of human affairs.42

Ferguson’s defense of Rome’s republican constitution was thus grounded on three main claims. First, it was based on the assessment that the republic’s divided system of assemblies and orders was compatible with a high degree of cohesion and liberty, a claim that was clearly in line with his earlier account of the moral and political benefits of social rivalry. The second claim centered on the role of the senate as the underpinning of political order and the source of legitimate authority. Third, and fi nally, Ferguson stressed the meritocratic foundations of Rome’s system of civilian and military offices, which harnessed the loyalty of the plebeians to the state, channeled ambition in a patriotic direction, and forged a dedicated and experienced civil and military elite. Framed in this way, the overall purpose of the fi rst chapters of the History was to show that Rome, notwithstanding the latent contradictions within its constitution, really was a school of statesmen and warriors.

Equality and the Politics of the Agrarian Law Ferguson’s account of the breakdown of the republic’s system of government, spanning the period between the First Punic War and Caesar’s fi rst dictatorship, took up much of the remainder of the History. The first, perhaps decisive, issue in this account concerned plebeian demands for equality in the form of an agrarian law or in the abolition of plebeian debts. These issues had an immediate resonance in the period in which Ferguson was writing. As I argued in Chapter 2, the problems of agrarian reform in a modern commercial state had been at the heart of much Scottish writing in the 1750s and 1760s, with Lord Kames and Adam Smith pitted against Sir John Dalrymple in the debate over entail and primogeniture. This was connected to the Scots’ interest in the agrarian laws of the ancients, a topic that was especially visible in the debate between Hume and Robert Wallace on the populousness of ancient nations.43 These Scottish debates, however, came to be overshadowed in the 1770s by more urgent questions about the relationship between property, representation, and constitutional stability. The Wilkes affair, the campaign for parliamentary reform, and the prospect of American independence

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raised fundamental questions about the relationship between property and representation, while for some observers radical politics had raised the specter of leveling (as Josiah Tucker asserted in his Treatise of Civil Government of 1781, the prospect of a “new Division of Property” now lay on the political horizon). Ferguson’s treatment of the contests over property and rule in ancient Rome was shaped by these contexts, and he was probably also responding to more theoretical justifications of agrarian equality set out by a number of writers in the 1770s and 1780s. A major purpose of the History, then, was to underline the necessity of a hierarchical distinction of ranks for the stability of large states and to demonstrate the potentially disastrous consequences of ill-conceived egalitarian reform projects.44 Understanding Ferguson’s presentation of this argument requires a brief clarification of his usage of the term “democracy.” In the History he used the word and its cognates (“democratic,” “democratical”) some twelve times, although he additionally used equivalent terms like “popular government.” In almost every case, “democracy” was used negatively, and in many cases it was associated not merely with popular sovereignty, but also with demands for economic equality and redistribution. There was a striking resemblance between Ferguson’s concept of democracy and Montesquieu’s analysis, in The Spirit of the Laws, of “the spirit of extreme equality” in a democratic republic. Ferguson’s understanding of democracy as the political expression of sectional interests in a society of ranks had two significant implications. First, it meant that he, like many contemporaries, saw no contradiction in the idea of a democratic usurpation (Caesar’s dictatorship, for instance, was not incompatible with democracy). “Democratical government” could thus be both inexpedient and unjust. Second, “democracy” had significant socioeconomic undertones. As Ferguson presented it in the History, it added up to a comprehensive political and economic project to transfer power and property to the urban populace, expressed institutionally in campaigns for the abolition of plebeian debts, for the free distribution of corn, and in programs for land reform. In the History Ferguson traced the seeds of these developments to the establishment of the plebeian tribunes and the tribunician assemblies. Although, as we have seen, he acknowledged the desirability of institutions capable of protecting plebeian liberties and rights, he stressed even more emphatically the tribunate’s role in undermining the estab-

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lished order of ranks. He described the comitia tributa as a “device of the popular party, to exclude the auspices, and to level the condition of ranks.”45 The tribunate itself, although it could have been a force for maintaining “equity and sound policy,” quickly became a source of disunity and instability. This negative judgment on the tribunate distinguished Ferguson from many earlier analysts of the republic, including Edward Wortley Montagu (who depicted the tribunate as inaugurating the era of liberty), the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (who claimed that it reestablished popular sovereignty and transformed Rome into something approaching “a perfect commonwealth”), as well as Rousseau (who had argued, echoing Nicolò Machiavelli, that the tribunate had transformed Rome into “a true Government and a genuine Democracy”).46 For Ferguson, by contrast, the tribunate was primarily a focus for the expression of popular envy: instead of a “representation to support and preserve their order with steadiness and moderation, [the popular party] proceeded to elect a few leaders, who, from thenceforward, were to head every popular tumult, and to raise every wind of contention into a storm.”47 This antipathy informed Ferguson’s reconstruction of a linked series of institutional and legal developments in the republic’s history. One of these was the proposal to introduce the secret ballot as a procedure for elections. Echoing Montesquieu’s examination of the same issue, Ferguson maintained that the secret ballot undermined the indirect authority of the republic’s most virtuous individuals, and hence minimized the beneficial dynamics of honor and shame: With these establishments, calculated to secure the functions of office, the secret ballot was introduced, fi rst in elections, and afterwards in collecting opinions of judges in the courts of justice, a dangerous form of proceeding in constitutions tending to popular license, and where justice is more likely to suffer from the unawed passions of the lower people, than from any improper influence of superior rank; and where the authority of the wise, and the sense of public shame, were so much required, as principal supports of government.48

This argument echoed Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where Gibbon suggested that the secret ballot had “abolished the influence of fear and shame, of honour and interest, and the abuse of freedom accelerated the progress of anarchy and despotism.”49 An example of the unintended consequences of legislation, the secret

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ballot served as the foundation for the popular party’s “zeal to attack the Nobility under any pretence,” and introduced the “cover of secrecy in all capital crimes.”50 Once again, all this was strikingly different from Rousseau. Whereas Rousseau, in the Social Contract, argued that the secret ballot had minimized bribery and vote-buying, Ferguson suggested that it undercut the exemplary authority of the higher ranks.51 One of the great ironies of Roman history was that the emperors abolished the secret ballot, during a period when it would have conferred a modicum of independence upon the senate and thereby could have minimized the influence of despotic tyranny. A second issue was the agrarian law itself. The main culprits in this part of Ferguson’s story were the brothers Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, whose land-reform project was depicted as a direct attack on the authority of Rome’s patricians. Here Ferguson followed Cicero’s defi nition of justice and the broader argument laid out in De Officiis that to “take from some in order to give to others” undermined the public trust upon which the political community was built.52 Moreover, Ferguson argued for the expediency and indeed necessity of economic inequal ity in large states. This mode of reasoning appears plausible; but it is dangerous to adopt by halves even reason itself. If it were reasonable that every Roman citizen should have an equal share of the conquered lands, it was still more reasonable, that the original proprietors, from whom those lands had been unjustly taken, should have them restored. If, in this, the maxims of reason and justice had been observed, Rome would have still been a small community, and might have acted with safety on the principles of equality, which are suited to a small republic. But the Romans, becoming sovereigns of a great and extensive territory, must adopt the disparities, and submit the subordinations, which mankind in such situations universally have found natural, and even necessary, to their government.53

Ferguson’s critique of the Gracchi was in line with his earlier conjectural history of subordination. Although, in the early republic, wealth was of little importance as a constituent of rank, property became unequally divided as the state expanded. Far from being a symptom of corruption, however, social inequal ity conferred a degree of political stability that the constitution alone could not supply. Ferguson therefore condemned the plan to redistribute the republic’s conquered lands as a project to

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affect the “subordination of ranks and the subversion of government.” Furthermore, the Gracchi’s attempt to transfer the judicial power to the equestrian order “contributed greatly to hasten the approaching corruption of manners, and the disorders of the state.” The entire project, he concluded, was an anachronistic echo of a much earlier age, suitable for a society of militaristic shepherds inhabiting a small territory, but utterly dangerous in a large and prosperous imperial society. The distinctions of poor and rich, in States of any considerable extent, are as necessary as labour and good government itself. The poor being destined to labour, the rich, by the advantages of education, independence, and leisure, are qualified for public affairs. And the empire now being greatly extended, owed its safety and the order of its government to a respectable aristocracy, founded on the distinctions of fortune, as well as personal qualities, or the merit of personal ser vice. The rich were not, without some violent convulsion, to be stript of estates which they themselves had acquired by industry, or which so originally acquired, they had inherited from their ancestors. The poor were not qualified at once to mix with persons of a better education, and inured to a better condition. The project seemed to be as ruinous to government as it was to the security of property, and tended to place the members of the commonwealth, by one rash and precipitate step, in situations in which they were not qualified to act.54

One of the assumptions underlying this argument was that poverty necessitated industry, which in turn guaranteed against vice. As Ferguson wrote in the Institutes of Moral Philosophy, “Undistinguishing charity is pernicious in trading nations. It is a wise maxim in trading nations, That no person able to earn his bread should be maintained gratuitously.”55 A similar argument appeared in the History. For example, the grain distributions of Caius Gracchus constituted “a check to industry, which is the best guardian of manners in populous cities, or where multitudes of men are crowded together.” Moreover, if “men were to have estates in the country because they were factious and turbulent in the city, it is evident, that public lands, and all the resources of the most prosperous state, would not be sufficient to supply their wants.”56 Here Ferguson was echoing earlier Scottish writers, notably Patrick Lindsay, who had claimed that distinctions of ranks helped to inspire the industry of the poor.57 A similar view found clear expression in Ferguson’s 1757 pamphlet, The Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously Considered, in which

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he argued that the “habits of the rich” were fundamental to the order of society and to the maintenance of the poor. If any person were rich enough, “he could not do a more signal mischief to his country, than that of maintaining the whole poor of Great Britain in idleness.”58 Ferguson consistently defended the utility of a property-based distinction of ranks. As he argued in the Institutes, not only was it extraordinarily difficult to distinguish wealth from true merit, but “the order of society sometimes requires that even the most discerning should not dispute their effects, or refuse to fortune the consideration of rank.”59 In the later Principles of Moral and Political Science, he explicitly justified a distinction of ranks in terms not only of stability, but also of industry and prosperity. A distinction of ranks was “the first germ of subordination and government so necessary to the safety of individuals and the peace of mankind,” and subsequently supplied a “continued incentive to labour and the practice of lucrative arts.” Interestingly, inequal ity served to maintain “in the most prosperous and wealthy societies, some remains of that necessity which nature has intended for the species as a spur to their industry and labour.” From a difference of fortune there results a difference of estimation and rank; and to those who would emerge from the lower station, there is a motive of ambition joined to that of necessity, in promoting the practice of arts: So that nations who are forward in the accumulation of wealth, proceed in it with a double ardour from the effect of advances they have already made; and thus owe, in a great measure, to the inequalities of fortune, what sprang originally from necessity, the application of that labour by which articles of consumption are reproduced, and the sources of wealth are enlarged.60

The argument has crucial implications for our understanding of Ferguson’s political thought. In the fi rst place, it reflects his skepticism about the Machiavellian idea that republics should periodically be restored to their fi rst principles.61 Projects to return states forcibly to their original constitution were dangerous, not only because they were liable to abuse or exploitation by demagogic individuals, but also because they went against the grain of long-term structural transformations. Such correctives served to exacerbate, rather than eradicate, political instability. Ferguson applied this insight not only to the agrarian laws, but also to related demands for the abolition of plebeian debts and sumptuary legislation against luxury. All such laws were merely “the antidote which the pol-

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icy of that age provided, in the capital of a great empire, against luxury and the ostentation of wealth, distempers incident to prosperity itself, and not to be cured by partial remedies.” Sumptuary laws proved “but feeble aids to stop up the source of so much disorder.” The point was not simply that the laws and institutions of the early republic were unfitted to the government of a corrupt society, but that the laws and institutions which guarded the liberties of relatively underdeveloped societies could shield vice and corruption later on. “Not only were many of the prevailing practices disorderly, but the law itself was erroneous; adapted indeed at fi rst by a virtuous people, because it secured the persons and rights of individuals against the possibility of injustice, but now anxiously preserved by their posterity, because it gave a license to their crimes.”62 More broadly, Ferguson set out an unambiguous position within one of the central debates in the long tradition of republican thought, which had long been divided over the issue of agrarian reform.63 Crucially, he rejected Harrington’s famous claim that an “equal agrarian” would be one of the two preconditions of a free and stable commonwealth. Harrington’s ideas were adapted by Walter Moyle in his Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government, a work written in the fi nal decade of the seventeenth century (but not published until 1721).64 Moyle, who was a key figure in the transmission of Harrington’s ideas to the next generation of commonwealthmen, set out in his Essay a clear vision of the supports of a flourishing popular commonwealth. Liberty rested on popular institutions (such as the plebeian tribunes and the secret ballot in elections) and on a wide distribution of property among all orders of citizens. Accordingly, Moyle claimed that the Licinian laws (named after the tribune Gaius Licinius Stolo) would have “rendered the commonwealth immortal” had they been properly executed.65 Although later writers in this idiom, such as Gordon, were more alert to the political dangers of actually executing agrarian reforms, they also tended to stress the utility and the justice of agrarian equality. In his Discourses upon Sallust, Gordon wrote that there could be “nothing more just, nothing more equitable, or more conducing to mutual Peace amongst Fellow- Citizens, and to the Equality so necessary in a free State . . . than the Ascertaining of an Agrarian Law, and Restoring the usurped Lands to the injured and necessitous Proprietors.” But at the same time, Gordon acknowledged that the Gracchi themselves could

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easily have made themselves absolute masters of the republic, “a situation, than which nothing can be more terrible to a free state.” It is a dreadful medicine, which is as likely to kill as to cure; and if there be certain disorders incident to the body, which cannot be extirpated without the extirpation of life, and are therefore to be endured; is it not more eligible to suffer certain diseases in the body politic, even certain great diseases, than attempt to remove them, by an expedient much more likely to destroy than to reform it; or which, if it reform one abuse, yet tends to introduce the most horrible of all evils and abuses, even tyranny and servitude?66

The debate continued among British writers into the period of the French Revolution. In 1796, Moyle’s account was revisited by the English radical, John Thelwall, who set out his own defense of agrarian laws in the set of notes appended to his edition of Moyle’s Essay (which he entitled, revealingly enough, Democracy Vindicated). Thelwall distinguished agrarian laws from “laws of levelling and plunder,” and argued that “nothing could be more just or more moderate than the claims of the people in this respect.” For him, the agrarian laws aimed simply to preserve the ancient rights and possessions of the plebeians from the encroachments of an overmighty aristocracy who had abused the “public trust.”67 A more specific target of Ferguson’s own narrative may well have been the positive account of the Gracchi set out in Hooke’s Roman History, which contained vehement denunciations of Rome’s aristocracy.68 As one reviewer of Hooke’s book noted in 1764, his argument highlighted the urgent need to abolish primogeniture and to establish in Britain a more equal distribution of landed property, which, the reviewer claimed, would “prevent, in great measure, those intestine commotions which frequently shake its frame.”69 Hooke himself, in his 1758 Observations, claimed that the Licinian laws had “brought the Roman Republic to its FREE and PERFECT state.”70 A rather different intellectual target may have been the dissenting minister Richard Price, who had criticized Britain’s increasingly inegalitarian property arrangements in the postscript to the “Supplement” to his 1772 Observations on Reversionary Payments. In this brief but interesting piece, Price argued that inequal ity in Britain was fueling poverty and depopulation, and praised the agrarian laws of Licinius as an admirable model for promoting population and industry. Later, in his 1784 Observations

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on the Importance of the American Revolution, Price argued that preserving the balance of property would be one of several preconditions for the survival of the republican federation in the United States (in addition to its avoidance of public debts, standing armies, and entanglement in foreign trade). He observed that most free states had endeavored to implement laws aiming at equality, and explicitly praised the laws governing inheritances in ancient Rome, Israel, and modern Connecticut.71 A more elaborate eighteenth-century vision of agrarian equality was set out in William Ogilvie’s Essay on the Right of Property in Land, a 1781 work calling for the implementation of a “progressive agrarian law” in Britain and Europe. The Essay, which was written during Olgivie’s tenure as professor of humanity at Aberdeen, adopted a positive stance toward Rome’s agrarian laws although, as Ogilvie recognized, the plans of Tiberius Gracchus were unlikely to have succeeded.72 The broader purpose of the work was to demonstrate how a properly implemented “agrarian” would restore independence to the dispossessed peasants of Europe and destroy the monopolization of agricultural property by Eu rope’s tiny elite of great landowners. This agrarian, Ogilvie argued, would provide a means to reconcile commercial and industrial progress with social equality, while at the same time restoring to the modern peasantry their ancient martial and agricultural virtues. Although much of the text focused on the problems facing Britain as an imperial state— Ogilvie discussed the problems of recovery after the American War, the resettlement of veterans, rebellion in Ireland, and Indian land reform— the work was genuinely European in scope. He claimed that the fi rst European state to adopt his “progressive agrarian” would quickly reach unprecedented heights of greatness, prosperity, and public happiness. It was, however, only in “purely democratical governments” or in “unlimited monarchies” that the reforms he proposed had any real chance of being put into effect. This was why he praised the model of patriotic kingship he discerned in Frederick the Great, who had, Ogilvie argued, “practically adopted some of those maxims” which he had laid down in his work. He anticipated that a modern “conquering monarch” with a “victorious army” under his command might also undertake a “salutary reformation of landed property” in accordance with the right of conquest. This combination of arguments— and especially the confidence

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in the potential for dedicated, public-spirited land reform on the part of an absolute but virtuous monarch— sharply distinguished Ogilvie’s ideas from Ferguson’s own critique of agrarian reform projects.73 As a fi nal indication of the scope and relevance of Ferguson’s account, it is worth noting that very similar issues were being discussed with interest across Europe. A more positive view of Rome’s agrarian laws, for instance, can be found in a work by the Göttingen philosophical historian Christoph Meiners, who in 1782 published his Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer, a study of the decline of Rome’s manners and constitution explicitly presented as an extension of Middleton’s Life of Cicero.74 Although Meiners is still sometimes situated in the context of racist ideology, scholars have begun to recognize his place in the broader sweep of late Enlightenment political discourse and the sciences of mankind. In certain respects, Meiners and Ferguson shared a similar political and philosophical outlook. Like Ferguson, Meiners saw his Roman history as a contribution to debates about the direction of modern European politics. Also like Ferguson, he emphasized the Romans’ declining willingness to undertake military ser vice as a cause of the republic’s shift to military dictatorship. But Meiners expressed a far more uncompromising position on ancient and modern forms of inequal ity. This view, as Michael Carhart has emphasized, comes out very strikingly in Meiners’s Briefe über die Schweiz, in which he reflected on the causes that had produced the Genevan revolution of 1782. Most important among these causes was the rise of an “unrepublican” level of inequal ity: “With such an inequal ity of goods, such as one fi nds in Geneva, it is almost impossible that the desire for privileges should not emerge, and that love of domination should not supersede love of the common good.”75 At the same time, Meiners attacked Montesquieu’s conception of monarchy and its reliance on the nobility as an intermediate power. As Meiners put it in a later work, Montesquieu’s claim that the nobility formed a bulwark against despotism contradicted the entire sweep of European history.76 Both these priorities were reflected in Meiners’s account of Rome’s transition to despotism. As he presented it in his Geschichte, the underlying cause of Rome’s corruption was the staggering rise of inequal ity in the Italian countryside that was a direct result of Rome’s territorial extension. Meiners followed Sallust’s and Plutarch’s sympathetic accounts of the situation facing Rome’s landless plebeians. The pursuit of

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luxury turned Rome into an expansionist entity that sucked the provinces of their wealth, turned free men into debtors, and created the cycle of impoverishment, proscription, and civil war that brought about the end of the republic. The massive influx of slaves, made possible by the republic’s conquests, was a poison that radically disrupted the agrarian economy, as large-scale agriculturalists began to use slave labor on their estates and used a mixture of deceit, physical intimidation, and fiscal trickery to drive the poorer citizens from their ancient patrimonies. The consequence of all this, Meiners argued, was the existence of an enormous multitude of nominally free but landless men unable to feed their families or to play any genuinely productive role in the economy. From this perspective, it was possible to see that Tiberius Gracchus was a well-intentioned reformer, whose agrarian law, had it been put into execution, would have restored the republic. Nor would such a law have been unjust. Agrarian reform was the only means of “saving the state from an inevitable decadence” which would result from the “inequal ity of fortunes.”77

The Republic’s Empire Running parallel to Ferguson’s critique of equality was a second story about the republic’s territorial expansion. It was this process, he argued, that laid the foundations for the despotic government established by Augustus, and ultimately left the Romans, “together with the conquests they made, a prey to military government.”78 Throughout the History, Ferguson highlighted the disastrous consequences of Roman expansion, noting “how odious, and in the end, how calamitous for both, it is for one nation to become subject to another.”79 In this sense, the History was in line with the critique of conquest set out in the Essay, as well as the many other critical histories of conquest elaborated by Scottish contemporaries. Nevertheless, Ferguson’s own presentation was even more obviously indebted to Montesquieu. His comment that the “republic often tottered under the effect of disorders which arose in the capital, but fell irrevocably under the blows that were struck from the provinces” was almost a direct paraphrase of a sentence in Montesquieu’s Considerations.80 More generally, the entire analysis reflected Montesquieu’s analysis of the predicaments facing a republican empire or a “republic that conquers.” As we saw in Chapter 1, Montesquieu

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had claimed that republican governments were almost always incapable of exercising imperial government either effectively or responsibly. Ferguson followed a similar path, underlining the confusions, violence, and despotism that accompanied republican empire. Thus Rome had “left only this piece of instruction to mankind; That just government over conquered provinces is scarcely to be hoped for, and least of all where republics are the conquerors.”81 Ferguson’s critique of Roman expansionism was a post-Montesquieu attack on the project of reconciling liberty with empire. As David Armitage has shown, this was a central hope of a number of British theorists and publicists between 1640 and 1750.82 This preference for expansion was a prominent theme of Moyle’s Essay, and had been restated in Scotland by the classicist William Blackwell, who claimed that the conquests undertaken by the republic were compatible with the principles of justice, liberty and humanity.83 In contrast to these advocates of republican empire, Ferguson wished to demonstrate how easily imperial expansion destroyed liberty. Although he recognized the distinction between colony and conquest upon which much of the earlier literature rested, the main purpose of his treatment of this topic in the History was to show how, in conditions of extensive empire, a fusion of civil and military powers occurred in the provinces that ultimately threatened liberty at home. In this respect, the massively expanded powers available to the East India Company after 1765 may have affected the presentation of his argument. The conclusion was to reemphasize the priority of national defense in the scale of public priorities, and to show that maintaining viable defensive institutions might well entail the sacrifice of distant territories, or, at the very least, the avoidance of entanglement in distant, commercially driven, wars. The first part of Ferguson’s narrative concerned the institutional changes set in motion as Rome shifted from a colony-based system to one based on conquest and military control. Colonization was legitimate insofar as it provided an outlet for virtuous settlers and did not entail the direct military rule over subject nations. But when colonization was replaced by the setting up of permanent military commands in the Roman provinces, a spiral of unpredicted, mutually reinforcing consequences was set in motion. Here Ferguson followed Montesquieu’s judgment on the importance on changes in the composition of Roman

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citizenship (stressing particularly the damage caused by the admission of Rome’s Italian allies or socii to citizen status).84 The old sources of social unity (external military threats) largely ceased, accelerating the complacency and moral decline of the citizens. Moreover, direct military rule in the provinces put a stop to colonization, which had always been an outlet for Rome’s surplus population. This had the additional consequence of transforming the character of the metropolitan center. Provinces so remote, and placed under military government, were to be retained in submission by regular bodies of troops. Roman citizens were not inclined to move their habitations beyond the limits of Italy; and if they had been so inclined, would not have been fit, in the mere capacity of civil corporations and pacific settlements, to carry into execution against the natives, the exactions of a government which they themselves, if now become inhabitants and proprietors of land in those provinces, would have been equally interested to oppose: for these reasons, although the Roman territory was greatly extended, the resources of the poorer citizens were diminished. And the former discharge for so many dangerous humours which arose among the people being in some mea sure shut up, these humours began to regorge upon the State.85

Moreover, a gap opened up between the armies in the provinces and the civilian government of the republic. The long duration of military commands meant that the loyalties of the centuries shifted from the republic to their generals. This led to a sharp decline in the power and authority of Rome’s civilian elite. Here Ferguson echoed the analysis set out in Hume’s essay “Of the Balance of Power,” which identified the “necessary progress” of “enormous monarchies,” where the “ancient nobility” would shun “military employments,” necessitate the use of foreign mercenaries, and hence “the fate of the Roman emperors, from the same cause, is renewed over and over again, till the final dissolution of the monarchy.”86 As Ferguson presented it, the republic’s empire created intractable contradictions between the demands of war and civil government, as the higher ranks withdrew from military occupations and thereby lost much of their former prestige as both “statesmen and warriors.” This led Gaius Marius to make the unprecedented and fatal step of admitting the poorest class of Roman citizens (the capite censi) into the legions, which transferred military power from the propertied to the propertyless:

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment This circumstance is quoted as a remarkable and dangerous innovation in the Roman State, and is frequently mentioned among the steps which hastened its ruin. The example, no doubt, with its consequences, may instruct nations to distinguish the military operations at a distance, from the more important object of preservation and home-defence; so that in declining the distant ser vice, the more respectable orders of the People may not think it necessary to abandon themselves to depredation at home. In the fi rst ages of Rome, the citizens in political convention, were styled the Army of their Country, and such in every age is the army in whose hands the freedom of nations is secure. From the date of these levies at Rome, the sword began to pass from the hands of those who were interested in the preservation of the republic, into the hands of others who were willing to make it a prey.87

Following this transformation of military arrangements, the senate was rendered both politically and militarily insignificant. The legions were taught “to expect extraordinary rewards for ordinary ser vices, and ambitious leaders were instructed how to transfer the affection and hopes of the legions from the republic to themselves.”88 It soon became impossible for even the most public-spirited general to bring the armies under control, while nothing could “compensate for the ruinous tendency of a precedent which brings force to be employed as an ordinary resource in political contests.”89 The explosive combination of military power and popular license meant that military despotism became the only option for the republic. Ferguson’s story also served to highlight the dangers posed to Europe by the expansion of enormous competing empires driven by the pursuit of wealth. This aspect of his argument looked back not only to Montesquieu’s Reflections on Universal Monarchy (which was unavailable to Ferguson in its original form), but also to several key eighteenthcentury works that focused on the political instability unleashed when military conquest was deployed as an instrument of economic growth.90 The fi rst part of this analysis centered on Carthage, which for Ferguson represented the worst possible combination of territorial overextension and commercial jealousy. Although the spirit of commerce ought to have inculcated a spirit of peace among the Carthaginians, they had engaged in ambitious wars and consumed the “bread of their own people in maintaining foreign mercenaries.”91 They had “stifled or neglected the military character of their own citizens, and had perpetual recourse to foreigners, whom they trusted with their arms, and made the guard-

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ians of their wealth.” Ultimately, Carthage was “ever ready to barter the national character for profit, to purchase safety with shameful concessions, and to remove a present danger, by giving up what is the only security of nations against any danger, the reputation of their vigour, and the honour of their arms.” Rome itself soon came to resemble both the Carthaginian republic as well as the sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy. It was avarice, Ferguson wrote, that incited the Spanish monarchy, “with so much destructive avidity, to invade the new world; and is ever likely to tempt the dangerous visits of strangers, who are ready to gratify their avarice and ambition, at the expense of nations to whose possessions they have no reasonable or just pretensions.” The abolition of taxation upon Roman citizens that became possible after the conquest of Macedonia served only to incite “an insatiable thirst of dominion.”92 Ferguson contrasted these models of acquisitionist empire with a more positive vision of a balanced order of independent trading nations. He argued that the maintenance of commerce, and the general prosperity, depended on the maintenance of the Eu ropean balance of power and the European system of independent states. In forming this compact, though mighty dominion, the republic had united, within its territories, all the principal seats of industry then known in the western world; had come into possession of all the seaports the most famous for shipping, and for the residence of merchants, who had conducted the carry ing trade of the world. Its subjects were possessed of all the profitable arts; and, having all the means and instruments of trade, might be expected to reap all the fruits of commerce. But, in making these acquisitions, the empire had been a place of arms, and a mere nursery of statesmen and warriors, more occupied with the ideas of spoil and further conquest, than with the attentions necessary to promote the industry or the prosperity of the nations subjected to its power. And it is probable that the Romans, in reducing so many separate nations to the condition of provinces, greatly impaired the sources of wealth, at the same time that they suppressed the pretensions to national independence and freedom.93

It is worth contrasting this assessment with the more positive evaluation of Rome’s empire set out in William Robertson’s History of America, fi rst published in 1777. Notwithstanding the critique of universal monarchy contained in Robertson’s earlier writings, the History of America contained a surprisingly positive verdict on the economic consequences

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of Roman imperialism, which in Robertson’s view “gave such additional security to commerce, as animated it with new vigour.” The union among nations was never so entire, nor the intercourse so perfect, as within the bounds of this vast empire. Commerce, under their dominion, was not obstructed by the jealousy of rival states, interrupted by frequent hostilities, or limited by partial restrictions. One superintending power moved and regulated the industry of mankind, and enjoyed the fruits of their joint efforts.94

Ferguson firmly rejected this view, preferring to echo a number of earlier British writers, including Charles Davenant and Hume, who had insisted that empires or universal monarchies must inevitably be unfavorable to trade. Industry and commerce, he argued, flourished best amidst a multiplicity of free and independent states. Unitary empires, by contrast—however much they offered a single uniform source of “peace and protection”—invariably promoted commercial decline. Ferguson strongly criticized the Roman system of provincial taxation, which he thought “may instruct a sovereign how to profit by the wealth of his subjects, rather than admonish a free people how to constitute a revenue, with the least inconvenience to themselves, or the least possible injury to the sources of wealth.” More generally, “we are not to suppose, that the wealth of the empire ever equalled the amount of what might have been estimated in the separate and independent states of which it was composed.”95

The Ancient Empire as a Modern Despotism The fi nal chapters of the History, numbers 36– 42 in the second edition, provided an account of the establishment of the imperial Principate under Augustus and his successors. Ferguson described this part of his narrative as a dark story which, “once being described, does not admit of repetition.”96 Despite this, these chapters are among the richest and most significant in the book. Continuing the project of the Essay, the chapters are best read as a projection of Britain’s future as an extensive empire or military state, characterized by an ever-closer alliance between populist demagogues and the army. Read from this perspective, Ferguson’s history of the Principate was a call for the restoration to health of a corrupt British state. This gave it a similar character to the

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strategy for reform set out, also in historiographical guise, by Denis Diderot in his near-contemporaneous Essai sur les regnes de Claude et Neron (although Diderot’s text was far more explicitly and radically republican in its sympathies).97 Marked by a clear anxiety about the combination of empire and popular government, Ferguson’s purpose was to show what a modern despotic state might look like once every significant barrier against its establishment had been removed. A dominant theme in Ferguson’s discussion of the Principate was the growing mismatch between the Roman constitution and the underlying reality of despotic power. This theme had been treated classically in Tacitus’s Annals, and had been revisited by both Montesquieu (“No tyranny is more cruel than that practised in the shadow of laws”) and Gibbon (the “image of a free constitution preserved with decent reverence”).98 In line with this sort of insight, Ferguson stressed that despotism made its appearance in Rome “under the name of republic, and in the form of a temporary and legal institution.” The titles initially assumed by Augustus (imperator and princeps) were genuine republican offices, implying no more at fi rst than they had done under the republican constitution (this was also an eminently traditional point to make, which featured, for example, in Leonardo Bruni’s early fi fteenth-century History of the Florentine People).99 But as Ferguson made clear, genuine power now rested with the military and, in partic u lar, the praetorian guards. A politically emasculated senate now depended upon the will of the army, or rather “those military bodies who are in possession of the capital, or who surround the person of the Prince.” Augustus’s regime thus constituted “a model for those who wish to govern with the least possible opposition or obstruction to their usurpations,” and a “caution, for those who need to be told under what disguise the most detestable tyranny will sometimes approach mankind.”100 As Ferguson underlined very strongly in his discussion of Augustus, the real origins of Rome’s military government lay in the republican project for democratic equality. From this perspective, the establishment of the Principate was less a radical break and more a continuation, or even a culmination, of the long-term populist legacy of the republic itself. According to Ferguson, the establishment of the empire had to be understood as a consequence of the popular party’s “zeal for higher measures of popular government.” Amplifying the point, he argued that

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military government was “almost a necessary result of the abuse of liberty, or, in certain extremities of this evil, appears to be the sole remedy that can be applied” (here Ferguson cited a famous passage from Tacitus’s Annals— non aliud discordantis patriae remedium fuisse quam ut ab uno regeretur—“the sole remedy for the distracted country was rule by one man”). All this enabled him to underline the incompatibility between liberty and democracy in large states. “Liberty,” Ferguson emphasized, on the part of the populace, was conceived to imply a freedom from every restraint, and to justify license and contempt of the laws. The gratuitous aids which were given to the People, enabled them to subsist in idleness and sloth; the wealth that was passing to Rome in the hands of traders, contractors, and farmers of the revenue, was spent in profusion. That which was acquired by officers in one station of command in the provinces, was lavished in public shews, in the baiting of wild beasts and fights of gladiators, to gain the people in the canvass for further preferments: And from all these circumstances we may conclude, that if there be reason to regret or detest the abuses incident to monarchy, and the luxury of courts, there is surely no less in the brute taste and dissolute manners incident to a populace acknowledged in democracy the sovereign or supreme disposer of preferments and honours.101

A second major theme of these chapters was the expediency of monarchical government for the situation in which Rome found itself. Ferguson thus made a decisive move against those who depicted monarchy as the corruption of republican politics, but without endorsing the Caesarist monarchy defended by Hooke. Although he refused to condemn those who defended the ancient constitution, Ferguson argued that the establishment of a genuinely mixed “legal monarchy” in Rome would have afforded both liberty and security to the various orders of the state and was the form of government most compatible with luxury, inequal ity, and empire.102 This argument clearly mirrored Ferguson’s own worries about the stability of monarchical power in Britain in the early 1780s, when he stressed how far the “rights of the people” depended upon the “Vigour of the Crown.”103 He lamented that Pompey, during the triumviral wars, had failed to provide the republic with “that reasonable mixture of kingly government, of which it appears to have stood so greatly in need.” In large states, justice and peace were better maintained by the “wisdom and discretion of a single person” than by “any system of public councils or popular assemblies.” The establish-

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ment of a hereditary monarchy, fi nally, would have prevented the “ruinous contests which arise from an elective or disputed succession,” thus guaranteeing “a permanent right of the Sovereign to his high estate,” and a “corresponding right of every citizen, to his rank, to his privilege, and to his property.” All who wished to preserve the republic, endeavoured to prevent, as much as possible, these ill constituted assemblies of the people from deliberating on matters of State; and it might, no doubt, have been still better for the empire, if the spirit of legal monarchy could at once have been infused into every part of the commonwealth; or if, without further pangs and convulsions, the authority of a Prince, tempered by that of a Senate, had been fi rmly established.104

But the moral and political legacies of the republic made all of this impossible. Echoing older vocabularies of the moral pathologies of bodies politic, Ferguson noted that while the “natural antidote” of vice was restraint and correction, in “great disorders, and where the system itself is corrupted, what is applied for a remedy is sometimes an evil, as well as the disease.” He identified the psychological residue of the republican politics of envy as a crucial factor preventing the establishment of legal monarchy. Since the republic’s highly egalitarian political culture had exaggerated already unstable and immoderate features of the Roman psychology, neither rulers nor ruled possessed the kind of qualities (obedience, loyalty, affection) that could have made monarchy viable. Instead, they exhibited a perpetual oscillation between ferocity and license, on the one hand, and servitude on the other: “in such rapid transitions, from the pretension of citizens, to the submission of slaves, is a mortifying example of the weakness and depravity to which human nature is exposed.”105 One of the most significant aspects of Ferguson’s account of Rome’s shift from republic to empire concerned the transformation of Rome’s once-virtuous patriciate into a narrow, hereditary caste. This was a commentary upon the character of the British elite and its apparent degeneration into a mere aristocracy of birth and privilege. Ferguson traced the decline of the political virtue of the Roman patricians throughout his entire text. He showed that this process ultimately left the nobility without the capacity to exercise political office, not unlike the hereditary aristocracies of continental Europe:

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment The titles of Praetorian and Consular rank, retained by those who had fi lled those offices in the commonwealth, were come, as we have mentioned, to resemble the titles of honour by which the nobles are distinguished in the monarchies of modern Europe; and men had, for some time, begun to covet the office, not on account of the power it conferred, but for the sake of the title it was to leave behind with the persons by whom it had once been possessed.106

Although, he noted, the ancient distinctions and honors of family continued to exist, they had “no real power or consideration affi xed to them.” The nobility, in short, were condemned to irrelevance as a consequence of the gulf that had opened up between the civil and the military establishments and, secondarily, by their concern with privilege and status. Augustus found it easy to manipulate this situation. It was “instructive to observe with what care this sovereign endeavoured to flatter the vanity of Roman citizens, by preserving the distinction of ranks, while in reality his policy was calculated to remove every distinction, and to render all ranks equally dependent on himself” (in a revealing footnote to this passage, Ferguson added that it was also instructive to know “that gradations are expedient to absolute government, as well as to freedom”). He thus drove home the argument he had already developed in the Essay that the modern mixed constitution might itself serve to veil underlying despotic tendencies: “the constitution indeed may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it.”107 One fascinating example of Ferguson’s treatment of the gap between law and politics centered upon the transformation of the lex maiestatis under the early emperors. Here he was participating in an ancient debate about the political structure of the Principate and, ultimately, about the location of sovereignty under the emperors (a debate that had traditionally hinged upon differing interpretations of the Roman lex regia).108 Following Cicero’s observation that majesty consists in the grandeur and dignity of the state (maiestas est amplitudo ac dignitas civitatis), he initially endorsed the shift in the locus of majesty that occurred with the shift from republic to empire: “Under the establishment of Augustus, the idea of majesty was transferred from the metaphysical entity of the State to the Emperor’s person; and so far as the majesty of the State is concentrated in the hands of the sovereign, there was no error in this

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construction of the law.”109 But as he immediately went on to point out, the Romans failed to distinguish between the emperor and the office. In this instance, Ferguson noted, “the principal object of the law” was not only to guard the “safety” and “authority” of the imperial government, but also the emperor’s “most private concerns.”110 This introduced a principle of arbitrariness into the entire political and legal system, epitomized most vividly in the criminal trials and accusations conducted under Tiberius. As such, it violated another Ciceronian maxim – salus populi suprema lex esto (“the safety of the people is the highest law”) – which Ferguson elsewhere described as the “fundamental principle of political science.”111 Following Tacitus, he noted that the old republican lex maiestatis had aimed at the security of the state, punishing “rebellion, breach of the public trust, betraying the forces of the State to its enemies, or violating the person of the magistrate in discharge of his office. These were justly reputed an invasion of the rights of the sovereign, were public crimes, and might be prosecuted by any citizen, though not particularly interested in the issue of the trial.” But all this changed with the ascription of majesty to the emperor himself: In respect to criminal prosecutions, the change of government which took place at Rome, had, without altering the language or forms of law, made a fatal change in the effect they produced; and served to show, that the seeds of despotism may be laid in the freest establishments; and that when the characters of men are changed, the worst abuse may proceed from the best institutions.

The account of the lex maiestatis thus culminated in a clear statement of the priority of politics over law in the preservation of liberty. As Ferguson commented, “it was not the law itself, so much as the arbitrary application of it, that was likely to deprive every Roman of that degree of security and freedom to which he still had pretensions.”112 It is worth noting that this stood in stark contrast to Smith’s evaluation of the capacity of military monarchies to preserve a regime of justice and even civil liberty. As we saw in Chapter 2, Smith was prepared to describe the Roman empire, like the Cromwellian dictatorship, as a military government or military monarchy. But unlike Ferguson, Smith had declared that “a military government allows the strictest administration of justice.” He had even hinted that the transition from

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republic to empire had led to improvements in civil and criminal justice and in the administration of the provinces. The private affairs of individuals continued to be decided in the same manner and in the same courts as before. The emperor had no interest he could obtain by altering those forms, and on the other hand the people would more readily submit to his authority when they were allowed to continue. But the whole of the executive and the far greater part of the legislative power he took into his own hands.113

Crucially, the establishment of military rule did not collapse the distinction between executive and judicial power that Smith saw as the crucial underpinning of individual liberty. In his lectures, he suggested that Cromwell himself made several improvements to the English civil law, and noted that the Roman authors “tell us that justice was never better administered than under the worst of the emperors, Domitian and Nero.” As scholars have underlined, all this reads as a pointed riposte to the civic humanist thesis that justice and civil liberty depended ultimately upon preserving the right form of government.114 Ferguson’s fi nal story concerned the impact of Rome’s military government upon the long-term survival of the state. The military preserved its virtue for much longer than might have been expected. But the paradox of a military government was that, for the security of its leaders, it sought to weaken the armies. The first to be corrupted were the praetorian bands, who were “early debauched by their residence in the capital.” Despite the efforts of virtuous provincial generals like Galba to reverse this trend, the “contagion of military arrogance” spread outward toward the frontiers. The extension of Roman citizenship to the inhabitants of the wider empire accelerated this process: it “extinguished all the sentiments on which the legions of old were wont to value themselves, and with the loss of their self-estimation as Romans, probably diminished the interest they had in the preservation of the Roman name.” As the armies themselves were corrupted, so the empire underwent a “radical and irrecoverable decline of its character, and even its force.” The Romans, by the continual efforts of seven centuries, through the territory of the warlike hordes who opposed them, and over forests and rugged ways, that were every where to be cleared at the expence of their labour and their blood, had made their way from the Tiber to the

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Rhine and the Danube: but the ways they had made to reach their enemies were now open, in their turns, for their enemies to reach themselves. The ample resources which they had formed by their cultivation increased the temptation to invade them, and facilitated all the means of making war upon their country. And in the sequel, by reducing the inhabitants of their provinces, in every part, to pacific subjects, they brought the defence of the empire to depend on a few professional soldiers, who composed the legions.115

In view of such circumstances, what required explanation was not the collapse of the Roman empire, but rather the extended duration of its decline: From such a tendency to corruption, it is not surprising that a nation, though once of such mighty power, should, in a few ages, verge to its ruin. It is rather surprising that a fabric, mouldering so fast within, should have so long withstood the storm from which it was assailed from abroad. Rapid in the fi rst period of its fall, by the incapacity of such enfeebled hands to preserve so great an empire, the effects of its decline became insensible and slow towards its fi nal extinction: So much, that although from the accession of Alaric into Rome, was no more than about four hundred years; but from this date, to the reduction of Constantinople by the Turks, was a period of above a thousand years. So long was it before the lights of civil, political and military wisdom, erected by the Roman commonwealth, though struck out by the Goths and Vandals in the West, and continually sinking in the East, were entirely extinguished.116

The problem of the duration of the eastern empire was, of course, a major theme of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Ferguson, however, had completed the “revolution of which it was proposed to give an account,” the transition from a republican government to a hereditary military monarchy which he had outlined in his letter to William Strahan.117 Ferguson’s analysis of the political condition of the early Roman empire was, unsurprisingly, entirely negative. There was no hint of the idea that the empire might serve as a vehicle for the propagation of Christianity, based on civilization, union, and peace, as Robertson had argued.118 Instead, Ferguson concluded his narrative by reminding his readers that an imperial monarchy, even under the rule of the most virtuous individual emperors, was by no means capable of reviving the civil and military commitment and energy upon which all flourishing polities

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ultimately rested: “A People may receive protection from the justice and humanity of single men; but can receive independence, vigour, and peace of mind, only from their own.”119 The problem with which Ferguson continued to deal, after the publication of the History, was the appropriate place and nature of such virtue in the eighteenth-century British state.

6

Q

Civil-Military Union and the Modern State

T HE SPECTER of a Roman-style revolution in eighteenth-century Britain was the backdrop against which Adam Ferguson formulated his political and military reform program. This program, which he occasionally referred to as his “project,” was grounded upon the ideal of a voluntary civic militia and, even more centrally, the reestablishment of the connection between the civil and military departments of the state.1 The significance of this project went well beyond the immediate demands of national defense, and instead stood at the center of a far broader vision of a modern civil society. First, the establishment of an open, merit-based system of military ranks and honors would neutralize divisions between the various orders of the state and create a true publicservice elite with the ability and virtue to act in the nation’s interest. Second, a new system of military honors would contain and moderate the moral and political distortions unleashed by commercial society, creating an alternative focus for public esteem, emulation, and distinction. In this sense, the military hierarchy, based on true merit or patriotism, was conceived as a counterweight to the market and to property, constituting a standard of excellence and a model of patriotism for the rest of society. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the creation of a martial public-service nobility would serve as an institutional safeguard against the combination of populist democracy with a centralized and potentially imperial monarchy. The union of statesmen and warriors would thus guard against the “alliance of faction with military force” which the Essay on the History of Civil Society had identified as the main threat to the liberty of modern Britain.

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This chapter sets Ferguson’s thinking about honor, distinctions, patriotism, and civil-military union in the context of late eighteenthcentury criticisms of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. Ferguson’s call for a union of statesmen and warriors sharply distinguished him from many of his eighteenth-century contemporaries, ranging from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to authors like Jean-Louis Delolme, the chevalier de Chastellux, and the abbé Sieyès, all of whom argued that maintaining a clear distinction between civil and military powers was key to the liberty, stability, and economic prosperity of modern states. Instead, Ferguson’s advocacy of civil-military union resembled the thinking of European contemporaries like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de Guibert, and the Swiss thinker Johann Georg Zimmermann. Despite obvious differences of national context, these thinkers shared a common distrust of professional soldiers and laid a correspondingly strong emphasis on the need to maintain military preparedness among modern populations. There was an overlap between Ferguson’s own project for military reform and the call for an integrated system of civilian and military offices set out in Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland. Yet although Ferguson’s vision of a militarily prepared state was grounded on a positive estimation of ancient Rome’s linked system of civil and military departments, it was not a demand for a return to the republicanism of the ancients. In its emphasis on a distinction of social ranks, and its acceptance of monarchy as a legitimate political institution, Ferguson’s republicanism remained at odds with both the egalitarian republicanism of the ancients and the explicitly antimonarchical, largestate republicanism of the American and French revolutions. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section discusses Ferguson’s idea of monarchical government as the most viable form of government for unequal modern states, concentrating especially on his subtle reworking and critique of Montesquieu’s conception of an honorbased monarchy. The following sections focus on the ideal of military ser vice as the centerpiece of Ferguson’s vision of a reformed British monarchy. The second section traces the roots of his thinking on civilmilitary relations by examining his pamphlet of 1756, the Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. The third section considers the intricacies of Ferguson’s ideal of civil-military “union” as he developed

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it in his thinking between 1767 and 1783, and compares his ideal of an integrated system of civil and military commands with the model set out almost contemporaneously by Mably. The fourth and fi nal section of the chapter discusses in more detail the neo-German idea of military aristocracy in Ferguson’s later works and places it in a British and Scottish intellectual context.

Monarchy, Nobility, and Honor Although it is conventionally read as a republican text, the Essay actually contained an endorsement of Montesquieu’s argument about the unsuitability of republican government for the large, populous, and prosperous states of eighteenth-century Europe. As Ferguson wrote in part 1 of the book, monarchies were “generally found, where the state is enlarged in population and territory, beyond the numbers and dimensions that are consistent with republican government.” Large- or medium-sized territorial states harbored systems of dependence and inequalities that undermined the love of political equality upon which republican governments depended for their survival. Furthermore, eighteenth-century states were bound together in a shared culture of monarchy. Although modern republics obviously existed in the eighteenth-century, they were inherently weak and unstable in comparison with their more powerful monarchical neighbors. In Ferguson’s description, they were “like shrubs, under the shade of a taller wood, choked by the neighbourhood of more powerful states.” Even modern republics were inhabited by individuals whose sentiments and manners approximated more closely to those living under neighboring monarchies than to those of the ancient Greeks or Romans (a point also made by Smith in his Lectures on Jurisprudence). Thus, despite the wide diversity among modern Europe’s political constitutions, every one of them had been shaped by the “influence of monarchy” which, due to its “prevalence in this part of the world,” had a “great effect on nations, even where it is not the form established.” Modern Eu rope was dominated by the “contagion of monarchical manners.”2 This verdict rested upon a distinctive reading of Europe’s postRoman history. According to Ferguson, the conquest and settlement of Europe by the ancient Germans had laid the foundations for a new kind

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of large-scale political society in Eu rope, which was quite distinct from the barbarous monarchies of Asia and the republican city-states and empires of the Mediterranean: The states of Eu rope, in the manner of their fi rst settlement, laid the foundations of monarchy, and were prepared to unite under regular and extensive governments. If the Greeks, whose progress at home terminated in the establishment of so many independent republics, had under Agamemnon effected a conquest and settlement in Asia, they might have furnished an example of the same kind. But the original inhabitants of any country, forming many separate cantons, come by slow degrees to that coalition and union in which conquering tribes are, in effecting their conquests, or in securing their possessions, hurried at once. Caesar encountered some hundreds of independent nations in Gaul, whom even their common danger did not sufficiently unite. The German invaders, who settled in the lands of the Romans, made, in the same district, a number of separate establishments, but far more extensive than what the ancient Gauls, by their conjunctions and treaties, or in the result of their wars, could after many ages have reached. . . . The seeds of great monarchies, and the roots of extensive dominion, were every where planted with the colonies that divided the Roman empire.3

Ferguson went on to explain how the precariousness of these early settlements necessitated the organization of society along military and feudal lines. Gradually, the temporary grants of land which were distributed among the subordinate military vassals became hereditary, giving rise to a “powerful and permanent order” of nobility. The subsequent histories of Europe’s individual states were determined by clashes between the centralizing forces of royal authority and the decentralizing forces of the nobility. While the crown secured political union over an extended territory, the nobility constituted the vital check against the onset of despotism. A major feature of Ferguson’s description of monarchy was its emphasis on a powerful military nobility in the preservation of liberty. At one point he claimed that the martial aristocracies of Europe had “formed a strong and insurmountable barrier against a general despotism in the state.”4 This fitted with his defi nition of monarchy as grounded on military hierarchy; as he wrote in the Institutes of Moral Philosophy, “extensive and perpetual military arrangements have led to

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monarchical subordination.”5 This accent on military aristocracy set Ferguson at some distance from most of his Scottish contemporaries. As Colin Kidd has argued, Smith, William Robertson, John Millar and others were fundamentally at odds with aristocratic or neo-German ideals of liberty. According to Kidd, for these writers it was the “progress of the arts of peace which had led to a redistribution of wealth by counterposing commercial to landed wealth, and eventually to a recasting of the constitution and the rise of civil liberty. They perceived that social instability was in some ways a greater threat to authentic liberty under the law than despotism itself.”6 As Smith claimed in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, “the power of the nobles has always been brought to ruin before a system of liberty has been established, and this indeed must always be the case. For the nobility are the greatest oppressors of liberty that we can imagine. They hurt the liberty of the people even more than an absolute monarch.”7 Ferguson’s own view, by contrast, remained much closer to the spirit of Montesquieu’s conception of monarchy. Robertson himself hinted as much in his View of the Progress of Society in Europe, in which he cited both Montesquieu and Ferguson for their analyses of the “maxims of honour” and “ideas of personal distinction” which set limits to the power of princes.8 Where Ferguson differed from Montesquieu was in advocating a fi rmer moral foundation for Europe’s large-scale modern monarchies. As we saw in Chapter 1, Montesquieu’s conception of monarchy centered on the principle of “false honour,” which he presented as a viable moral and political alternative to true honor, or virtue. In the second half of the Essay, by contrast, Ferguson sought to show that a modern monarchy, without patriotism or genuine political virtue, would remain vulnerable to despotism. He thus sought to reconcile the republican values of virtue and public ser vice with the inequalities of rank characteristic of Europe’s modern kingdoms. As Ferguson emphasized, monarchical government remained “consistent with the safety and prosperity of some nations; it admits of a vigorous courage, by which the rights of individuals, and of kingdoms, may be long preserved.” The subjects of monarchy, though rarely motivated by the intensely shared commitment to political and economic equality that characterized the citizens of republics, remained “highly susceptible of moral excellence,” and often acted “a vigorous part as members of the state.” They would be

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“occupied as the members of an active society, and engaged to treat their fellow-creatures on a liberal footing.” The same “integrity, and vigorous spirit” that expressed itself in sustaining equality in democratic states worked in monarchies to maintain established systems of subordination. In short, most of the virtues that many earlier thinkers (including, if from different perspectives, both Niccolò Machiavelli and Montesquieu) had confi ned to the strenuous demands of republican politics were for Ferguson entirely compatible with modern states and the unequal social ranks that they housed.9 Ferguson’s critique of Montesquieu’s idea of monarchy aligned him with a number of Eu ropean contemporaries writing between 1748 and 1789. During this period, many European thinkers seriously doubted whether false honor really could save states from despotic rule (as Johann Gottfried Herder remarked in his unpublished “Travel Diary” of 1769, one of the key questions Montesquieu had not solved was whether “honour and despotism can exist simultaneously”).10 Another such thinker was the French philosopher and encyclopedist, the marquis Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, who set out his ideas about the possibility of a virtuous and patriotic monarchical culture in the articles “Honour” and “Legislator” written for the Encyclopédie in the early 1760s. In each of these pieces Saint-Lambert sought to demonstrate the need for a more patriotically oriented idea of honor in France, and hence claimed that “true honour” (le véritable honneur), which he equated primarily with love of country, was as necessary to the preservation of large-scale monarchies as it was to small-scale republics.11 According to Saint-Lambert, Montesquieu’s conception of false honor had none of the socializing and integrative qualities ascribed to it in The Spirit of the Laws. Honor was quite capable of motivating men toward great deeds and heroic actions. But when separated from love of country it remained a socially divisive force. Honor alone would not unite men “amongst themselves; on the contrary, it multiplies among them the objects of jealousy.”12 Instead, Saint-Lambert argued for the need to align honor more closely with virtue or patriotism. By distributing honors in such a way that they were the rewards of virtue, the legislator would manage the good of the state and promote “virtuous actions.” The civic crowns and murals, the names of conquered countries given to victors, the triumphs, served more than the love of country itself in

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inspiring Roman souls to great actions. Do not think that I am confusing honour and glory; I know they are distinct, but I believe above all that where glory is loved, there also will be honour.13

This morally acceptable version of honor, furthermore, would mitigate the worst effects of inequality. According to Saint-Lambert, a society characterized by inequalities in property and honors always had the potential to collapse in envy, civil war, and despotism. But by making public service a prerequisite for the attainment of preeminence and distinction, it would be possible to avoid the popular envy that accompanied a purely wealth-based distinction of ranks.14 Ferguson’s argument followed a similar pattern. Although it was focused upon the distinctive circumstances of the British constitutional state, it found expression in a similar call for the renewal of patriotic service among the higher ranks of modern states. The key to the account of the corruption of modern monarchies in the fi nal pages of the Essay— states in which “property, distinction, and pleasure, are thrown out as baits to the imagination”—was Ferguson’s fear that the higher ranks were being transformed into purely wealth-based elites without either patriotism or courage. Birth and fortune now created “false grounds of precedency.” From this perspective, he argued, luxury “must be allowed to corrupt the monarchical as much as the republican state, and to introduce a fatal dissolution of manners.” All this, crucially, was a matter of particular relevance for the British elite: But the higher orders of men, if they relinquish the state, if they cease to possess that courage and elevation of mind, and to exercise those talents which are employed in its defence, and its government, are, in reality, by the seeming advantages of their station, become the refuse of that society of which they were once the ornament; and from being the most respectable, and the most happy, of its members, are become the most wretched and corrupt.15

The key concept here was “elevation of mind,” which was a striking alternative to Montesquieu’s “false honour.” The phrase echoed the stress on strength of mind found in much ancient Stoic theory, as well as the account of the virtue of greatness of spirit or courage set out in Cicero’s partially Stoic De Officiis. In that work, Cicero had described greatness of spirit as consisting in a disdain for the external trappings of prestige and in a willingness to undertake “difficult and laborious tasks which

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endanger both life itself and much that concerns life.”16 Ferguson’s usage also paralleled the appropriation of these Stoic themes in a number of early modern works: he repeated the traditional association of “greatness of mind” with the Theban statesman Epaminondas, and he also echoed the third earl of Shaftesbury’s claim that strength of mind consisted in self-command.17 The theme ran through much of the Essay. Elevation of mind was grounded upon justice and the ability to follow its demands in both prosperity and adversity. Although it implied vigilance and tenacity with regard to one’s personal rank within the state, it also demanded psychological detachment from mere opinion and from the race for distinctions and wealth. This understanding of the orientation appropriate to the higher ranks of a modern state resembled much older claims that vera nobilitas (true nobility) consisted in moral and political excellence rather than wealth or birth.18 As Ferguson concluded, the “true point of honour in free and uncorrupted states” consisted in a “zeal for the public.” Nobility brought responsibilities as well as honors, and members of any modern aristocracy had to “pay with their personal attendance and their blood for the civil or military honours they enjoy.”19

Ferguson and the Militia Ferguson’s earliest significant discussion of this kind of public-service elite appeared in his 1756 pamphlet Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. An intervention into the debate about extending what would in 1757 become the English militia act to Scotland, its argument was shaped by discussions about Scottish military reform that had taken place in the Select Society of Edinburgh throughout the 1750s.20 It was the text that Ferguson felt best embodied his military reform project, which he described in a letter of 1759 to Gilbert Elliott as “the best calculated for invasions of any philosophy now extant.” As this quotation suggests, one motivation behind Ferguson’s pamphlet was his anxiety about the nation’s vulnerability to conquest. “It seems plain,” he continued in the letter to Elliott, “that the French intended by assembling their force to strike a blow in the Channel,” while a French victory in Germany would have prepared the way for “an embarkation from the Weser & the Elbe” aimed specifically at Scotland.21 Ferguson’s concern about Britain’s vulnerability to invasion never entirely evap-

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orated. The problem returned in 1778–1780, when France’s entry into the American War sparked renewed concern about a French strike on Britain itself. During this period, Ferguson was in correspondence with William Eden, who had himself advocated a renewed and patriotic “system of internal strength” in one of his Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle.22 Ferguson himself put it colorfully in a letter of July 1779 to his close friend John Macpherson. Calling for a revival of the posse comitatus in Scotland, Ferguson envisaged the comprehensive arming of the country against intruders, with the countryside “full of People firing & shooting at them from every Hedge & Bush.” “Such is my Plan for the Invasion War if there should be such a Business of which indeed I have no doubt unless it be prevented by our Vigilance & the imposing Aspect of our preparations.”23 The broader significance of the Reflections lies in its account of the structural problems that, in Ferguson’s view, accompanied the modern combination of constitutional government with an advanced commercial economy. In this respect, the pamphlet voiced themes that had dominated British political discourse in the opening stages of the Seven Years War, and prefigured a number of contemporary works— notably John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) and Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republicks (1759)— that were also highly critical of Britain’s commercial politics.24 One feature of all these works was their anxiety that Britain’s achievement in forging a new kind of constitutional system held out little prospect of taming the forces of decline that had destroyed the most flourishing republics and empires of the past. Like both Brown and Montagu, Ferguson presented Britain as a new Carthage: a dangerously corrupt, wealthy, and overextended state that stood little chance against a more powerful, more martial, and more patriotic neo-Roman France. Also like both of them, he advocated rebalancing the relationship between empire, wealth, and defensive capacity through the institution of a militia that would combine “military virtue and publick spirit.”25 The starting point of Ferguson’s diagnosis was the observation that Britain was unable to bear the fi nancial and military costs of fighting a European war while simultaneously preserving her colonies. Despite the nation’s former glories in long-distance confl icts, it was ill-equipped for the more fundamental demands of national defense:

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment In former wars this nation felt, only, their strength, their fleets were triumphant on every sea, and carried the terror of their name to the most distant parts of the globe. Their wealth found allies, and put numerous armies in motion on the Continent, where their enemy found sufficient occupation for his powers. In the present war, when engaged singly with a powerful enemy, they have felt their weakness too. Their weapons, it seems, are formed to wound at a distance, in close fight their bosom is bare and defenceless. No sooner did the enemy threaten to invade this island, but we appeared unequal to the defence of any distant possessions. Our numerous fleets were occupied in guarding the coast at home, and a declaration of war, in which we threatened to force our enemy to a reparation of injuries, seems to have brought upon us, only, a new expence in defending ourselves.26

Furthermore, France had successfully emulated Britain’s commercial, naval, and colonial strategy: “Our example hath taught the French to bring commerce in aid of their military power. They have felt the advantage of trading colonies, and the necessity of a powerful marine.”27 Ferguson’s analysis rested on a broader history of the changing balance between military and commercial occupations in European kingdoms since the Middle Ages (here he was covering the same historical territory sketched in Andrew Fletcher’s Discourse of Government). In the “Gothic” kingdoms of Europe, he noted, military occupations had taken precedence over economic tasks, and every military emergency brought a militia “to the field with a love of glory, and a familiarity with arms, more formidable than the exactest discipline.” The dissolution of the Gothic military establishment, however, coupled with the apparent security afforded by Britain’s geograph ical position as an island, meant that the “use of arms, arising from the necessity of selfdefence,” had decayed. The progress of commerce had naturally induced a deterioration of the military spirit, and while Britain labored to “acquire wealth,” it lacked the means of defending it. The nation now resembled a “company of manufacturers” where the immersion of individuals in repetitive mechanical tasks had created men incapable of perceiving the duty of national defense. Moreover, the nation’s nobility and gentry had lost their traditional contempt for “lucrative arts,” and wealth had replaced military ser vice as the key to public estimation. “Love of Pay” and “Compulsion” had become the only means to ensure a viable military force, but this meant that armies were now composed wholly from the “Dregs of the People.” Given the fragility of the

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British system of civil government, this left open the danger that a professional army composed mostly of the lower ranks might switch its allegiance from support of the established order and raise up some individual to a position of unconstitutional preeminence. France, by contrast, had preserved the rudiments of a martial culture by rewarding military ser vice with glory, dignities, and honors. In France the “highest dignities of the state derive a new lustre from military ser vice.”28 Ferguson’s argument about the downgrading of military ser vice picked up a well-established theme in British political discourse. The issue had been central to the standing army debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and had resurfaced in the 1730s among the critics of Horace Walpole.29 By the middle of the 1750s, it had become a commonplace that Britain, despite its wealth and empire, was unable to sustain the kind of military culture and vitality of France, its main continental rival. This was primarily because, in highly commercialized societies, military ser vice was no longer a dependable route to wealth, honor, and social preeminence. As the political economist Josiah Tucker proclaimed in 1755, “military ser vice, so much coveted in other countries, as the most honourable, is not entitled to a very great respect.”30 Furthermore, France’s centralized monarchical government was increasingly perceived as an advantage when it came to defense, a view which turned on its head conventional wisdom about the military superiority of free states. As one of the many anonymous pamphleteers from this period suggested in 1758, the continent’s princes were “assured of ready military ser vice,” and frequently outshone those states where the “principles of public freedom” existed.31 The militia proposal that Ferguson laid down in the pamphlet was designed to correct these imbalances in Britain’s political culture. He also addressed two long-standing fears about the implications of establishing a militia in Scotland. The fi rst anxiety was that a Scottish militia would favor a revival of Jacobitism, the memory of which was never very far from the surface of Ferguson’s text. According to him, British statesman had been far “too scrupulous” on this issue. It was precisely the absence of a patriotic militia that had left the door open for the rebels in 1745, and its continued absence left open the possibility that a “few banditti from the mountains, trained by their situation to a warlike disposition, might over-run the country, and, in a crucial time, give law to this nation.” The example of the collapse of the Roman republic,

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Ferguson wrote, proved nothing against this point: Caesar and Pompey had employed troops that were “formed to all the vices and disadvantages of a standing army: the event therefore is rather a proof of danger from that quarter.”32 The second anxiety was that militia ser vice would drag men away from vital commercial and agricultural employments, thereby retarding the nation’s economic progress. As Ferguson wrote, many years later, to Eden, the example of the Swiss republics was a striking proof of the compatibility of voluntary militia ser vice with a flourishing industry and commerce. The “only People in Europe who are regularly armed are the most Industrious and Peaceable Citizens,” and any power foolish enough to attack them would meet with “disgrace and ridicule.”33 Ferguson’s argument can also be compared with the proposals for military reform set out by Lord Kames in his Sketches of the History of Man. Like Ferguson, Kames faced up squarely to the problem of maintaining military patriotism within a commercial state. Motivated by the “fi rm conviction that a military and an industrious spirit are of equal importance to Britain,” Kames rejected both Harrington’s and Fletcher’s militia projects on the grounds that they would have sapped the economic foundations of British power, rendering the country of “little or no weight in Europe” and forced to rely on subsidies by hiring out troops to wealthier neighbors. As its success in the Seven Years War had demonstrated, British power was first and foremost a consequence of its domestic manufactures and extensive commerce. The issue instead, for Kames as much as for Ferguson, was to ensure Britain’s defense without sacrificing either commerce or liberty. Unlike Ferguson, however, Kames rejected the Roman republic’s system of military organization as a model. He described the Roman republic as a “forc’d constitution; contrary to nature,” and as a “hazardous constitution, having no medium between universal conquest and wretched slavery.” His immediate aim was to strengthen Britain through a comprehensive remodeling of its standing army, an institution which, for all its disadvantages, he accepted as an inevitable part of the machinery of the eighteenth-century state and as the only form of military orga ni zation capable of reconciling Britain’s defensive needs with its continued economic development.34 Ferguson expressed a similar skepticism about the austere and compulsory scheme laid down by Fletcher almost sixty years previ-

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ously. Instead, he turned to the fashionable concepts of honor and emulation, focusing upon the psychological mechanisms by which Britain’s leading ranks could be inspired to reassume their military responsibilities and thus to lay the foundations of a rejuvenated, patriotic, and martial nation. But in contrast to Kames, Rome remained the crucial model: “At Rome the several branches of the civil magistracy, the senate and the forum, opened the way to distinction and honour; but when a person laid his highest claim to consideration and applause, he reckoned the years of his military ser vice, he shewed the wounds he had received in the defence of his country.” In Britain, military offices were to be accorded equivalent status to the great civilian dignities of the state, thereby ensuring that the “military character will rise in the esteem of the public,” and military responsibilities would fall upon those “who deserve its confidence, on account of their personal spirit, their property, and interest in its preservation.” What this meant in practice was that the military hierarchy would have to mirror, as far as possible, the preexisting hierarchies of property and authority that characterized the civil sphere. While the Crown would nominate officers and possess the supreme command of the militia, the different ranks of officers themselves “should follow, as nearly as possible, that subordination in point of dignity and wealth already subsisting in this nation.” Failure on this count would result in the falling of military force into the “hands of the least reputable class of the people, who cannot be reduced into the order of an army, and who are strangers to the sentiments and the attention to personal character, which such a duty would require.”35

Ferguson and Mably on the Foundations of a Free State Ferguson’s insistence on the union of civil and military offices as the key to the preservation of free states was an adaptation of a major theme of Roman and Rome-inspired political thought. The subordination of the military to the civil power had, of course, been a major preoccupation of Roman political thought; Cicero’s phrase—cedant arma togae (“let arms yield to the toga”)— is probably the best-known expression of this view. In the Roman republic there had existed a distinction between imperium militiae (military power or “command abroad”) and imperium domi (civil power or “command at home”). The distinction paralleled a broader

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division between the spheres of war and law.36 The most famous reworking of this theme in early modern Europe was that of Machiavelli, who had argued for the crucial interdependence of civilian and military virtues and powers in The Prince, the Discorsi, and The Art of War.37 Similar ideas informed the works of many subsequent political thinkers in Britain. John Milton had argued in the Eikonoklastes of 1649 that “if the power of the sword were any where separate and undepending from the power of law . . . then would that power of the sword be soon master of the law.” Lord George Lyttelton made a similar argument in his popular Letters from a Persian in England of 1735. Paraphrasing Machiavelli’s Art of War, Lyttelton claimed that military virtues and abilities were now devalued below “many others of vastly less importance,” and argued that the nation seemed “to forget, that on these alone must depend the security of the rest, and that every civil excellence is useless, unless it be under their protection.” Thomas Gordon, in his Discourses on Sallust, defi ned free states as those “where the laws must dictate to the sword.”38 The description of a free state that Ferguson set out in the Essay was fi rmly in line with this tradition: In every free state, there is a perpetual necessity to distinguish the maxims of martial law from those of the civil; and he who has not learned to give an implicit obedience, where the state has given him a military leader, and to resign his personal freedom in the field, from the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil society, and is fit only to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state, where the principles of mutiny and of servility being joined, the one or the other is frequently adopted in the wrong place.39

While this distinctively British tradition was crucially important in shaping Ferguson’s conception of a modern civil society, his thinking must also be situated in the context of European debates, stimulated largely by Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, about the relationship between the civil and military powers of large modern states. After 1748, a number of writers endorsed Montesquieu’s advocacy of separate civilian and military institutions, arguing that the distinction between the two spheres was now inseparable from modern political realities. One of the most significant French statements of this view was set out by François Jean, marquis de Chastellux in his De la félicité publique of 1772 (translated into English and published in 1774 as An Essay on Public Hap-

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piness). Although the conception of representative government worked out by Chastellux differed substantially from the account of monarchy set out in The Spirit of the Laws, he followed Montesquieu in recommending a clear separation between civil and military functions as the basis of a modern, econom ical ly productive state. He rejected ancient ideals of military virtue and criticized the dangerous confusion of economic and political interests that characterized the ancient republics. He repeated Montesquieu’s verdict on the damage done to states by “that vain enthusiasm of glory, that military, and conquering spirit, which only serves to sharpen during some time, those arms, with which the citizens are destined, one day, to murder each other.” Criticizing Rousseau’s idealization of the ancient agrarian-military republic and his rejection of political representation, Chastellux argued that a professional army was a key institution of a flourishing modern monarchy. The combination of military, judicial, and legislative employments, which was the hallmark of ancient republicanism, was, by contrast, a symptom of barbarism. In ancient Greece and Rome, one found only “a shallow politician, an incapable judge, an indisciplined soldier.”40 At the opposite end of the spectrum, many of Montesquieu’s critics argued for maintaining a close connection between the civil and military departments of modern states. The most famous of these critics was Rousseau himself, who consistently argued for combining civilian and military magistracies as a means of avoiding the shift from civil to military government that had ruined the Roman republic. As he argued in his essay on the “State of War” (which, in a striking echo of Montesquieu, was originally titled “That the State of War arises from the Social State”), the “perfection of the social order consists in the union of force and law.” Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland was, in part, an attempt to realize such a union through a plan for the combination and gradation of civilian and military magistracies. Originating in anxieties about the substitution of the “spirit of military government for the spirit of republican government in Poland,” the idea of graduated promotions through the civilian and military hierarchies was designed not only to reward virtue and merit, but also to diffuse a culture of emulation and patriotism throughout Poland. As Rousseau wrote, this would be a “patriotism enlightened by experience.”41 Perhaps the most sustained argument for reuniting the civil and military departments of modern states was that of Mably, whose own

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analysis overlapped with Ferguson’s in several respects.42 The theme of civil-military relations stretched through almost all of Mably’s works, from his writings of the 1750s (the Observations on the Romans of 1751, and the Droits et Devoirs du Citoyen of 1758), through to his later works on the constitutions of Poland and the United States. As he underlined in his dialogue of 1774, De la législation, ou Principes des Lois, achieving a balance between civil and military powers posed almost intractable difficulties for modern societies. If the military was too strictly subordinated, the state would end up with the “worst troops in the world.” But if the civil power was subordinated to the military, “the civil laws would have no force, and the fortune of citizens would never be secure” (here, as elsewhere, he referred to England’s experience under the tyranny of a parliamentary army). The solution, Mably argued, was to establish a “perfect harmony between civil functions and military functions,” thus ensuring that “the republic has nothing to fear neither from its generals nor from its armies.” More broadly, Mably sought to establish a culture of dedicated public ser vice, in which patriotic honor, rather than birth or money, would be the criterion for, and reward of, military duty.43 In his Phocion’s Conversations, fi rst published in 1763, Mably had anticipated one of the key arguments of Ferguson’s Essay. According to Mably, Phocion had struggled to reverse the distinction between the “men of the long robe” and the “men of the sword” that characterized the Athens of his day. He had argued that a government “in which the same person acted both parts (in propounding laws and ordering the militia, that is, both as a general and a politician) was a more perfect, uniform and regular mixture, and would redound most to the general good and public safety.” This, Mably observed in the “Remarks” appended to the work, had a clear and continuing relevance to modern European politics: I believe it would not be impossible to prove, that a state in which every citizen is not trained to defend his country as a soldier, can never have any thing of a good military establishment. . . . If there are men in a state wholly confi ned to civil employments, they will necessarily introduce an effeminacy of manners, and such effeminacy of manners will as certainly relax the springs of military government.44

Mably developed his critique of the gulf that had opened up between statesmen and generals in modern states in several later works. He praised

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both the Swiss and Roman republics for the esteem in which they held military ser vice. He praised the Romans, specifically, for having made the attainment of public office dependent upon the various grades of military ser vice.45 These mechanisms, Mably later wrote in his work on the government and laws of Poland, served to maintain the moral and practical excellence of the state’s civilian leadership, whereas their separation “necessarily degrades all political talents, and almost always produces mediocre men.” From this perspective, the specialization of economic, political, and military functions had led to a severe narrowing of political capacity. While the ancient republics had “admirable men,” with a fi rm knowledge and experience of “all the needs and duties of society,” the moderns had only limited talents which were of little advantage to society.46 Mably repeated these claims almost word for word in his fi nal work, entitled Observations on the Government and Laws of the United States of America, published in 1784. But in this text he made an important clarification to the basic argument. He gave qualified approval to the law of Massachusetts that proclaimed the necessity of maintaining the subordination of military power to civil authority. But it was “not enough to declare that the army ought to be subordinate to the civil authority; this is a truth comparatively trivial; but the legislature should take every possible measure and precaution, in order to secure the continuance, and to prevent any interruption of this subordination.”47 The same applied to the constitutions of New York and Pennsylvania, which, Mably argued, recognized the danger of military usurpation, but had failed to implement genuine institutional mechanisms to prevent it. In short, a citizens’ militia was a necessary, but not sufficient, basis upon which to rest the future liberty of the United States. What was required in addition, Mably claimed, was a more comprehensive set of regulations designed to prevent great inequalities of fortune (he explicitly recommended the wider adoption of Georgia’s legislation against entails).48 This was because he deemed the magistrates of large republics peculiarly vulnerable to the temptations of corruption that naturally accompanied the increase of wealth and money, and feared for the loyalties of the military in conditions of great social inequal ity. The single most important additional criterion of a free state, according to Mably, was a relative degree of equality between citizens, which would act as a guarantee against the rise of the destructive passions of avarice and

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envy (as William Godwin wrote in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, Mably’s De la législation could be characterized as an attempt to display the “advantages of equality,” although Godwin thought that Mably had quit “the subject in despair from an opinion of the incorrigibleness of human depravity”).49 These destructive passions, Mably wrote, were incurable disorders “incident to all free states in which property is very unequally divided.” In the context of his discussion of the United States, this meant finding ways to avoid the inequalities that would be the inevitable result of its expanding commerce and manufactures. Laws were required to maintain a greater degree of “harmony” and “equilibrium” between the members of society. Once again, Mably turned to the example of Switzerland. He advocated copying key elements of Swiss republican politics, which he claimed consisted mainly in the avoidance of the temptations of wealth and, consequently, in establishing the “silence” of those passions which were the “most natural to the human heart.”50 Maintaining social equality would be as important as the institutional balance of civil and military powers. Ferguson’s own advocacy of civil-military union in the Essay rested upon a positive endorsement of the Spartan and Roman models. Drawing upon Xenophon’s Constitution of Sparta, he praised Sparta as the only state in the history of mankind that had made virtue an “object of state.” Spartan virtue, however, rested less on the equal balance of property which many contemporary writers, such as Walter Moyle, Mably, or Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, had described as the foundation of the Spartan polity, and more on the institutional mechanisms that preserved emulation and competition among the citizens.51 Sparta was a “nursery of statesmen and warriors” where the usual ambitions and dissensions between individuals found their outlet in honorable emulation in the ser vice of the state. Sparta’s great achievement was to have constructed political institutions that worked to preserve the intensely moral dispositions that characterized societies without private property. Over time, however, the Spartans had learned to “regard their discipline merely on account of its moral effects. They had experienced the happiness of a mind courageous, disinterested, and devoted to its best affections; and they studied to preserve this character in themselves, by resigning the interests of ambition, and the hopes of military glory.” In language reminiscent of Rousseau’s Social Contract, he suggested that

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“the preservatives of civil liberty applied by the state, were the dispositions that were made to prevail in the hearts of its members.”52 Rome, on the other hand, served to demonstrate the superiority of voluntary and merit-based systems of military provision over professional troops. Its example enabled him to question the widespread eighteenth-century assumption that monarchical regimes, with their centralized structures of political and military decision-making, had rendered obsolete the martial and patriotic commitment of citizens. Ferguson acknowledged that armies required an undivided command (he named the Roman dictators and the Dutch stadtholders as examples). But he went on to claim that the meritocratic structure of the Roman system was a more reliable guarantee of the army’s quality and spirit. Although “the conduct of armies requires an absolute and undivided command; yet a national force is best formed, where numbers of men are inured to equality; and where the meanest citizen may consider himself, upon occasion, as destined to command as well as to obey.” It is here that the dictator fi nds a spirit and a force prepared to second his councils; it is here too that the dictator himself is formed, and that numbers of leaders are presented to the public choice; it is here that the prosperity of the state is independent of single men, and that a wisdom which never dies, with a system of military arrangements permanent and regular, can, even under the greatest misfortunes, prolong the national struggle. With this advantage, the Romans, fi nding a number of distinguished leaders arise in succession, were at all times almost equally prepared to contend with their enemies of Asia or Africa; while the fortune of those enemies, on the contrary, depended on the casual appearance of singular men, of a Mithridates, or of a Hannibal.53

In Rome, Ferguson went on, the principles of honor consisted in a “zeal for the public,” while war itself was an “operation of passions” rather than the “mere pursuit of a calling.” As he reminded his readers toward the end of his book, “no policy was ever more successful than that of the Roman republic in maintaining a national fortune.”54 Ferguson’s most elaborate examination of the principles governing a union of civil and military powers was set out in the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic. He emphasized particularly strongly the laws preventing the abuse of military power within the city,

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and underlined the seriousness with which the Romans maintained the boundary between civil and military law: The republic had taken many precautions to prevent the introduction of military power at Rome. Although the functions of the State and of War were intrusted to the same persons, yet the civil and military characters, except in the case of a Dictator, were never united at once in the same person. The officer of State resigned his civil power before he became a soldier, and the soldier was obliged to lay aside his military ensigns and character before he could enter the city; and if he sued for a triumph in his military form, must remain without the walls till that suit was discussed. The command of armies and of provinces in the person of any officer was limited to a single year at a time, at the end of which, if the commission were not expressly prolonged, it was understood to expire, and to devolve on a successor named by the Senate.55

In subsequent passages he implicitly responded to Smith’s criticisms of the Roman military establishment. In book 5 of the Wealth of Nations, Smith had suggested that the oscillation between command and obedience which characterized the ancient citizen in his civil and military capacity may have been a source of military weakness. Ferguson conceded that, occasionally, “the citizen may have been too much of a master in his civil capacity to subject himself fully to the bondage of a soldier,” but ultimately concluded that, since “experience” rather than “speculative ideas” led his conjectures on the subject, there was no reason to reject “as an improper mode of forming an army, that very establishment by which the Romans conquered the world.”56 All this formed part of a broader argument about the possibility of maintaining a flourishing martial culture within civilized, commercial, and wealthy states. As Ferguson had written in the Essay, the “celebrated nations of antiquity” had preserved civil-military union “under the highest attainments of civility, and under their greatest degrees of refi nement.” The History represents a development of this theme. Against Hume, Montesquieu, Smith, Delolme, Chastellux, and many others, Ferguson asserted that there was no intrinsic incompatibility between the preservation of martial values and a developed system of law and civil government. On this reading, Rome’s historical trajectory demonstrated that it was possible to maintain a close institutional union of the civil and military spheres of the state in conditions of “refi nement.”

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It may be difficult to determine, whether we are to consider the Roman establishment as civil or military; it certainly united, in a very high degree, the advantages of both, and continued longer to blend the professions of state and war together, than we are apt to think consistent with each: but to this very circumstance, probably, among others, we may safely ascribe, in this distinguished republic, the great ability of her councils, and the irresistible force with which they were executed.

The Romans, Ferguson underlined, had achieved civilization and refi nement without “departing from the policy by which they had been preserved in the infancy of their power.” Although various civilian magistracies, such as the censorship and the consulate, came to be distinguished, the republic, even in the “pitch of greatness, made no distinction between the civil and military establishments.”57 It is worth emphasizing how serious Ferguson was about the practical implementation of this vision. As he wrote in the 1780 letter to Eden, the transformation of statesmen into warriors formed part of a long-term strategy for maintaining political stability and for underpinning the “General Good” of the state. He stressed that the skills and talents of the statesman and the warrior were interdependent, asking his correspondent, “What would you think of a Party of Chess played by six of a side of whom each professed to know only the moves of one Piece?”58 Much of the argument set out in the Essay and History was designed to demonstrate the suitability of this model for British circumstances. A merit-based distinction of military offices would be compatible with Britain’s existing social ranks, while the martial energy and selfless patriotism traditionally associated with republics would be harnessed for a mixed monarchy. The unambiguous conclusion was that the union of civilian and military departments was a crucial criteria of a free state. No free State or Republic is safe under any other government or defence than that of its own citizens. No nation is safe that permits an ally to suffer by having espoused its cause, or that allows itself to be driven, by defeats or misfortunes, into a surrender of any material part of its rights.

“Some part of the political character” of the Romans, Ferguson wrote, “is necessary to the safety, as well as to the security of nations.”59

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Reforming the Order of Ranks in 1792 Ferguson’s advocacy of a union of the civil and military departments remained a constant refrain in his thought into the era of the French Revolution. While his most explicit consideration of the issue was set out in the later manuscript essay “Of Statesmen and Warriours,” further clues about his thinking can be discerned in his fi nal major publication, the 1792 Principles of Moral and Political Science. The Principles, which was based primarily upon Ferguson’s moral philosophy lectures at Edinburgh, was in important respects continuous with his overall “project” and with his earlier arguments about the characteristics of free states. For example, he reiterated his view that competition between a multiplicity of public “councils” and social orders was a constituent of a flourishing state, and he underlined again that political constitutions should be judged by the quality of their civilian and military leadership. He repeated his characteristic defi nition of civil society as a school for excellence and virtue, for the forging of an elite through competition in patriotic ser vice.60 But the text also identified more precisely the nature of Britain’s predicament as a commercial monarchy in the early 1790s. Like Edmund Burke, Ferguson agonized over the exponential increase of the national debt, the reinforcement of a “monied interest,” and the corruption of the virtues of the civilian elite.61 He underlined the political dangers posed by bankers, fi nanciers, and public creditors, noting that they lent “not to accommodate their country, but to make profit on every occasion of public expence and calamity.”62 Furthermore, his correspondence throughout the 1790s reflects continuing anxieties about the commitment and loyalty of the military. For example, in 1797 Ferguson wrote to Macpherson about the dangers of allowing the army to “come together upon any Subject of grievance or professional pretension.”63 Unlike Burke, however, his program for reform centered on the neo-German idea of military aristocracy and, especially, the idea of a Roman-style military-civil union and the forging of a public-service elite. One of the main arguments Ferguson laid out in the Principles concerned the dangers of a purely wealth-based distinction of ranks. Although, as we have seen, he acknowledged that a property-based distinction of ranks would be a natural characteristic of large and wealthy states, he consistently warned against allowing wealth to become the exclusive source of authority, social prestige, and “estimation.” Here Fer-

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guson’s argument was an extension of the critique of Epicurean morals he had already sketched out in the Essay. Citing a well-known passage from Lucretius’s De rerum natura— tandem res inventa est, aurumque repertum; Quod facile et pulchris et validis demsit honorem (“thereafter property was invented and gold found, which easily robbed the strong and the beautiful of honor”)—he argued that wealth created distortions in the moral sentiments and warped the mind’s judgment of beauty, convenience, and merit. A great deal of the moral philosophy of the Principles was devoted to a critique of “false notions of rank, that attach elevation to mere birth and fortune, exclusive of merit.” These arguments fitted with Ferguson’s rejection of the moral psychology of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its explicit grounding of the distinction of ranks on mankind’s disposition to admire and to sympathize with the passions of the rich and powerful (as Ferguson pointed out, Smith’s “sympathy” was “by no means a safe or adequate principle of estimation”).64 But it also fitted, more generally, with Ferguson’s critique of the idea of a purely wealth-based aristocracy as the guardians of a commercial mixed monarchy on the British model. These arguments found practical expression in the Principles in a demand for a military aristocracy, which in Ferguson’s presentation would serve two interrelated purposes. First, a martial nobility would positively recast the relationship between wealth and virtue within the nation by renewing the prestige or honor attached to military functions and public ser vice. Second, this martial elite would hold a balance between the various social orders of the state and constitute a barrier against executive or demagogic abuses of power. The outcome would be to forge a meritocratic alternative to the property-based hierarchy. Distinctions of rank, for the most part, are taken from birth or property; and we may censure the rule, but cannot reverse it. It is even fortunate for mankind that a foundation of subordination is laid, too obvious to be overlooked by the dullest of men, or by those who stand most in need of being governed. But, though property sometimes overpowers both ability and every other merit, yet there are occasions in which it must give way to either. At elections and country meetings, men of fortune predominate; but armies are commanded, and states are governed by men of ability.65

Ferguson’s elaboration of this project in the Principles rested upon two models. The first of these was the neo-Roman model of civil and military

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union. Like Mably, Ferguson argued that the establishment of a proper balance between the civil and military powers of the state was the “great problem of political wisdom.” On the one hand, the effective direction of the national force by the executive was a precondition of national security and the maintenance of justice internally. But “if we suppose that a power which is established for these purposes were employed to violate the rights it ought to protect, there is no case more fatal to the liberties of the people.” For, on this supposition, the arm which ought to defend is itself the force that invades. The remedy is become the disease; and the roof, under which shelter is taken from a storm, threatens a ruin more dreadful than the storm it was intended to repel.

The solution was to integrate law and force within a single political establishment: Law without force, is no more than a dead letter; and force, if improperly lodged, will frustrate all the precautions of a legal establishment. It is no less dangerous in the hands of a profl igate rabble who would level the conditions of men, than it is in the hands of an usurper who would render them subject to his will. In order to obviate the danger from either of these quarters, the same guard that is or ought to be set over the sources of the legislative power, namely, that every respectable order in the state may have a proper share in it, and every improper person be excluded from the trust, ought also to be set over the distribution of arms or of force in the community. Where the law originates, there also is the proper depositary of national force; and whoever has not the proper interest in the laws of his country is but ill entrusted with its defence.66

The second model was neo-German. Setting himself against contemporary critics of martial aristocracy, Ferguson drew once again upon Tacitus’s Germania and stressed its relevance to a reformed system of military and political leadership.67 In the section of his lectures on the “History of Political Establishments,” he regularly cited Tacitus as an authority for understanding the structure of Eu rope’s early kingdoms (in 1784, for example, he claimed that Tacitus remained the “best authority” on the English government before the Norman conquest).68 In the Principles he cited the two most important passages used by Montesquieu in his own account of modern European states, claiming that

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when disparities of rank are admitted among the parties which compose a society, what Tacitus relates of the ancient Germans may be safely assumed as so many laws of nature, by which men are led before they have planned an establishment: That, in matters of small moment, the chiefs deliberate; but, on great occasions, all take a part: That royalty is attached to birth, and military command to valour.69

The overriding purpose of all this was to demonstrate that the nobilities of post-Roman Europe had originally been distinguished on account of military service, rather than birth or property. “Our ancestors conceived the military character, as that which distinguished the lord or the gentleman: In their opinion, to be noble and military was the same.” In a crucial note, he referred to the military origin of the nobilities of postRoman Europe, although there is no mistaking the contemporary relevance of his claim: The present order of things in Eu rope originated in the ascendance of persons having arms in their hands. What was originally a cavalier or horseman, is now a gentleman; and, in the constitution of our country, members returnable from the counties to parliament, as appears from the remaining form of the writ addressed to sheriffs for this purpose, were to be military [miles gladio cinctus]; none being thought worthy of a place in the councils of state, but such as were armed for its defence.70

Ferguson’s appeal to the martial origins of political authority was not entirely unique in the Scotland of the 1780s. A similar argument about the nexus of nobility and martial ser vice featured in a two-part dissertation, originally read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783– 1784, entitled “An Essay on the Origin and Structure of European Legislatures” by the Edinburgh professor of law Allan Maconochie, a writer with whom Ferguson had briefly corresponded in the late 1770s.71 Maconochie’s regular university lectures dealt with the familiar Scottish topic of the progress of civilization and political society from the “rude to the polished state,” commencing with the natural histories of a vast range of savage, pastoral, and barbarous peoples and concluding with a comprehensive history of the decline of feudal society and the rise of modern European governments.72 The par tic u lar significance of his 1783 essay, however, lies in its account of the military basis of legislative authority and, even more specifically, in Maconochie’s attempt to provide an alternative to the accounts of modern European political order he

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associated with Montesquieu, Hume, Mably, and Gilbert Stuart. Maconochie rejected the “democratic” thesis expounded in the writings of Mably and Stuart that the idea of “assembling a nation by its representatives” went all the way back to the primitive societies of ancient Germany. Representation, Maconochie claimed, only developed after Europe’s medieval princes, in a calculated move against the feudal nobility, sought to ally themselves with the urban municipalities throughout their realms. His second target was the “aristocratic” interpretation of European legislative authority that Maconochie associated principally with Montesquieu (but also, in part, with Hume’s history of the Saxon constitution). Montesquieu, he claimed, had read back into the history of the ancient Germans a property-based, hereditary aristocratic order which, according to Maconochie, had only arisen much later as a consequence of the system of fiefs. There was simply no evidence for the existence of a hereditary “patrician order” or “noblesse d’origine” among the political communities described by Tacitus and Caesar. Part of Montesquieu’s mistake had been to confuse the comites described by Tacitus— the young men who served as the personal military retinue of the kings—with the principes vicorum et pagorum, whom Tacitus had also occasionally referred to as comites, but were in fact a quite different order of men— the civil and military “heads of the nation, and the natural counsellors of both prince and people” (roughly equivalent, Maconochie thought, to the authority of Rome’s senators).73 In short, a crucial category mistake lay at the foundations of Montesquieu’s history of European monarchy. Maconochie’s thesis was that legislative authority in modern Europe derived ultimately from the connection between military ser vice and civil authority which modern Europeans had inherited from the ancient Germans (which were quite similar in this respect to the prerepublican societies of ancient Greece and Italy). The idea of nobility derived from a broad community of free and equal warriors. For Maconochie, it was essential to differentiate between the origins of that authority in military merit and the “titles of honour” and “official functions” which attached to European nobility only as a consequence of later feudal accretions. This showed that far from being narrowly “aristocratic” bodies, the original legislatures of Eu rope had to be recognized as genuinely national assemblies, from which none of the realm’s military freeholders had been excluded. Thus, as Maconochie summarized his

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“leading thesis,” the “diets of the European states were originally national assemblies, containing de jure, the whole warriors belonging to them, conducted by their local chiefs or magistrates, who, together with the king and dignified ecclesiastics, formed a senate and council that, in general, directed the common resolves.” In this way, Maconochie indicated the “origin of the genuine nobility of modern Europe.” That nobility, as it is destitute of all titles of office or honour, exhibits no trace of owing any part of its lustre to the favour of kings, or to usurpations of magistracy. But its numbers, its prerogatives, the documents of its history, and its character concur to prove, that it is the remains of nations of freemen, and derives its honours from having preserved, uncontaminated from servile or ignoble occupations, that high spirit which, as independent warriors, and as equals, the conquerors of Eu rope received pure and unadulterated from the bounty of nature.74

Although Ferguson laid less emphasis than Maconochie on the equality of the nation, there was a significant overlap between their positions. Both writers sought to undermine the claims of property and royal nomination and instead emphasized those of service as the qualifications of office among ancient German societies. They both backed up this claim by referring to the overlap between the patriotic nobilities of ancient Greece, Germany, and Rome. In Ferguson’s hands, the Germanic origins of Europe’s governments implied the necessary connection between service and legislative authority. Forging a neo-German aristocracy of service and merit, rather than of birth and privilege, was the single most important arrangement in making “executive power in the most extensive dominions, consistent with the safety of the people.”75 By the 1790s, then, the establishment of a neo-German aristocracy of service had come to form the centerpiece of Ferguson’s reform proposals. Conceived as a remedy to the instabilities Montesquieu had identified at the heart of the British polity, the idea was to establish a parallel to the property-based hierarchy, and to forge a new kind of virtuous elite capable of acting in the public interest. This elite, in tempering the drift toward complacency or pleasure on the part of the existing nobility, would also constitute a focal point for emulation and national patriotism. A militarily prepared aristocracy would, fi nally, be the bulwark of the nation’s stability and the underpinning of the established distinction of ranks:

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment In ordinary times, military ser vice, like the professions of law, divinity, or medicine, may be entrusted to persons who make it an honourable calling. But, it does not by any means follow, that they who have a real stake in the preservation of an order established should forego the use of arms, and profess their inability to defend themselves or their state at any emergence whatever. Or, if this should be thought necessary, at any period of national progress, we cannot any longer be at a loss to account for the vicissitudes of human affairs, or the fatal reverses in which the established order of ranks is overturned.76

Establishing a martial aristocracy was a crucial guarantee against the prospect of revolution.

7

Q

Revolution and Modern Republicanism

A DA M Ferguson’s thinking about the vicissitudes of civilization and the foundations of Europe’s stability was sharpened, but not fundamentally transformed, by the events of the French Revolution. Like many of his British contemporaries, he welcomed the revolution in its early stages. As he wrote to his old friend John Macpherson in January 1790, he was initially confident that the French would prove “better neighbours both in Europe and Asia than they have been heretofore.”1 But his confidence had all but evaporated by 1792. By 1796, as he noted in another letter to Macpherson, he had come to the conclusion that France’s main objective was territorial conquest in Europe and beyond. Now a large-scale military republic, France would not only “keep up the delenda est Carthago” against Britain herself, she would also pose a massive threat to the “general system of property in Europe.”2 Both claims were substantially continuous with his thinking of the 1760s and 1770s. For Ferguson, the French Revolution represented a dangerous mixing of ancient republican militarism with the complex social and economic structures of a large monarchy, a combination that Ferguson believed would have fatal results for France itself, Europe, and Britain. As David Kettler has pointed out, “Ferguson’s animosity toward the French Revolution rested primarily on the threat which he believed it posed to the security of England and to the peace of Europe.”3 An equally urgent problem raised by the revolution, however, was whether Britain itself now faced a similar fate. Crucially, the French Revolution sharpened Ferguson’s fear that the combination of commerce with licentiousness

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left Britain wide open to the possibility of a corrupt republican revolution and, subsequently, the establishment of a despotic state. This chapter situates Ferguson’s evaluation of republican politics in the 1780s and 1790s against the writings of a number of Scottish contemporaries who focused on the consequences of building large-scale republics in North America and France. It deals with two prominent issues. The fi rst concerns the prospects for maintaining stability and cohesion in large and wealthy modern republics and, more specifically, the prospect of securing a balance between the civil and military powers of states. Like a number of his contemporaries, Ferguson believed that large-scale republics would ultimately come to be dominated by the military, and would therefore experience the shift from civilian to military government that had plagued the most powerful republics of the past. The second theme concerned the implications of large-scale republics for the international order. While some of his younger Scottish contemporaries believed that the French Revolution held out the prospect for the establishment of peaceful republican democracies in Europe, Ferguson and others predicted a revival of conquest and expansion.4 Against this background, Ferguson reworked and clarified his account of civil liberty, which he now separated even more sharply from the republican liberty of the ancients. His evolving response to republican politics during these decades culminated in an elaborate engagement with Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire and the principles of republican imperialism, set out in an unpublished essay on the French Revolution’s consequences for European stability. Militarism, international instability, and a return to centralized military dictatorships would be the result of attempts to build democratic republics on an unprecedented scale.

The “Social War” and the American Republic Ferguson’s fi rst sustained encounter with modern republican politics took place in the 1770s, when he became involved, both practically and theoretically, in the British reaction to the American Revolution. He played a significant personal role in the crisis by serving as secretary to the unsuccessful Carlisle Commission in 1778, traveling to the colonies with Frederick Howard (the earl of Carlisle), William Eden, and George Johnstone with the aim of reintegrating the American states into a

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looser and more federal version of empire.5 He made a theoretically significant contribution to the debate in his 1776 Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price. As its title suggests, this pamphlet was motivated by the publication, earlier in 1776, of Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which had justified American independence by grounding civil liberty upon the principles of consent and representation (somewhat ironically, Price later turned Ferguson’s arguments against him by invoking the critique of conquest set out in the Essay to criticize British aggression against the colonists).6 Like most Scottish moderates, Ferguson opposed American independence. The Remarks provided a theoretically explicit justification for this position by setting out a detailed account of the principles of civil and political liberty. More generally, the pamphlet demonstrates substantial continuity in his thinking about the problems of democracy, empire, and military government throughout the 1760s and 1770s. Not only did he continue to think about Britain’s future in terms derived from the history of republican and imperial Rome but, more substantively, he continued to do so through the prism of Montesquieu’s writings on republicanism, democracy, and the future of the British constitution. Ferguson’s Remarks shared two broader themes with the writings of his Scottish contemporaries. The first concerned the impossibility of establishing a republican government, even along federal lines, in a territory as large and potentially wealthy as North America. Some passages in Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man illustrate this line of argument. The United States, Kames argued, would fail to construct a stable federal system and to transform itself into a larger version of the Swiss or the Dutch republics. Although this was, in part, a simple matter of America’s size, it was also because the Americans had no powerful rival in their vicinity and hence possessed no rationale for politico-military federation. Instead, Kames argued, independence would spark the disintegration of the union and “part of a great state will be converted into many small states.” Similarly, the anonymous author of the 1778 Letter to His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh argued that the rise of commerce and luxury among the Americans would “soon lead them into the career of other nations, and at once civilize, if not divide.” Overlapping arguments were repeated by many other Scottish thinkers in the 1770s, and testify to the strength and durability of what has been termed the “small-republic thesis” among the mainstream of Scottish thinkers.7

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This aspect of the Scottish debate was also fi ltered through readings of Montesquieu. As John Pocock has underlined, the American crisis was envisaged less as a case of “decline and fall” and more as a modern repetition of the “Social War” between the Roman republic and its Italian allies (socii).8 This gave Montesquieu’s assessment of the Social War in the Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline an additional relevance. One Scotsman who amplified Montesquieu’s discussion in the 1770s was William Barron, later professor of logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics at St Andrews, who teased out its implications for modern Britain in the course of an attack upon Adam Smith’s proposal for colonial representation. According to Barron, the admission of colonists to representation in the British legislature would be the “greatest sacrifice to liberty that ever was offered by any nation.”9 It would, he went on, be equivalent to the solution adopted by the Romans in the aftermath of the Social War, which extended the rights of citizenship to Rome’s allies and colonies under the terms of the lex Julia of 90 B.C. As we have seen, Montesquieu had described the Julian law as one of the “two causes of Rome’s ruin,” but in Barron’s estimation this law alone “may be said to have annihilated the republic.” What power will prevent Great Britain from sharing a similar fate in similar circumstances, with the republic of Rome? Factious and ambitious leaders are to be found in modern times, as well as in those of antiquity. The members from the colonies may be attached to such men, or dependent on them. Party-spirit may blind their understandings, or corruption may procure their suffrages. Their fortunes will not be so independent, nor their sentiments perhaps, so liberal as those of most of the representatives from this island; and men of this disposition are half disposed to the purposes of faction. The House of Commons is already divided, and the junction of the new members may make either scale preponderate so much, that the consequences are to be dreaded. We have lived long in possession of much liberty: Let us be satisfied, lest, by grasping the shadow, we lose the substance.10

Montesquieu’s analysis was picked up by many other Scottish thinkers. As James Anderson observed in his Free Thoughts on the American Crisis, the mania for constitutional innovations was unlikely to prove favorable to liberty. “Let us,” he wrote, “not flatter ourselves with the opinion that, by infringing the constitutional laws in one instance where they may seem defective, we will do a ser vice to the state.”

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Montesquieu well observes, that, “When the Gracchi deprived the Roman senators of the power of judging, the senators were no longer able to withstand the people. To favour therefore the liberty of the subject, they struck at the liberty of the constitution; but the former perished with the latter.” And this must ever be the case in all countries. Civil liberty, or the liberty of the subject, can only exist where the system of political liberty is complete, and bears sovereign sway. Those, therefore, who prize the former, must be careful to see that the latter be not in any case infringed.11

The second theme in these texts concerned the consequences of American independence for the balance of power in Europe.12 Developing Montesquieu’s critique of republican expansion, a number of Scottish thinkers argued that the establishment of a nonmonarchical republic in America would result in the dominance of the military over the civil power and would probably spark a new epoch of war, militarism, and expansion. Behind this scenario lay the prospect of French empire in Europe and, even more distantly, the French conquest of Britain itself. This latter prospect was a key preoccupation of Allan Ramsay, who argued tirelessly throughout the 1770s for the reestablishment of metropolitan authority over the colonies. By 1782, in his Succinct Review of the American Contest, Ramsay had reached the conclusion that Britain’s future as a free state looked worse, not better, than that of ancient Rome. In Rome, Ramsey wrote, “fierce struggles for universal liberty were finished by the establishment of the most despotic government ever known.” But still their circumstances were, in many respects, different from ours; and our disputes may not end in the same manner, or perhaps not so well. The Romans were altogether a military people, who made no account of merchandize as a matter of state; who were totally unacquainted with public debts, and with paper money; who conquered countries for the sake of the tributes to be raised from them, and who planted colonies only for the better securing those conquests. But the greatest and most important difference between their circumstances and ours was, that they had no powerful neighbour to avail themselves of their division; so that they could only terminate in establishing one or other of the political antagonists at the head of the Roman government, while Rome was sure in every event of continuing mistress of the world. A man must belie his own feelings, as well as be grossly ignorant in political arithmetic, who will assert that the fate of the antient Romans is the worst that can befall a free people, or that a despotic power established

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment by any nation from within itself, is not preferable to a like despotic power exercised over it by a foreign State.13

A similar Scottish depiction of the consequences of American independence can be found in the “Preliminary Discourse” to John Gillies’s 1778 translation of the Orations of Lysias and Isocrates. Gillies, the prolific Glasgow-based historian who would later succeed William Robertson as historiographer royal for Scotland, offered an elaborate defense of modern civilization and modern monarchies. He was, however, intrigued by the possibility that modern European nations would fi nd themselves affl icted by a coming cycle of revolutions, similar in their consequences to those that had undermined the ancient world (as indicated by the subject of a paper, now apparently lost, that he presented at the Société Littéraire of Lausanne in the early 1780s, entitled “Est-il à présumer que les nations modernes de l’Europe subiront des révolutions aussi grandes que celles auxquelles elles ont été exposées?”).14 In his “Preliminary Discourse,” Gillies drew a sharp contrast between modern monarchy and ancient democracy, and warned of a revival of ancient republicanism under modern conditions. According to Gillies, the Athenians were “tyrants in one capacity, and slaves in another; and that impervious line which may be drawn between power and liberty, was a secret undiscovered in Greece, and is still concealed from every country but our own.” Yet despite the lack of liberty and security afforded by Athenian political institutions, these institutions nevertheless “enabled the republic to exert itself with vigour against its foreign and domestic enemies.”15 This contrast between modern liberty and ancient licentiousness also featured heavily in Gillies’s later, and more famous, History of Ancient Greece. Unlike the states of the ancient world, Gillies declared, in modern Europe “the revolutions of public affairs seldom disturb the humble obscurity of private life.” In republican governments, by contrast, public misfortunes, which ought to have bound “all ranks of men in the fi rmest and most indissoluble union,” had “little other tendency than to increase the political factions which tear and distract the community.”16 The overriding issue that preoccupied Gillies in 1778, however, was the foreseeable impact that the establishment of an American republic would have on the European state system. Crucially, Gillies argued that an independent America could easily become a warlike and conquering

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state, or could ignite an international “republican confederacy.” What he seems to have feared was the possibility that the establishment of a large territorial republic across the Atlantic would prove a poisonous example for the fragile states of eighteenth-century Europe. The evidence for this preoccupation rests upon a remarkable passage in the “Preliminary Discourse.” The Greeks themselves, he pointed out, had inhabited geograph ically restricted territories and had certain “moral advantages” which “ought in some measure to have corrected the unhappy tendency of their political system, and to have rendered it more tolerable in Greece than in any other country.” But, he went on, if there is a people on earth, who, though their situation in these respects be the reverse of that of the Greeks, would nevertheless re-establish a similar plan of government; and disdaining to continue happy subjects of the country under whose protection they have so long flourished, would set on foot a republican confederacy, let them tremble at the prospect of those calamities, which, should their designs be carried into execution, they must both infl ict and suffer. The unhappy consequences of their domestic dissensions would be confi ned to themselves, but the fatal effects of their political system would extend to the remotest provinces of Europe. The republics, which at present subsist in this part of the world, scarcely deserve the name, and are, besides, so inconsiderable, that were their principles truly democratical, the influence of them would be checked by the prevailing maxims of their more powerful neighbours. But if that turbulent form of government should be established in a new hemisphere, and if popu lar assemblies and senates should be there entrusted with the right to exercise power, why might they not abuse it as shamefully before? Might not the ancient barbarities be renewed; the manners of men be again tainted with a savage ferocity; and those enormities, the bare description of which is shocking to human nature, be introduced, repeated, and gradually become familiar?17

Ferguson’s critique of Price echoed a number of these arguments. Like Gillies, Ramsay, and Kames, he underlined the difficulty of reconciling liberty with popular government, and civil with military power, in the framework of a large republic. What distinguished Ferguson’s own analysis from that of most of his Scottish contemporaries, however, was his careful dissection of the concept of liberty. Price, Ferguson noted, had promiscuously deployed both negative and positive defi nitions of civil liberty, describing it both (negatively) as freedom from “restraint,” but

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also (more positively) as “the power of a civil society or state to govern itself by its own discretion.” Ferguson directed most of his attention to Price’s defi nition of liberty as an absence of restraint and his more specific claim that any infringement of an agent’s “will” or “power” was a step in the direction of slavery or servitude. For Ferguson, Price’s conflation of liberty with power was a fundamental category error. No civil community could exist without some form of restraint upon the wills of its members. Liberty without restraint amounted to the despotic power enjoyed by the rulers of Turkey or Prussia. More seriously, it amounted to giving the communities out of which states were formed a carte blanche to secede: this, as “the humour for it should spread, would threaten every community with the loss of every incorporated member that has a pretence for separation, or a fancy to set up for itself.” Similarly, Price had failed to recognize Montesquieu’s crucial distinction between liberty and independence. A simple numerical extension of political participation among a more numerous body of electors was no guarantee of an increase of liberty. Indeed, it could actually be one of the greatest threats to liberty. At this point Ferguson borrowed two arguments about liberty from The Spirit of the Laws. The fi rst concerned the lack of security enjoyed by persons accused under criminal law in democratic states. In democracies, accused persons were “in fact subject to a power which is of all others the most unstable, capricious and arbitrary, bound by no law and subject to no appeal.” The second concerned the broader incompatibility between liberty and popular government. Here Ferguson summarized one of the main arguments that would later appear in the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic: “when all the powers of the Roman senate were transferred to the popular assemblies, the Liberty of Rome came to an end.”18 The distinction between liberty and power that informed Ferguson’s critique looked back to an earlier distinction that Francis Hutcheson had made between ancient and modern liberty. As Hutcheson put it in A System of Moral Philosophy, in modern times a people was denominated “free, when their important interests are well secured against any rapacious or capricious wills of those in power.” In contrast, the Greeks and Romans had “another precise meaning to the populus liber, denoting by that term only Democracies, or such forms where the supreme power, or the chief parts of it at least, were in some popular assembly, so that the people in a body had the command, or had their turns in commanding

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or obeying.” On Hutcheson’s reading, modern liberty was essentially negative (defi ned by security against “capricious wills”), whereas ancient liberty meant sectional (especially democratic) government: a state in which the populus participated in command or sovereignty.19 Ferguson’s response to Price followed a similar logic. Civil liberty was not popular power. Moreover, civil liberty was only properly secure in mixed states. Even in small democracies, he claimed, a degree of aristocratic authority was required as a check upon the power of the people. Ferguson cited Montesquieu’s view that neither democracies nor aristocracies were by nature free states. In most free states the populace have as much need to be guarded against the effect of their own folly and errors as against the usurpation of any other person whatever. And the essence of political liberty is such an establishment which gives power to the wise and safety to all. The exercise of power in popu lar assemblies has a mixture of effects, good and bad. It teaches a people, as it did the Athenians, to become wits, critics, and orators. It gives to every man one chance against being oppressed, in allowing him to appear for himself. But it places him, when accused, before rash, precipitate, prejudiced, and inequitable judges; he is no more his own legislator than he is the master of the people. And for this reason, Mr. Montesquieu has very wisely said that democracy and aristocracy are not by their nature free governments. They are inferior in this respect to certain species of monarchy where law is more fi xed and the abuses of power are better restrained.20

Ferguson drove home this argument about liberty and power by citing Rome’s transition to empire and military rule. In the Roman republic, he argued, the people’s “liberty sunk as their power increased, and perished at last by the very hands that were employed in support of the popular cause.” More generally, Rome had a direct relevance for the unprecedented project to establish a democratic republic “extending 1200 miles in one direction, and without any known bounds in the other.” By what title have they to hope for an exemption from the too common fate of mankind; the fate that has ever attended Democracies attempted on too large a scale; that of plunging at once into military government? The armies they form against their country will need no other title to become their masters. It is even fair to conclude, from the history of the world, that there is no time of more danger than those

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment times of sanguine, of florid, and enthusiastic expectation, in which mankind are bent on great and hazardous change.21

The concluding pages of Ferguson’s pamphlet returned to his broader preoccupations with decline and the vicissitudes of prosperous states. He denied that Britain would escape the war unscathed, claiming that such an outcome was “not of a piece with the history of mankind.” Nations that have been high can seldom bear a fall; they sink in the scale with a retrograde motion as rapid as they advanced. Is Great Britain then to be sacrificed to America; the whole to a part, and a state which has attained high measures of national felicity, for one that is yet only in expectation, and which, by attempting such extravagant plans of Continental Republic, is probably laying the seeds of anarchy, of civil wars, and at last of a military government.22

Ferguson’s pamphlet concluded with criticisms of the utopian rationalism which he detected in Price’s book. To appeal, as Price had done, to the tribunals of “reason, equity, and humanity” was in effect to deprive human societies of their moorings, to “set human affairs afloat on the sea of opinion and private interest, and to deprive men of those charts, landmarks, and rules of sailing, by which they were in use to be guided, and to direct their cause.” On this reading, the revolutionary appeal to reason and justice easily collapsed into mere private judgment; reason itself was not the best guide for the ship of state. All this, fi nally, underpinned a call for the use of force which was the ultimate purpose of the pamphlet. “If any part of the monarchy withdraw its allegiance, the remainder must repel such an insult with their blood.”23

Revolution and Modern Republicanism in the 1790s There was a substantial continuity between these responses to the American Revolution and the debates generated by the French Revolution. As one anonymous Scottish writer noted in a two-volume work entitled Reflections, Moral and Political and published in Edinburgh in 1787, the revolution in North America seemed to be only a prelude to a much deeper crisis of the international order. Writing against the background not only of American independence, but also the establishment of the League of Armed Neutrality (1780–1782), the Dutch patriotic revolution of 1787 and the apparent resurgence of French power,

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the author of the Reflections argued that the revolutionary cycle that had commenced across the Atlantic would, sooner or later, extend to Europe itself: The revolution in the new hemisphere seems to be but the forerunner of others in the old: for, in the history of Europe, never were there so extensive combinations forming among its powers, as at this day present themselves, with a view to proportioned changes in the system of things. The centre and moving principle of all these political machinations is our jealous rival, and this country is the primary object she proposes to herself in them, and annexed to it she no doubt has her secondary.24

Beyond the risks it posed to British security, the French Revolution raised two central issues for Scottish thinkers writing in the 1790s. The fi rst concerned the underlying relationship between republicanism and military expansion and, more specifically, the consequences of France’s military republicanism for the European state system. Throughout the eighteenth century it had been widely argued that the first European nation which succeeded in forging a genuinely national militia would achieve an astonishing superiority over its neighbors. As the anonymous author of the Letters of Crito (a work sometimes attributed to John Millar) argued in 1796, the French had demonstrated how easily and how quickly the “new levied militia” of a republican government could be “taught to conquer the best appointed and disciplined troops in the world.” France was now an “armed nation,” overturning the military arrangements of ancien régime Europe and reverting to the patriotic model of the barbarous nations which had overrun the Roman empire (the author of the Letters of Crito believed that France had established a degree of political liberty of which both James Harrington and David Hume would have approved).25 The second question concerned France’s vulnerability to military government on the model of the Roman empire and the prospect of a slide from military republic to military despotism. The most famous argument along these lines is certainly Edmund Burke’s claim in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that “military democracy” would henceforth be the “true constitution of the state” in France.26 But Burke’s opposition to the combination of military power with democratic government was far from unique. As Arthur Young noted in 1792, French events could be understood in terms of the tension between military and social orga ni zation. For him, the

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revolution resembled ancient projects for the implementation of an agrarian law, underwritten by the poor who formed the backbone of the armies. The result was untrammeled popular power, which Young described as a “worst monster” than monarchical despotism. Warning against the possibility of repeating France’s calamitous example, Young argued that, since every European state depended upon “a soldiery taken from the dregs of the people,” it was, in Britain at least, imperative to establish a militia of property.27 Many of these charges were addressed in James Mackintosh’s antiBurkean Vindiciae Gallicae of 1791, perhaps the most famous Scottish appraisal of the French Revolution. Mackintosh, from a younger generation than Ferguson and Smith, depicted the revolution as a step toward the forging of a genuinely modern republic, based on a division of economic labor but also on a close union of the civil and military departments.28 Yet there were major differences from Ferguson’s own position. The most significant of these was Mackintosh’s confidence in the possibility of forging a stable republic in a large modern state. According to Mackintosh, the French Revolution was an event unparalleled in European history since “legislative republics” had superseded the “heroic monarchies” of Homeric Greece. Events of 1789 literally represented a shift from barbarism to civilization, from the “rude institutions and barbarous manners” of Gothic government to a rational and philosophic system of legislation. According to Mackintosh, the enlightened elite of Europe would now act as legislators for the multitude, just “as the vessels of Cadmus and Cecrops spread the arts and the wisdom of the East among the Pelasgic barbarians.”29 A central issue in Mackintosh’s book concerned the organization of military power in a large postmonarchical republic. As he acknowledged later in the work— in a clear echo of the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ferguson himself— the problem of accommodating a large army within a free government was one of the most urgent, and most difficult, problems of modern politics. But he flatly denied Burke’s claim that France would inevitably fall under military government. According to Mackintosh, the French had already made significant steps toward removing this danger through the formation of a “municipal” army and through the enfranchisement of the professional troops. He believed that the French had implemented something similar to the plan for reform laid out in Rousseau’s Consid-

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erations on the Government of Poland, a work which Mackintosh cited not only for its elaborate proposals for civilian and military organization but also for its critique of the spirit of conquest. Significantly, Mackintosh argued that the revolution was likely to curtail France’s old expansionist designs (he also predicted that France would soon give up its “commercially useless, and politically ruinous” colonies as well). All this was compatible with France’s opting for a single, undivided system of legislative and executive powers which, in Mackintosh’s view, fitted the emergency needs of the revolutionary situation. He thus broke the link that Burke had identified between democracy and military government: “A military democracy, if it means a deliberative body of soldiers, is the most execrable of tyrannies; but if it be understood to denote a popular government, where every citizen is disciplined and armed, it must then be pronounced to be the only free government which retains within itself the means of preservation.”30 He concluded that France had successfully instituted a form of republican government compatible with her domestic liberty and her defensive requirements. Mackintosh’s positive appraisal of French military democracy rested on an interesting account of the eighteenth-century arms race. According to him, the expansion of Europe’s standing forces under the ancien régime had paradoxically produced liberty and republicanism, because the professional armies had themselves become repositories of civic sentiment. In applying this view of the unintended consequences of royal militarism to the French case, Mackintosh was able to short- circuit Montesquieu’s remark about the “increase of troops” and his prognosis of a revival of barbarism in the heart of Europe. As Mackintosh put it, it was “the apprehension of Montesquieu, that the spirit of increasing armies would terminate in converting Europe into a vast camp, in changing our artizans and cultivators into military savages, and reviving the age of Attila and Genghis.” But events are our preceptors, and France has taught us that this evil contains its own remedy and limit. A domestic army cannot be increased without increasing the number of its ties with the people, and of the channels by which popu lar sentiment may enter. Every man who is added to the army is a new link that unites it to the nation. If all citizens were compelled to become soldiers, all soldiers must of necessity adopt the feelings of citizens, and the despots cannot increase their army without admitting into it a greater number of men interested to destroy

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Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment them. A small army may have sentiments different from the great body of the people, and no interest in common with them, but a numerous soldiery cannot. This is the barrier which nature herself has opposed to the increase of armies.31

Describing the ancien régime armies as the embodiment of national sentiment enabled Mackintosh to dismiss Burke’s claim that the revolutionary elites had simply purchased the allegiance of the soldiers (who themselves “sold their King for an increase of pay”), and it also enabled him, more generally, to conjecture that “the history of the next century will probably evince on how frail and tottering a basis the military tyrannies of Europe stand.” Events in France thus held enormous relevance for the future of the relationship between royal authority and military power in Austria, Germany, and the Dutch Republic, the governments of which, he asserted, would soon be compelled to hear the “solicitations of armed petitioners.”32 Several of these points were reiterated in an interesting collection of essays, probably written around 1794, by John MacLaurin, a leading Edinburgh lawyer and son of the famous Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin. MacLaurin’s main aims in these essays were to justify and to defend France’s experiment in republican government by distinguishing it from the ancient, slave-based democracies which, he alleged, were celebrated by Rousseau, and to demonstrate the need for rebalancing the British system of parliamentary representation toward smaller property owners, although he carefully avoided calling for a revolution in Britain itself. The essays also celebrated America’s independence, condemned British naval aggression (and Britain’s failure to ally with the Americans and the French to liberate Spain’s South American colonies), and fiercely criticized those (like Burke) who had tried to minimize the evils of the ancien régime.33 As his eighteenth-century editor pointed out, the main purpose of these pieces was to show that “an extensive nation can enjoy the republican form of government.” According to MacLaurin, the revolution was grounded on the principles of “representative democracy” that had fi rst been worked out in seventeenth-century England (the model for the French Constitution of 1792, he argued, was Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellency of a Free State, or the True Constitution of a Republic, fi rst published in 1656).34 Unlike in England, however, where republican principles had been contaminated by religious conflict, France had been more faithful to the model of representative democracy con-

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tained in Nedham’s text. MacLaurin also echoed Mackintosh in noting the difficulties faced by Europe’s monarchical regimes in maintaining large military establishments and argued that “similar convulsions” to those of France were soon to be expected in almost every country of Europe. The continental powers would, therefore, quickly discover that “reformation is the only method to prevent, or long retard, revolution.” They will keep up a great armed force: supposing them able to do so, which the im mense debt they must have contracted by their wars renders very problematical; yet that force will soon, instead of serving, counteract the purpose of its institution; it will turn against those who raised it because it must (on the Continent) consist almost entirely of the very men whose interest it is to reduce the new theory into practice, and whom their communication with the French (of late friendly and hostile) must have greatly enlightened: for, in the countries under consideration, men may be said to be divided into two classes, one that has a vast deal, and another that has nothing, or next to nothing.35

An alternative to these interpretations was set out in Gillies’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, a two-volume work, with extensive commentary, fi rst published in 1797. Gillies made clear that, in undertaking his translation, his purpose was to shed light upon contemporary European events (this applied especially to book 7 of the Politics, which contained “the opinions of the wisest man of antiquity on the great and awful questions which now agitate the world”).36 While the Athenian example dominated his argument, Gillies also showed little hesitation in deploying the time-honored Carthage-Rome comparison when it suited his purposes. The similarities between Britain and Carthage, he asserted, were slight and superficial. But there was more mileage in the analogy between France and Rome, the chief difference being that France had “run through the same stages in a few years, which the former did in as many centuries.” It has expelled or destroyed its royal line; abolished privileged orders, laid all honours open to the people at large; displayed the enthusiasm of liberty; proved the connection between this principle and military energy; defeated its neighbours on the Continent; obliged them to supply its armies with pay, corn, and clothing; plundered their altars and temples; carried off their pictures and statues. I need not say more of what France has done; but among the transactions indicating what in the future is likely to do, the reader of ancient history will recollect that

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Gillies’s recognition of Napoleon’s potential for Caesarism formed the conclusion to the analysis of French developments which he developed in the commentaries that served as introductions to the individual books of Aristotle’s works. The overall purpose of these commentaries was to defend (in loosely Aristotelian terms) a theory of the eighteenthcentury British state as a “free monarchy” and to repudiate the modern republican and democratic doctrines that, in Gillies’s view, had inspired the French Revolution. In Gillies’s reconstruction, modern European republicanism had started with John Locke, whom he described as a religious man and a good subject whose philosophy and political opinions had, nonetheless, opened a door for philosophical skepticism and popular rebellion. This was because Locke had considered society as a “mere mass,” rather than as a system based upon “a distinction and subordination of parts.”38 Locke’s ideas, like those of his contemporary, William Molyneux, had been further radicalized by later writers (namely Price, Joseph Priestley, Rousseau, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and Thomas Paine). Price’s own defi nition of political liberty—“the power of a civil society to govern itself by its own discretion, or laws of its own making”—was among the most volatile of all post-Lockean expressions of republican doctrine in modern times. This long tradition of republican opinion, Gillies believed, had nurtured a “democracy in the public mind” well before the fall of the monarchy. Echoing the thesis put forward in 1771 by Jean-Louis Delolme on the importance of the indivisibility of executive power, Gillies argued that in following the doctrines of Locke, Rousseau, and Paine, successive French revolutionary governments had replicated the “deep and radical error” that existed in “all those denominated the free states of antiquity,” where executive power, “instead of being sovereign, permanent, and indivisible, was exercised by assemblies and senates, or by them delegated to an almost indefi nite number of independent ministers and generals.” All this formed part of a broader defense of the British “free monarchy,” a defense which rested upon classical authorities (such as Seneca’s promonarchical De Beneficiis) and upon Gillies’s own belief that the “progressive prosperity” of Eu rope over the previous two centuries was connected to the rise of

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modern monarchies. Gillies argued that Britain now embodied the republican principles of liberty and lawfulness in a new form. As he put it, the British monarchy was a form of government upon which “the fruits of genuine republicanism have been successfully engrafted,” flourishing there with a “degree of vigour and beauty they had never exhibited on their parent plant.”39 Gillies’s comparative analysis of French and British politics looked back to his earlier works on ancient Greek republicanism. As we have seen, the message of these works was that there were “no just grounds for the admiration commonly bestowed on the political institutions of the Greeks.” In the Aristotle translation, Gillies underlined the tendency of republics to invest the state with an unlimited power over the private lives of individuals and families, and to fail in providing a mechanism by which the authority of rich over poor could be restrained. These failings of the classical Greek polis could not be attributed, Gillies went on, to the absence of political representation among the ancients. In fact, he argued, several ancient Greek states were perfectly well acquainted with ideas of representation. But representative institutions had failed to prevent the “multitude assembled in a large and luxurious city from yielding to the perfidious voice of demagogues.” The real cause of the illiberal and despotic proclivities of most republics was, by contrast, their failure to establish a permanent, indivisible, and sovereign executive power. Their radical infi rmity originated not in those causes to which it is universally ascribed, the want of representation and a balance; but it consisted principally in this, that their fi rst magistrates, by whatever title they might be distinguished, consuls, archons, or kings, were incapable of performing what Aristotle considers as the main function of royalty, the defending the poor from insult and the rich from injury, and thus keeping the component parts of a state in their proper places, and thereby giving to the constitution inalterable stability.40

According to Gillies, even Niccolò Machiavelli had recognized the need for “the authority of some virtuous, prudent, and powerful citizen” in maintaining a balance between the various factions into which commonwealths naturally divided. A similar perspective explained why, in modern times, the Dutch Republic depended upon the office of the stadtholderate, and why the “great personal weight of their president” remained of such crucial significance in maintaining the happiness and security of the citizens of the United States.41

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One of the most important dimensions of Gillies’s critique of French developments concerned the affi nity he diagnosed between republicanism and militarism. The connection between republican government and martial virtue was, of course, something to which Aristotle himself had devoted considerable attention in the Politics; in Gillies’s translation, Aristotle had shown that the “virtue most likely to pervade a whole people is martial spirit,” and that “citizens, who are soldiers, naturally bear sway in that form of civil polity which is called by way of distinction the republic.”42 But in Gillies’s view the unique capacity of a republican state to integrate its civilian and military professions and to generate an unsurpassed degree of “martial virtue” was not something to be admired. Here Gillies picked up the thread of his earlier prognosis of an American-led “republican confederacy.” Endorsing Aristotle’s view that democratic nations “shine in war,” while “in peace they rust with their swords,” he claimed that this truth regarding the “military energy of democracy” had in fact been the principal reason for his decision to write the “Introduction” to the Orations of Lysias and Isocrates. In that work, he noted in the Aristotle translation, he had attempted to convey “what means should be used for avoiding a desperate confl ict with a people, whose ambition under despotism, first subjected their neighbours to the necessity of keeping on foot mercenary standing armies; and whose more dangerous ambition under democracy, was likely to subject them to the still harder necessity of becoming armed nations.” Here Gillies simply transferred what he had originally written about the consequences of the establishment of a republic in America to the French situation after 1792, underlining in partic ular the enormous dislocations likely to be created within the European state system as a whole by France’s turn to “democracy.” He condemned France’s failure to understand its “true interest” in pursuing wars “inflamed by the jealousy of trade.” Just like among the Romans, France’s military institutions “called forth the whole energy of the state,” but this was purchased at the cost of both continental security and internal domestic tranquillity. All large republics, he went on, faced special difficulties in ensuring that the “army may be formidable only to the enemies of the state” and in securing the dependence of the military power on the civil power. As the experience of that “great modern republic” (i.e., France) suggested, these difficulties meant that republican governments more often resembled a “camp” than a “commonwealth,” where

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“liberty” was no more than an “empty boast” (the argument was a direct reversal of the claims made by Mackintosh and MacLaurin). Gillies concluded this analysis by urging France to abandon its plans of continental conquest and, more pointedly, to disband its army in accordance with the “interest and safety of her republican government.” The stability of her democratical constitution can result only from giving to her national guards or militia a decided superiority over soldiers by profession. But how many stubborn difficulties will present themselves in attempting to realise this project! Should many of the requisition men be desirous to return to their families, and should the numerous bodies of foreigners in the ser vice be discharged without danger, and without tumult, yet who will be able to persuade the French veterans to forsake their arms, their generals, and their military habits of life; and prevail on the greater part of them to mix with the peaceful mass of citizens, while the remainder is dispersed over an extensive frontier? Yet unless this is done, it is morally impossible that France should long enjoy even the name or appearance of a republic.43

Gillies’s claim that a unitary executive would be a crucial support of modern liberty echoed the picture of a “free monarchy” set out by James Beattie, professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen, in the section on “Politicks” in his Elements of Moral Science (a two-volume compendium of his lectures published in 1790 and 1793). Rehearsing many of the standard arguments about the perils of attempting to introduce a republican form of government into Britain, Beattie asserted that “as the world is now constituted,” republics were neither “desirable” nor “natural” forms of government (an opinion which he claimed to have held for at least thirty years).44 Following Montesquieu’s defi nition of monarchy almost to the letter, he declared that a nobility and a “diversity of ranks” were essential components of a “free monarchy.” He also emphasized the inadequacy of republican governments to cope with the demands of commerce and empire. The Roman republic, Beattie declared, only survived for as long as it did because its constitution contained two quasi-despotic institutions (the dictatorship and the augurs) that the senate could deploy in times of tumult and emergency. Those “modern republicans” who admired the “prosperity of Rome under its consuls,” or the government of England under Oliver Cromwell, simply failed to recognize the degree of political despotism which republican regimes harbored. The real cause of Rome’s demise was neither territorial

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expansion nor “luxury,” but rather its failure to maintain a clear distinction between the “principle of sovereignty in the state” and “popular deliberation.” Following Delolme again, Beattie asserted that this was precisely what the English constitution provided for in the organization of the executive power, the unity and indivisibility of which guaranteed against the kind of military usurpation he associated with Caesar. In par tic ular, since the British king, as sovereign, was also “commander-in-chief,” there existed clear lines of loyalty bonding soldiers to the state rather than to their generals.45 The analyses of Mackintosh and MacLaurin on the one side, and those of Gillies and Beattie on the other, are indicative of the interest Scottish writers took in France’s modern republicanism and its implications for the security of Britain and Europe. Furthermore, their analyses serve to highlight the centrality of the question of military organization to the debates on modern republicanism in Britain, and the ongoing relevance of the history of the ancients and the legacies of civic humanist political thought to understanding these debates. Both Mackintosh, at least in the early 1790s, and MacLaurin argued that modern conditions now made the rise of military government in ancient Rome irrelevant to an understanding of France’s (and Britain’s) prospects. A new kind of compatibility between modern republican institutions and defensive organization could in principle be achieved. Gillies and Beattie, by contrast, argued that large modern republics like France would fi nd it impossible to extricate themselves from pathologies similar to those which had destroyed ancient Greece and Rome. Like the Roman republic, France would fail to fi nd a coherent institutional solution to the tension between the civil and military powers, and would run through Rome’s experience of expansion, instability, and military dictatorship.

Ferguson and the Imperial Republic Ferguson’s initial reaction to the French Revolution can be partially reconstructed from the Principles of Moral and Political Science. Although in the Principles he made only indirect comments on the revolution itself, the text reflects his ongoing engagement with the dangers of revolutionary republicanism and its implications for Britain and Europe.

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The most immediate sign of this engagement was a revised account of modern liberty. In two crucial chapters of the Principles, entitled “Of Civil and Political Liberty” and “Of Liberty as it may be affected by the Exercise of the Legislative Power,” Ferguson reworked his account of modern liberty, which he distinguished carefully from the liberty of the ancients and claimed was compatible with the economic and social realities of a modern state. While he broadly followed the argument he had leveled against Price in 1776, he now distinguished even more sharply between liberty on one side and popular sovereignty and power on the other. These clarifications reflected Ferguson’s perception of the need to combat the theoretical claims of those he described as “zealots for liberty” in both Britain and France.46 The consequence was a self-consciously modern defi nition of civil liberty in a large state. In “Of Civil and Political Liberty” Ferguson provided a defi nition of liberty that was cleansed of the various “vulgar errors” on the subject that, historically, had led to the “wildest disorders” and “the most violent and pernicious usurpations” (his main examples of usurpers were Caesar and Cromwell).47 He drew attention to two main errors in contemporary understandings of the concept, both of which were probably aimed at the descriptions of civil liberty used by Price, Priestley, and others. The fi rst of these was the notion that liberty or freedom consisted in an “exemption from all restraint.” Echoing Montesquieu’s defi nitions of the liberty of the constitution and the liberty of the citizen in The Spirit of the Laws, Ferguson claimed that liberty consisted largely in the security conferred upon the individual subject by a just and effective government: liberty was the “most effectual application of every just restraint to all the members of a free state, whether they be magistrates or subjects.” It followed that security was the “essence of freedom,” and that the language of natural liberty— terms like “perfect freedom” and “original right”—was without meaning. This was a clear retreat from the praise he had lavished on the liberties of savages in the Essay. The freedom of the savage, he now suggested, was “precisely no more than a privilege to deny himself all the comforts of a man, in order to avoid the inconveniencies of a dangerous neighbourhood.” A “just and effectual government” was out of all the “circumstances of civil society” the “most essential to freedom.”48 The emphasis on security ran through much of Ferguson’s later writing. In his unpublished essay “Of Liberty

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and Necessity” (probably written around 1806), he defi ned civil liberty as “the security of all Civil Rights,” and political liberty simply as the “Form of Government proper to that Security.”49 Ferguson developed this argument in the chapters “Of Liberty as It May Be Affected by the Exercise of the Legislative Power” and “Of the Executive Power.” He began by acknowledging that since law represented the “sovereign will” of the community, the legislative power must accordingly be supreme and subject to no control. This did not mean, however, that liberty depended upon every individual or order within a community having an “active share” in the legislature. This belief, he suggested, was a prejudice of the ancients. Law, once made, was general, even if each and every individual had not specifically assented to each and every law. Similarly, Ferguson rejected the idea of a simplistic opposition between liberty and the exercise of executive power. He warned that it was a severe mistake on the part of the “zealots for liberty” to oppose the creation of an executive government “sufficient to combine the strength of the people, and to enforce the observance of justice in every part of the community.”50 A second target was the idea of liberty conceived as equality. Although Ferguson was clear that liberty was incompatible with the unrestrained exercise of power by elites, liberty conceived as equality was a “mere chimera or vision, never realized in the state of mankind.” Furthermore, an agrarian law, applied to modern states, would prove even more disastrous than it had done in antiquity. Equality of possession would “reduce the fortune of every person to the fruit merely of his own labour, and, in fact, would be to render every person alike and equally poor.” Distinctions of fortune may give rise to a separation of aristocratic and popular factions, or a supposed opposition of interests, in the different orders of a people; and we will have occasion to observe that neither is safe without such a share in the government as may enable them to defend themselves, or put a negative on any measures which might be prejudicial to their respective interests. Both the high and the low, however, frequently aspire to the government of their country. The one is said to contend for authority, subordination, and power; the other for liberty, immunity, or privilege; But liberty is far from being safe in the exclusive prevalence of either. This will not be disputed relating to the unrestrained prevalence of aristocratic authority. But it is no less true,

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that liberty does not consist in the prevalence of democratic power. The violence of popu lar assemblies and their tumults needs to be restrained, no less than the passions and usurpations of any other power whatever; and there is indeed no species of tyranny under which individuals are less safe than under that of a majority or prevailing faction of the people.51

The main conclusion Ferguson drew from all this was that democratic republics, ancient and modern, sacrificed more civil liberty than monarchies or mixed states. This observation applied not only to postrevolutionary France, but even to the traditional commercial and military city-republics of Italy and Switzerland. In other words, by the 1790s Ferguson was prepared to question not only the political viability of large democratic republics, but even the smaller city-republics defended by Rousseau and many others. According to Ferguson, small republics like Berne and Venice possessed only a highly restricted form of civil liberty. Paradoxically, this was a side effect of the relative weakness and insecurity of government, which gave the magistrates of these states a jealous, harsh, and inquisitorial character. Echoing an argument deployed by Hume in his 1741 essay on the freedom of the press, Ferguson contrasted the jealousy and dread of weak republican governments with the security and tolerance of the strong and vigorous governments of monarchies and mixed states. The republican magistrate was cruel because he was fearful: “he is jealous of the most innocent freedoms, and dreads a too familiar inspection of his measures as want of respect to his person or his state.”52 Ultimately, this meant that both Berne and Venice exhibited less liberty than had existed in Paris before the events of 1789. Ferguson developed his thinking on the French Revolution, and its implications for Britain and Europe, in three crucial manuscript essays written in the early nineteenth century.53 The fi rst essay, “Of the Separation of Departments and Professions,” provided an assessment of Britain’s future as a commercial state, based upon a new analysis of the social and political consequences of the division of labor. The second essay, “Of Statesmen and Warriours,” set out a coherent argument about the urgency of reforming Britain’s civilian and military establishments on the model of the Roman republic. The third essay, “Of the French Revolution with its Actual and still Impending Consequences,” focused upon the consequences of the revolution at the British, European, and

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global levels. Here the revolution was described as having utterly transformed the European state system, introducing an entirely new kind of republican, but militaristic, state in the center of Europe. All three essays, considered together, add up to a coherent assessment of Britain’s future as a commercial state, conceived against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the rise of an ancient military republic in modern Europe. They laid out a two-pronged strategy for the maintenance of British independence in the wake of the Napoleonic threat, a strategy that would combine an extensive system of naval and colonial power with a reformed system of national territorial defense. The essay “Of the Separation of Departments and Professions” was a development of the discussion in the Essay of the “Separation of Arts and Professions.” Based on the strong distinction between economic and political roles that had been a major theme in 1767, the essay’s immediate purpose was to set clear and tangible limits on the progress of the division of labor and the various forms of moral, social, and political subordination to which it gave rise. In this sense, the essay supplied the social and economic dimensions to Ferguson’s broader argument about the political limits to Britain’s commercial and economic development, and the extent to which commercial society could be made compatible with the nation’s civil liberty and territorial defense. As Ferguson acknowledged, it was in the interest of every modern society to avail itself of “every advantage which the subdivision of arts and the separation of employments can give.”54 But the process of subdivision and separation could only be carried so far. One limit was set by Ferguson’s concern for the integrity of the human personality (the “genius and character of man”). Immersion in repetitive, mechanical tasks destroyed the preconditions for both political activity and virtue, just as a painting in which the “different shades, lights and colours were to be laid by different hands” would suffer in terms of the “unity of the whole.”55 The thrust of the essay concerned the impact of a modern economy on the character of civil society itself. Here Ferguson went further than he had done in previous works, and considered the extent to which economic inequalities characteristic of modern commercial states, and particularly the vast differences in intellectual and moral capacities between the different orders of society, might ultimately assume the character of the distinction between master and slave that had underwritten the economies of the ancient world. Ferguson strongly implied that

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the progress of social and economic disparities among modern nations might ultimately promote a revival of ancient forms of slavery. Systems of subordination, however valuable, were “too dearly bought by the debasement of any order or class of people.” As Ferguson pointed out, the “worst possible condition in which man can be conceived is that in which all labour were precluded, or in which all power is vested in one and all dependence in another. The nearest approach to this condition is that of master and slave, however constituted, whether as a civil relation of proprietor and property, or sovereign and subject.” As we have seen, this claim rested less upon any sympathy for the plight of the poor, and more upon Ferguson’s judgment that extreme economic inequalities tended to erode the overall cohesion of the state. Economic disparity on this scale was dangerous because it prefigured a revival of political despotism and slavery. At this point Ferguson came quite close to endorsing the more notorious judgment about the relationship between personal and political slavery set out in Andrew Fletcher’s much earlier Two Discourses on the Affairs of Scotland. Echoing Fletcher’s claim that political slavery was worse than domestic slavery, Ferguson observed that “Political Servitude is debasing in the greatest degree & to the greatest Extent. The Courtiers of Tiberius or Nero, even the Senators of Nero’s time, were debased to a degree far beyond that of the Slave to an ordinary Master.”56 The remainder of the essay was devoted to tracing, albeit on a narrower canvas than in the History, the connection between political slavery and the division of civil and military professions among modern nations. At this point Ferguson referred to the “Socrates” of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and, more specifically, to Socrates’s argument that the virtues and aptitudes required of the statesman, general, and head of household were overlapping and usually congruent.57 Ferguson drew from Xenophon the insight that the most important civil and military offices of public life demanded for their effective fulfi llment a similar mix of virtues. Thus although in “well-regulated establishments” the civil, political, and military departments of state would be separated to a certain extent, they demanded the “same grounds of knowledge and power.” The knowledge of men and the power it gave was the “essence of ability in either department, and that strength of mind which gives an ascendant over men is equally required in both.”58 The essay concluded with a fi nal swipe at Smith. According to Ferguson, Smith’s

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justification of a standing army was based on a flawed application of the principle of the division of labor to the political sphere. Smith had been correct to stress the importance of a broad martial education, but his rejection of a militia was mistaken. To deny the wider populace the use of arms was, in effect, to deprive people of the happiness which derived from the exercise of military virtue: “to set valour apart as the characteristic of a few were to change virtue and happiness itself as matter of profession and study peculiar to a devision of the community.” Much of the rest of the essay was simply a recapitulation of the major themes of the Essay and the History. In par tic ular, Ferguson reiterated the crucial significance of the “union of departments” in republican Rome, where “the departments of state and war were not only strictly allied and known to each other but for the most actively fi lled and conducted by the same person.” It was this, in par tic ular, which made Rome a “model of felicity to free nations.”59 The remaining two essays—“Of Statesmen and Warriours” and “Of the French Revolution”— contained an embryonic analysis of the French Revolution’s causes. Although he did not fail to mention several other features of French politics that provoked revolution in 1789—mentioning the fashionable philosophies of “atheism and anarchy,” the profl igacy of the Court, the disordered state of the public fi nances, and the abuses of the system of tax farming—his analysis focused almost exclusively upon the contradictions generated between the civil and military institutions of the ancien régime state and upon the moral and political failings of the French aristocracy.60 Ferguson underlined the massive differences between the system of ranks as it existed in Britain and ancien régime France. The fate of the monarchy was, at least in part, a product of the closed character of the French elite. Here Ferguson looked back to his earlier inquiries into the divergent foundations of the distinction of ranks among different European societies. This enabled him to show that the broad causes of the revolution were the enormous disparities in privilege and condition that had grown up between the nobility and the lower orders of France, and the failure of the nobility to maintain the virtues and patriotic commitment that justified their civil preeminences and honors. These disparities had corrupted the nobility “by making them secure on the foot of birth alone,” and incited the lower orders with the ambition to “compensate their disadvantage.”61

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What mattered above all, however, was the manner in which the civil distinctions that patterned the French monarchy had been mirrored in the structure of its armies. As Ferguson suggested to Alexander Carlyle in 1797, of “all the plebeians in France who felt the galling distinction of noblesse connected with the monarchy, the rank and file of the French army did so the most.”62 The deeply inegalitarian structure of the army destroyed all traces of emulation among the common soldiers, leaving them with “nothing to inspire them with zeal for the object on which they are employed” and with “no hopes of advancement in distinguishing themselves.” At this point Ferguson revised his earlier, more positive appraisal of French honor as a source of martial greatness and asserted the advantages of British patriotism. Britain maintained its military capacity because its free constitution remained a point of national pride and, as Ferguson underlined, “national estimation is a known principle of valour.” Moreover, patriotic loyalty expanded exponentially where the “community is an honour and protection to its members, as it is in free constitutions of government, where no rank is depressed so low as not to feel its participation in the general welfare.” In France, by contrast, the exclusion of the lower ranks from the “honour and protection” of the state simultaneously undermined the capacity of the French monarchy to act as a focus for patriotic unity.63 In this condition, he went on, “the Revolution found the armies of France.” It “soon appeared that noblesse was an empty name, and the great body of men with arms in their hands and conscious of their own importance subverted the monarchy and laid it with all its privileged orders in the dust.”64 It followed that the revolution had the character of an extended military coup, the democratic character of which was a direct consequence of the political sentiment of the armies. Ferguson underlined just how quickly the French military “lost that zeal for royalty with which they were supposed to be animated more than any other troops in Europe.” In this sense the entire episode was a devastating commentary on the fragility of the civil and political establishments of all modern monarchies: In this the revolution consisted or by this alone was it effected. If the army had adhered to the king, the popu lar assembly would have been dismissed, and military government established in the house of

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Despite the more positive evaluation of Britain’s political system he made in the essay “Of Statesmen and Warriours,” Ferguson believed that the French Revolution had increased the urgency for reform. He thus reiterated the desirability of restoring the nexus between Britain’s civil and military departments and of diffusing martial patriotism more broadly across the population. Repeating the ideal of the integrated individual “Man” that had featured in almost all of his works, Ferguson argued that, despite the extensive discoveries in “Geograph ical, Physical and Astronomical Science,” man himself was “forgotten or considered only as a Party in Trade and a Dealer in Manufactures & Money.” A similar “mutilation” characterized the military establishment. While the most ambitious and talented opted for a civilian career, the less talented ended up in the armies. The statesman with no practical knowledge of warfare was a clerk, while the warrior became a mere “prise fighter and bully whose only form of proceeding is mere violence or force.”66 With the specter of French expansionism in the background, he went on to argue that modern commercial states were now at the mercy of states with a more closely integrated set of civil and military institutions. Repeating the argument he had made some five decades earlier in the Reflections, he proposed a system of military honors and increased pay for generals as a way of motivating patriotism. The king could reward those who had distinguished themselves in ser vice with higher honors and prizes. The meritocratic system of rewards and honors would create a culture of ambition, ser vice, and patriotism throughout the army, extending downwards to the lowest ranks. The fi nal essay, “On the French Revolution,” focused on the consequences of the revolution for Europe, and the par ticular role that Britain might play in responding to Napoleon’s new universal empire. As Ferguson noted resignedly, the immediate consequence for Europe was that the “long boasted balance of power was set at nought.” This judgment was a concise expression of his long-held view that the establishment of a large, militaristic republic in Europe would inevitably destroy the fragile equilibrium among Europe’s modern states. Paradoxically, Ferguson did voice admiration for France’s success in opening up its civilian and military honors on the basis of merit. Not only had the revo-

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lutionary episode generated an enormous level of residual patriotism across the country, but successive revolutionary governments had carefully linked the per for mance of military duties to the achievement of civilian honors, thereby creating an irresistible motivation toward military patriotism. Military leadership came to depend on “genius and superior ability” rather than birth or wealth, while the “multitude” were “roused by expectation of a rising sun of glory to their country, and unlimited elevation to preferments and honours excited in the breast of every individual.”67 All this, Ferguson underlined, constituted a complete revolution in the military system of modern Europe itself. Men raised their ranks on a presumption or experience of merit living and suffering with their men in times of privation, hardship or danger. And men from the ranks looking up for preferment due to their action have trampled on all the former military establishments of the continent of Europe and make a general knowing how to conduct them ascend from a state of Europe to an unprecedented dominion of nations formerly supposed invincible and not to be shaken by any attack to be feared from abroad.68

All this had crucial implications for British foreign policy. As Ferguson depicted the situation, the Continent remained mired in old jealousies and rivalries that made a common strategy unworkable. Since the major Continental powers could not, either singly or together, form a sufficient counterweight to French expansionism, they should not have provoked France into aggressive war, and Britain should never have participated in the War of the Second Coalition (1798–1802). These arguments were based on the insight that the French military republic, if left at peace, might well have collapsed in domestic dissension and civil war before it launched its plan for the armed subjugation of Europe. Before 1800 at any rate, the time had not “yet passed in which the French nation, if left to themselves, might not have broke to pieces, gone to war among themselves, and saved their neighbours the trouble of reducing their too formidable greatness.” But the military buildup and deployment of armies from Austria, Prussia, and Russia only acted as “calls on the military leader of France” to “possess himself of Germany and Poland, quite to the frontiers of Russia.” With almost all of continental Europe under his belt, no state would have been capable of preventing Napoleon from establishing an “empire” that stretched from “the Atlantic to the American Straits to the North of Kamkatcha.”69

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Resigned as Ferguson was to Napoleon’s dominance of Europe for the immediate future, he described the truly crucial task facing British statesmen as that of ensuring that France did not succeed in usurping Britain’s dominance of the seas as well. This was a matter of the utmost urgency, since if “the ruler of France were as powerful at sea as he is by land, no state or province could be safe from California to Japan.” Europe’s safety rested ultimately upon “the limit which this island sets to his Empire.” The partisans of Bonaparte say he has given peace to the continent of Europe. What Peace? Subjugation! And [they] arraign the British councils for refusing peace. The meaning is obvious, and it is evident that any peace tending to reduce the defences of Britain either at sea or by land would be ruinous not only to her but to every nation which the mandates of this European sovereign could reach. His vessels might be met with on the ocean fetching his contributions at once from Mexico and Japan.70

It is worth underlining the extent to which the history of ancient Rome lay behind Ferguson’s projection of Europe’s future in a postrevolutionary epoch. France’s recent history represented a modern version of Rome’s imperial project of global pacification and, more generally, a replay of ancient Rome’s transition from republic to empire. Simultaneously, the image of Roman despotism served as a reminder to the elites of modern states to reacquaint themselves with their civil and military responsibilities. As Ferguson warned somewhat gruesomely, it was in the Roman metropolis, not the provinces, that the worst effects of despotic power made themselves felt. “They were not the heads of Dacians or Armenians which Nero wished to have sett upon neck to be struck off at a blow, but those of the Romans inhabiting the seven hills of Rome.”71

Q Conclusion

A DAM Ferguson’s verdict on Napoleon Bonaparte’s potential for global domination formed a striking conclusion to his life-long investigation into the Roman past and Europe’s future. His death, in the transformed world of 1816, brought that investigation to a fi nal close, and marked the end of one of the Enlightenment’s most sustained inquiries into the character, foundations, and prospects of modern European states. As we have seen, that inquiry had commenced some sixty years earlier, when Ferguson had fi rst become preoccupied with Britain’s prospects as an extensive commercial state. It was placed on fi rmer philosophical foundations in the Essay on the History of Civil Society, a theoretical history of the modern state designed to show that Europe’s wealthy and civilized monarchies were by no means immune from revolution, military government, and despotic empire. It was further elaborated in the History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, an ambitious work of Enlightenment historiography which provided an analysis of Britain’s future against the mirror of the ancient Roman past. These works represent the core of Ferguson’s answer to Montesquieu’s more confident assessment of the durability of European civilization and of Britain’s viability as a modern monarchical republic. His postrevolutionary writings— the Principles of Moral and Political Science and the unpublished early nineteenth-century essays— traced these preoccupations into an age of unprecedented revolutionary upheaval, yet they remained largely compatible with the criticism of republican expansion, popular rule, and military government he had elaborated in the earlier works.

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Ferguson’s contemporaries recognized both the intellectual coherence and the European scope of his inquiry. Most of his eighteenthcentury readers, for example, appreciated the Essay as a fundamental contribution to European debates about the history of mankind and the progress of civilization, and clearly recognized its arguments as an answer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s highly skeptical Second Discourse as well as to David Hume’s or Adam Smith’s utility-based moral theories. Numerous contemporaries, furthermore, were impressed by Ferguson’s vivid account of the compatibility between commercial society and military government; his description of the modern state as an artificial and mechanical entity that would substitute tranquillity and wealth for freedom fi red the imaginations of subsequent German thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.1 At the same time, contemporaries were not blind to Ferguson’s critique of popu lar government and its intrinsic incompatibility with the large, unequal, and populous states of modern Europe. According to British thinkers like Robert Bisset, Ferguson’s History showed that “the promiscuous admission of such numbers to the privileges of Roman citizens under the specious pretext of reform, in fact was the cause of despotism. Excess of democracy destroyed the liberty that was its professed object to secure.”2 But Ferguson’s account of Rome’s mixed constitution, with its emphasis on distinctions of rank and senatorial virtue, was also appreciated by American thinkers like John Adams, who incorporated large sections of the History within his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.3 It was only during the nineteenth century, as Ferguson’s writings came to be read through the ideological fi lters of socialist, liberal, and conservative politics, that readers began to lose sight of his intellectual coherence. Ferguson’s inquiry into modernity’s prospects has a number of broader implications for our understanding of late eighteenth-century political thought. First of all, his example serves to correct some widely held and surprisingly tenacious assumptions about the character of Scottish Enlightenment political thought, and highlights a crucial alternative to the liberal defense of commercial modernity which has come to be associated with Hume and Smith. Ferguson’s rejection of commercial sociability, and his correspondingly strong emphasis on the permanence of war and antagonism between independent states,

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certainly separated his thought from the more commercial and cosmopolitan sympathies which historians have discerned in Smith’s writings.4 His denial of any historic link between modern liberty and markets, and his suggestion that commercial progress might be compatible with ancient forms of dictatorship and despotism, stands in sharp contrast with his contemporaries’ faith in the progressive pacification of wealthy civil societies. Yet it bears repeating that his critique of modern civilization also diverged significantly from the indictment of inequality set out in Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which is usually seen as emblematic of eighteenth-century criticisms of modern commercial society. Although Ferguson shared Rousseau’s diagnosis of the moral distortions unleashed by the market, he fiercely opposed Rousseau’s skeptical denial of human sociability and offered a different assessment of the political consequences of inequal ity. Close scrutiny of his argument thus highlights the need for a more fi nely grained perspective upon late Enlightenment thinking about the history, progress, and future of modern civilization. As we have seen, Ferguson’s diagnosis of Europe’s prospects differed in emphasis and in detail from many of the alternatives discussed in this book, ranging from the abbé Raynal’s and Denis Diderot’s devastating attack on European commercial imperialism, Herder’s denigration of modern Europe’s cultural and intellectual self-centeredness, and Christoph Meiners’s criticism of “unrepublican” inequalities across Europe. Seen from that perspective, late Enlightenment criticisms of civilization were complex and multifaceted; the idea of a straightforward clash between modern and antimodern thinkers is misleading. Second, Ferguson’s engagement with the premises of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws highlights a vision of modern constitutional government that has largely vanished from contemporary historiography on both the Scottish Enlightenment and the origins of modern republicanism. Most of Montesquieu’s late eighteenth-century critics, ranging from Smith and Jean-Louis Delolme to Rousseau, Raynal, Meiners, and the abbé Sieyès, argued that Montesquieu’s assessment of Europe’s political foundations— the combination of a neo-German hierarchy of ranks with a modern commercial economy—relied far too heavily on the idea of an honor-based nobility to be morally or politically viable. While Ferguson shared some aspects of this criticism, he nevertheless sought to recover the neo-German ideals of patriotism and military

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ser vice as the basis of a reformed system of modern government. As we have seen, this call for a military aristocracy of merit sharply demarcated Ferguson’s writings from those of Smith, but it also distinguished him from the conceptions of a modern representative republic set out in the writings of James Madison, Sieyès, and Immanuel Kant. Nevertheless, Ferguson was not alone in calling for a restoration of the connection between aristocratic rank and military service in the second half of the eighteenth century. Similar ideas about military aristocracy were developed by the Swiss historian and political thinker Johannes von Müller, who drew explicitly from Ferguson’s account of the origins of military rule among barbarous peoples in his manuscript work “Beobachtungen über Geschichte, Gesetze und Interessen der Menschen” (1774–1776). Müller also predicted the exhaustion of modern Europe’s commercial societies and advocated the formation of small, militarily prepared, and aristocratically governed republics as a counterweight to the rise of centralized military empires.5 The idea of using military service as the foundation for a more legitimate distinction of ranks was a significant feature of much of the reform politics of large states like Britain and France.6 Seen from that perspective, Ferguson’s claim that modern constitutional government would depend upon a military aristocracy of merit represents a significant eighteenth-century alternative to the more familiar idea of representative government as the inevitable state-form of a commercial society. Furthermore, Ferguson’s preoccupations about maintaining the subordination of military power to civil authority highlight the centrality of this issue to debates about the viability of modern republics as the nineteenth century dawned.7 During the early years of the French Revolution, writers like Sieyès and Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet advocated a clear division between the civil and military departments as the firmest basis for maintaining the stability of the postrevolutionary French state. As Condorcet argued in 1789, the division of armies into widely dispersed garrisons, whose generals were debarred from permanent commands, meant that all European states, with the possible exceptions of Russia and Prussia, were now safe from a Roman “despotism of the army.” By contrast, writers like Antoine-Joseph Barnave, the leader of the Feuillant group during the French Revolution, emphasized that the organization of military power would prove consistently diffi-

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cult for large modern republics, and suggested that an integrated nexus of civilian and military offices would be a necessary barrier against the rise of military despotism.8 As we have already seen, similar concerns dominated the Scottish debates of the 1790s, while in Germany Humboldt echoed Ferguson’s own claims about the necessary interdependence of the civilian and military virtues. According to Humboldt, “a warlike spirit is only honourable in conjunction with the highest peaceful virtues, and military discipline, only when allied with the highest feeling of freedom.”9 Perhaps the most significant nineteenth-century continuation of these concerns was that set out in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, a work which was deeply preoccupied by the legacy of the French republic and empire for modern politics. Not only did Hegel echo Ferguson’s fears of a wholly pacified or tranquil civil society but, more specifically, he underlined the importance of keeping the civil and military departments of state in equilibrium, noting that “sometimes the civil power is completely defunct and based exclusively on the military power, as at the time of the Roman emperors and the praetorians; and at other times— as in the modern period—the military power is solely a product of the civil power, as when all citizens are eligible for conscription.”10 Although the rise of large conscript armies in the early nineteenth century made Ferguson’s advocacy of a militia redundant, the problem of securing the subordination of the military upon the civil power remained a central problem for postrevolutionary nation-states. Finally, Ferguson’s sophisticated revisiting of ancient Rome’s transition from republic to empire has two very important consequences for the study of what John Pocock has called “the politics of historiography.”11 The first, quite simply, is that Rome’s history remained central to the attempts of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment political thinkers to understand the trajectories of modern states. Rome, in other words, retained a crucial position within what Hume called the “enlarged mirror” of the human past.12 The central text for almost all late eighteenth-century discussions of this issue was Montesquieu’s Considerations on the History of the Romans and their Decline. As this book has shown, Montesquieu’s distinctive account of Rome’s transition from republic to empire was in some sense at the center of the Scottish Enlightenment debate about modernity’s prospects, and certainly provided

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Scottish authors with crucial intellectual resources for making sense of Britain’s constitutional and political dilemmas in the age of the American and French revolutions. During the French Revolution, Montesquieu’s Considerations came to hold a somewhat paradoxical status as both a manual of republican politics and as a stark warning about the dangers of violent republican revolution.13 The second observation is that contemporary historiography on republicanism has severely underestimated the connection that many eighteenth-century thinkers discerned between popular rule, the politics of equality, and the rise of republican empires. Ferguson’s History reminds us that the relationship between republican liberty and imperial slavery was by no means as simple as it might at fi rst glance appear. The French Revolution reinvigorated this Roman story in two connected ways. First, as Ferguson himself had anticipated, France’s republican militarism led directly to the revival of the spirit of conquest in Europe. While in some ways this judgment matched the earlier critiques of universal monarchy set out by Samuel Pufendorf, Andrew Fletcher, Montesquieu, and Hume, it was also indicative of a novel, postrevolutionary connection between democratic republicanism and republican empire. An interesting glance at Ferguson’s preoccupation with the problem of republican expansion in postrevolutionary Europe is hinted at in one of the long obituaries published shortly after his death. Although, the obituarist noted, Ferguson had been no admirer of France’s absolute monarchy, he also “dreaded the effects of a popular government, by the operation of which he had beheld many of the Continental Princes reduced to a state of vassalage; and Europe itself ready to succumb under the pressure of numerous, powerful, and victorious armies.”14 It was left to a younger generation of political thinkers—including Benjamin Constant, Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël, Friedrich Gentz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and many others—to debate the prospects of eradicating the spirit of conquest and for reconstituting Europe’s political foundations in a postrevolutionary age. But there is a second reason why Rome’s transition from republic to empire retained a pressing relevance in a postrevolutionary world. With Napoleon’s rise to domination, the French republic gained what Montesquieu had called a “prince who succeeds to a republic” and what Ferguson, more bluntly, had termed a “new master.” This was the paradoxical figure of the postrepublican prince or republican emperor, an

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increasingly conventional term to describe Napoleon’s own constitutional position after 1804.15 The Roman imagery upon which Napoleon drew is well known. In subsequent decades, this seemingly paradoxical idea moved toward the center of European political theory, which now focused on the tangled legacy of the revolution itself for understanding the relationship between republicanism, democracy, and empire in the modern world. We are still asking questions about the relationship between democracy and empire among the world’s wealthiest and most powerful states, and about the relationship between civilian governments and military forces in modern republics across the globe. Ferguson’s eighteenth-century history of Rome’s transition from republic to empire is not usually connected to these post-revolutionary concerns. Nevertheless, his intricate analysis of ancient Rome’s relevance for understanding the political prospects of wealthy constitutional states, his anxieties about the expansionist proclivities of republican polities, and his concerns about the tendency of popular republics toward dictatorship and military government are crucial parts of the story.

Abbreviations

Correspondence

CUP Lectures

LJ (A)

LJ (B)

Manuscripts

The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, with an introduction by Jane B. Fagg, 2 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995) Cambridge University Press Lectures on Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh University Library Special Collections MS, Papers of Professor Adam Ferguson, Dc.1.84– 86 “Report of 1762–3,” in Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) “Report dated 1766,” in Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle with Robin Dix and Eugene Heath (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006)

Q Notes

Introduction 1. For the views of Burke, Hume, Sieyès, Iselin, and Gibbon see The Annual Register, or a view of the history, politics, and literature, for the year 1767 (London, 1768), 309; John Home, “Appendix to the Biographical Account of Mr. Home, Consisting of Letters To and From his Friends,” in Home, Works, to which is prefi xed an account of his life and writings, ed. Henry Mackenzie, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1822), 1:181–182; Emmanuel-Joseph, l’abbé Sieyès, Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. Tome II. 1770–1815, ed. Christine Fauré (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 27–28; Isaac Iselin, Review of Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 11 (1770), 154–168; Edward Gibbon, Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, Pour l’an 1767 (London, 1768), 49–50. For commentary on the interpretations of Iselin and Gibbon see, respectively, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth- Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 169–189; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 346–361. 2. For significant interpretations see David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus, OH: Columbus State University Press, 1965); Duncan Forbes, “Introduction,” in Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966); J.  G.  A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 499– 505; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 119– 125; David Kettler, “History and Theory in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society: A Reconsideration,” Political Theory 5 (1977): 437– 460; Ronald Hamowy, “Progress and Commerce in Anglo-American Thought,” Interpretation:

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A Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (1986): 61– 87; Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, 93–129; Marco Geuna, “Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of Adam Ferguson,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 2:177–196; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1999–2010), 2:330–345; 3:399– 416; Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006). See also Michel Foucault’s lecture of 4 April 1979, which deals substantially with Ferguson’s Essay, in Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 291–316. 3. On this early “dissertation” see Ferguson to Gilbert Elliot, 19 March 1758, in Adam Ferguson, The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, 2 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 1:26–27. This was almost certainly the text Hume read with admiration in 1759; see David Hume to Adam Smith, 12 April 1759, in New Letters of David Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 52. 4. Throughout this book I have generally used Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). For excellent recent interpretations of Montesquieu see Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Spirit of Nations,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 9–39; Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). I am especially indebted to Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 5. For earlier interpretations see Sheila Mason, “Ferguson and Montesquieu: Tacit Reproaches?” British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 11 (1988): 193–203; Richard B. Sher, “From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. David Wootton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 368– 402; James Moore, “Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Montesquieu and his Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 179–195. 6. Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:3. 7. On neo-Roman conceptions of liberty see the argument developed in Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty,” Politics 18 (1983): 3–15; Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schnee-

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wind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 193–221 [revised versions of these are contained in his Visions of Politics. Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 160–185; 186–212]; Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of Political liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 293–309; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). 8. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, intro. by Jonathan Schell (New York: Penguin, 2006 [1963]). 9. For the relationship between republicanism and empire in early modern political thought see the arguments in David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); Armitage, “Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 2:29– 46; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 203–235; Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). For the nineteenth-century aftermath (although not focused explicitly on republicanism) see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 10. For their views on the despotic republic of seventeenth-century England see Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 22 (bk. 3, ch. 3), 166 (bk. 11, ch. 6); David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:509; Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of Faculties,” in Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 188, n. 11. On Scottish philosophical history see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 1975); Forbes, “Introduction,” in David Hume, The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Duncan Forbes (London: Penguin, 1970), 7–54. On the “Enlightened narrative” and the diminishing relevance of ancient models of empire see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: CUP, 1997); John Robertson, “Gibbon’s Roman Empire as a Universal Monarchy: the Decline and Fall and the Imperial Idea in Early Modern Europe,” in Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 247–270; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 1– 6; 163–329; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Four: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 229–339; Pocock, “Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking,” Intellectual History Review 17 (2007): 79– 92. 12. Adam Smith, LJ (A), iii.111. 13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse, in The Discourses and Other Early Political

226

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Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1997) [hereafter: Second Discourse]; Guillaume Thomas François, l’abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. O. Justamond, 8 vols. (London, 1783); Johann Gottfried Herder, “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 272–358. 14. Herder, “This Too a Philosophy for the Formation of Humanity,” 296, 307–308. 15. Rousseau, Second Discourse, 185. 16. For the tension between ancient and modern republicanism see Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Whatmore, “Democrats and Republicans in Restoration France,” European Journal of Political Theory 3 (2004): 37–51; Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 1–156; Jacob T. Levy, “Beyond Publius: Montesquieu, Liberal Republicanism and the Small-Republic Thesis,” History of Political Thought 17 (2006): 50– 90; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. See also Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge, CUP, 2008); Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), and, more broadly, Wilfried Nippel, Antike oder moderne Freiheit? Die Begründung der Demokratie in Athen und in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008).

1. Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic 1. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 66. On Ferguson’s relationship to Montesquieu see Richard B. Sher, “From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. David Wootton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 368– 402; Sheila Mason, “Ferguson and Montesquieu: Tacit Reproaches?” British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 11 (1988): 193–203. 2. Ferguson, Essay, 42; Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. George R. Healy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 140. 3. For the description of Montesquieu as a Stoic thinker see Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 1:8. 4. For Ferguson’s ac knowledg ment of his reliance upon Montesquieu’s Considerations in constructing his own History see Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1799), 1:xxiii.

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5. Dugald Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 274–275, 293. 6. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 169. While I generally cite this edition, see also Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, ed. Françoise Weil and Cecil Courtney, Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, 22 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 2:87–318. For accounts of Montesquieu’s influence on the Scottish Enlightenment see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 157–177; James Moore, “Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Montesquieu and his Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 179–195; and Sher, “From Troglodytes to Americans.” 7. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 169. 8. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 29, n. (bk. 3, ch. 9). The quotation here is from Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols. (London, 1752), 1:38, n. 9. For recent work compatible with the argument set out here see Vickie Sullivan, “Against the Despotism of a Republic: Montesquieu’s Correction of Machiavelli in the Name of the Security of the Individual,” History of Political Thought 27 (2006): 263–289; Annelien de Djin, “On Political Liberty: Montesquieu’s Missing Manuscript,” Political Theory 39 (2011): 181–204; see also Paul A. Rahe, “Montesquieu’s anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 128–136. On the sharpness of Machiavelli’s own distinction between republics and principalities see Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 260–311. 10. On eighteenth-century French historiography on ancient Rome see Mouza Raskolnikoff, Histoire romaine et critique historique dans l’Europe des lumières: La naissance de l’hypercritique de la Rome antique (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1992); Chantall Grell, L’histoire entre l’érudition et philosophie: Etude sur le connaissance historique à l’âge des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1993); Grell, Le dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France, 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995). 11. Jean-Baptiste l’abbé Dubos, Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie françoise dans les Gaules, 3 vols. (Paris, 1734). For Montesquieu’s attack on Roman law and the thèse royale see Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 319–354; Sheila Mason, “Women’s Political Competence and the

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Notes to Pages 15–18

Issue of the Salic Law(s),” British Journal of Eighteenth- Century Studies 22 (1999): 125–132; Iris Cox, “Montesquieu and the History of Laws,” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of the Laws, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 409– 429; Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 131–149. 12. Montesquieu, Considerations, 93. 13. Pierre Bayle, The dictionary historical and critical of Mr. Pierre Bayle, trans. Pierre des Maizeaux, 5 vols. (London, 1734–1738), 2:166, n. 14. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 3. 15. Samuel von Pufendorf, Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (London, 1729), 23. On Pufendorf’s political thought see James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, “Protestant Theologies, Limited Sovereignties: Natural Law and Conditions of Union in the German Empire, the Netherlands, and Great Britain,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 171–197; Peter Schröder, “The Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648: Samuel Pufendorf’s Assessment in his Monzambano,” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 961–983; Michael Seidler, “Introduction” to Samuel Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, ed. Michael J. Seidler (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), ix–xxvii. 16. Pufendorf, Introduction, 14. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law, ed. James Tully and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 142. On Pufendorf’s post-Hobbesian distinction between regular and irregular constitutions see Hans Erich Bödeker, “Debating the respublica mixta: German and Dutch Political Discourses around 1700,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 1:219–246; Schröder, “Constitution,” 961–968; Seidler, “Introduction,” xiv. 19. Pufendorf, Introduction [“Preface”, no pagination]. 20. Montesquieu, Considerations, 45, 92– 94, 104, 122; for Montesquieu’s earlier criticism of the distinction between Roman citizens and conquered peoples see Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 223. 21. For Aristotle’s claim that Carthage was a wealth-based oligarchy, attaching more value to wealth than merit see Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 1273a (II.xi.§10–11). For Melon’s account of these themes and his mitigated defense of Carthage see especially the chapter “Of Military Government” in Jean-François Melon, A Political Essay on Commerce, trans. David Bindon (Dublin, 1738), 135–145. On

Notes to Pages 19–27

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Melon see John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 340–347. 22. This translation is taken from Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Reflexions on the causes of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1759), 33. Compare Montesquieu, Considerations, 47. 23. The fi rst versions of Vertot’s histories of Portugal and Sweden were published in 1690 and 1695 respectively; his Histoire des révolutions de la république romaine was fi rst published in 1719. I have used René Aubert, abbé de Vertot, History of the Revolutions that happened in the government of the Roman Republic, trans. John Ozell, 2 vols. (London, 1720). On Vertot see Grell, Le dixhuitième siècle, 2:1042–1056. 24. Aaron Hill, An enquiry into the merit of assassination, with a view to the character of Caesar and his designs on the republick (London, 1738), 87. 25. Vertot, History, 1:i–xiv. 26. Ibid., 2:106. 27. Ibid., 2:91, 129, 439. 28. Montesquieu, Considerations, 41. 29. Ibid., 40. 30. Vertot, History, 2:439. 31. Montesquieu, Considerations, 123, 139, 152. 32. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 90 (bk. 6, ch. 15). 33. Montesquieu, Considerations, 150, 171. 34. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 143–144 (bk. 10, ch. 6). 35. Ibid., 184 (bk. 11, ch. 19). 36. Ibid., 170–175 (bk. 11, chs. 12–13). 37. Ibid., 182 (bk. 11, ch. 18). 38. Ibid., 112 (bk. 8, ch. 2), 22–23 (bk. 3, ch. 3), 43 (bk. 5, ch. 3). 39. Ibid., 124 (bk. 8, ch. 16). 40. Montesquieu, Considerations, 138; Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Nugent, 2:19; compare with the translation contained in Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 15–16 (bk. 2, ch. 3). 41. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 112 (bk. 8, ch. 2). 42. Ibid., 113 (bk. 8, ch. 2). 43. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, ed. Françoise Weil, Œuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, 22 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 2:338–364, esp. 360. 44. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 338. 45. Ibid., 392 (bk. 21, ch. 21). 46. Ibid., 462 (bk. 24, ch. 3). 47. Ibid., 139. (bk. 10, ch. 3). 48. Montesquieu, Considerations, 146. 49. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 224 (bk. 13, ch. 17); see also Montesquieu, Réflexions, 362.

230

Notes to Pages 27–32

50. See also Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 221–224 (Letter CXXXI). 51. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 167 (bk. 11, ch. 8). In this paragraph I am following Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 131–149. 52. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 167–168 (bk. 11, ch. 8). 53. Ibid., 166 (bk. 11, ch. 6), 677 (bk. 31, ch. 4). For the original passages see Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus, trans. M. Hutton, R. M. Ogilvie, and E.  H. Warmington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 141, 147–149 (chs. 7 and 11). 54. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 18; see also Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 131–149. 55. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 69–70 (bk. 5, ch. 19). 56. Ibid., 66 (bk. 5, ch. 16). 57. See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Nugent, 1:257; compare Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 185 (bk. 11, ch. 19). Montesquieu’s call for maintaining a strict separation between civil and military functions was echoed by many parlementaire critics of Maupeou’s coup of 1771, which some depicted as the beginnings of praetorian government in modern France. On this episode see especially Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 52–53; Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); Swann, “ ‘Silence, respect obedience’: political culture in Louis XV’s France,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 225–248. 58. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 27 (bk. 3, ch. 7). 59. Ibid., 55–56 (bk. 5, ch. 9). On this see Catherine Larrère, “Montesquieu on Economics and Commerce,” in Carrithers, Mosher, and Rahe, Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, 335–374. 60. On honor see Michael A. Mosher, “Monarchy’s Paradox: Honor in the Face of Sovereign Power,” in Carrithers, Mosher, and Rahe, Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, 159–230; Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32– 66. 61. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 44 (bk. 5, ch. 4). 62. Ibid., 27 (bk. 3, ch. 7). 63. For the background see especially Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, 229–303, and, more generally, Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). 64. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 33 (bk. 4, ch. 2). 65. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 26 (bk. 3, ch. 6). 66. For England’s place in Montesquieu’s political thought see Nannerl O. Keohane, “Virtuous Republics and Glorious Monarchies: Two Models in Montesquieu’s Political Thought,” Political Studies 20 (1972): 383–396; Donald

Notes to Pages 32–40

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Desserud, “Commerce and Political Participation in Montesquieu’s Letter to Domville,” History of European Ideas 25 (1999): 135–151; Lee Ward, “Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 37 (2007): 1–27; Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 67. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 70 (bk. 5, ch. 19), 156 (bk. 11, ch. 5). 68. Ibid., 155 (bk. 11, ch. 3). 69. Ibid., 166 (bk. 11, ch. 7). 70. Ibid., 156–164 (bk. 11, ch. 6). 71. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 232 (Letter CXXXVI). 72. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 325–326 (bk. 19, ch. 27). 73. Ibid., 328 (bk. 19, ch. 27), 343 (bk. 20, ch. 7). 74. Montesquieu, Considerations, 44. 75. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 18–19 (bk. 2, ch. 4). 76. For an interesting contemporary criticism which dismissed Montesquieu’s anxieties about the absence of intermediary powers in England see Pierre Jean Grosley, A tour to London; or, new observations on England, and its inhabitants, 2 vols. (London, 1772), 2:198; on the differences between Montesquieu and Jean-Louis Delolme’s conceptions of the English constitution see Iain McDaniel, “Jean-Louis Delolme and the Political Science of the English Empire,” Historical Journal 55 (2012): 21– 44. 77. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 22 (bk. 3, ch. 3), 166 (bk. 11, ch. 6). 78. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, “Notes sur l’Angleterre,” in Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949–1951), 1:865– 884, 1631–1632. 79. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 328 (bk. 19, ch. 27). 80. Ibid., 165 (bk. 11, ch. 6). 81. Lord John Hervey, The conduct of the opposition, and the tendency of modern patriotism (London, 1734), 21. 82. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 165 (bk. 11, ch. 6). 83. Ibid., 165 (bk. 11, ch. 6). 84. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Nugent, 1:225.

2. Military Government and Empire in the Scottish Enlightenment 1. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 128. 2. On the “Patriot King” in the second half of the eighteenth century see David Armitage, “A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King,” Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 397– 418; Mark Goldie, “The English System of Liberty,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political

232

Notes to Pages 40–44

Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 73–74. 3. David Hume, “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic,” in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 28–32. For the Cromwellian protectorate as “imperial republic” see David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 531–555; on William III see Charles-Edouard Levillain, “William III’s Military and Political Career in NeoRoman Context, 1672–1702,” Historical Journal 48 (2005): 321–350. 4. J. E. Cookson, “Ser vice without Politics? Army, Militia and Volunteers in Britain during the American and French Revolutionary Wars,” War in History 10 (2003): 381–397; E. H. Gould, “To Strengthen the King’s Hands: Dynastic Legitimacy, Militia Reform and Ideas of National Unity in England, 1745– 1760,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 329–348. For the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon see J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 5. Samuel Johnson, “Considerations on the Corn Laws,” in The Works of Samuel Johnson: LL.D., 12 vols. (London, 1823), 10:402– 410. 6. David Hume to William Strahan, 25 October 1769, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 2:210. 7. On these themes see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 1975), 129–192; J. G. A. Pocock, “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton,” in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 125–156. 8. Hume, “Of Public Credit,” in Political Essays, 170. 9. Hume, “Whether the British Government,” 32. 10. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:509. 11. Ibid., 5:544–546; 6:153. 12. James Harris, “Introduction,” in Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 1:ix–xx. 13. Kames, Sketches, 2:387, 411, 495–501, 514. 14. John Dalrymple, An Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1757), and Dalrymple, Considerations on the Policy of Entails in Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1764). Dalrymple’s position was satirized by John, Lord Swinton, in his A Free Disquisition Concerning the Law of Entails in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1765). For the context see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 120–121, 210–212; David Lieberman, “The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), 204–234; James Moore, “Montesquieu

Notes to Pages 44–50

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and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 179–195. 15. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Historical Law Tracts, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1758), 1:184–219; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.  H. Campbell and A.  S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1776]), III.ii.1– 6 (1:381–384). 16. Dalrymple, Considerations, 23, 25. 17. Ibid., 59– 60, 66– 67. 18. Ibid., 63. 19. Allan Ramsay, An Essay on the Constitution of England (London, 1765). I follow the attribution of Alastair Smart, Ramsay’s modern biographer, who notes that the essay is included in a volume of Ramsay’s essays which is housed in the National Library of Scotland, corroborated by the fact that the volume’s contents are listed in Ramsay’s own handwriting. See Alastair Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay (London: Routledge, 1952), 140, n. 20. Ramsay, Essay on the Constitution of England, 11, 68– 69, 70, 72, 75. 21. Allan Ramsay, Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government. Occasioned by the late disputes between Great Britain and her American Colonies. Written in the Year 1766 (London, 1769), 8– 9. 22. Ibid., 9. 23. Allan Ramsay, “Lettre de M. de Ramsay,” in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris, 1875–77), 4:52– 60. On this letter see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 1971), 103–106. For Ferguson’s criticism of Beccaria see Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 2:220. 24. Ramsay, “Lettre de M. de Ramsay,” 58–59. 25. Allan Ramsay, Letters on the Present Disturbances in Great Britain and her American Provinces (London, 1777), 11, 15. 26. Allan Ramsay, A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. Occasioned by his Speech in Parliament, February 11 1780 (London, 1780), 10–11. On this issue see Ian R. Christie, “Econom ical Reform and ‘The Influence of the Crown’, 1780,” Historical Journal 12 (1956): 144–154. 27. Allan Ramsay, Observations on the Riot Act (London, 1781), 28–30. 28. For classic examinations of these issues see Ronald Hamowy, “Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and the Division of Labour,” Economica 35 (1968): 249–259; John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); Richard B. Sher, “Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 240–268; Donald Winch, “Commercial Realities, Republican Principles,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 2:293–310; Lisa Hill, “Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Karl Marx on the Division of Labour,”

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Notes to Pages 50–54

Journal of Classical Sociology 7 (2007): 339–366. On Smith’s ongoing critique of Montesquieu see most recently Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 102–105, 218. 29. For Hume’s and Smith’s reconstructions of the ancient-modern distinction see especially David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 377– 464; Adam Smith, LJ (A), iii.140–147 (196–199). For analysis see Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: An Introductory Essay,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), 1– 44; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Three. The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 372–399. 30. On this see Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith’s History of Law and Government as Political Theory,” in Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn, ed. Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 131–171. 31. Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.36 (2:704). 32. Smith, LJ (A), iv.74–108 (228–241); LJ (A), 34– 46 (410– 414). 33. Smith, LJ (A), iv.105 (240); LJ (B), 44 (413). 34. Smith, LJ (A), iii.141–143 (197–198). 35. Smith, LJ (A), vi.6–7 (333). 36. Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), 63– 64. 37. Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.41 (2:707). 38. Smith, LJ (A), v.1 (269–270); Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.b.25 (2:722). 39. Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.41 (2:706). 40. In his biography of Kames, Alexander Fraser Tytler described Millar as a crypto-republican who had failed to recognize the dangers stemming from the “increasing influence of the democratic branch of the constitution”; see Alexander Fraser Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 3 vols. (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1814), 1:281. For further evidence of Millar’s reputation as an antimonarchical republican see Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 42, and William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contribution to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: CUP, 1960), 71–72. 41. John Millar, Observations concerning the distinction of ranks in society (2nd ed., London, 1773), 204. For Millar’s distinction between ancient (Greek and Roman) and modern (British) systems of governments see also the title headings in John Millar, A Course of Lectures on Government; given annually in the university (Glasgow, 1792). 42. On this see also Gloria Vivenza, “The Division of Land and the Division of Labour. Analogies and Differences between Ancient and Modern Times in Adam Smith’s Thought,” in Knowledge, Social Institutions and the Division of

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Labour, ed. Pierre Luigi Porta, Roberto Scazzieri, and Andrew Skinner (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001), 331–350. 43. Millar, Observations, 249. 44. Ibid., 250. 45. Ferguson, Essay, 148, 258–259. The quotation is from Tacitus, The Histories IV–V, The Annals Books I– III, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), I.ii (245): “Then step by step he [Augustus] began to make his ascent and to unite in his own person the functions of the senate, the magistracy, and the legislature.” 46. Ferguson, Essay, 256. 47. Ibid., 125. 48. Ibid., 159. 49. Ibid., 158. For his endorsement of the sharing of sovereign power between Crown, lords, and commons see Ferguson to William Pulteney, 1 December 1769 in Correspondence, 1:85. 50. Ferguson, Essay, 160. 51. Ibid., 210–211. 52. Ibid., 73. 53. Ibid., 71. 54. Ibid., 182. 55. Ibid., 146, 219. 56. Ibid., 145. 57. Ibid., 69–70. On Fletcher’s views on political slavery see Andrew Fletcher, Two Discourses concerning the Affairs of Scotland, in Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 63– 64. 58. Ferguson to William Pulteney, 7 November 1769, in Correspondence, 1:82– 83. 59. Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Considerations on the present and future state of France (London, 1791), 299–300. 60. Ferguson to William Pulteney, 1 December 1769, in Correspondence, 1:85– 88. 61. The Roman idea of using the dictator to preserve or restore the commonwealth was discussed by Cicero in De Re Publica (although most of this text was not available in the eighteenth century); see Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), VI.12 (96). 62. Ferguson, Essay, 254. 63. Ibid., 228.

3. Ferguson and the Moral Foundations of Civil Society 1. On Enlightenment conjectural history see Peter Hanns Reill, “Narration and Structure in Late Eighteenth-Century Historical Thought,” History and

236

Notes to Pages 64–66

Theory 25 (1986): 286–298; Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth- Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31–52. 2. On the “science of man” in Scotland, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Language, Sociability, and History: Some Reflections on the Foundations of Adam Smith’s Science of Man,” in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 70– 84; Phillipson, Adam Smith: A Philosophical Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Annette Meyer, “Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in Combining History and Science,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Vincenzo Merolle and Eugene Heath (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 131–145. For the broader European context see Annette Meyer, Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008); Wolfgang Pross, “Naturalism, Anthropology, and Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 218–247. 3. For the scope of the “natural history of man” and for the distinction between the “history of the species” and the “history of the individual,” see Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), 12–13; for human nature as a “subject of history and physical science” see Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 1:1. For his endorsements of Pliny and Buffon see Ferguson, Institutes, 12, as well as Ferguson, Lectures (lectures of 26 November 1776 and 29 November 1780). For more detailed commentary on the scientific grounding of Ferguson’s history of mankind see Paul Wood, “The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Science 27 (1989): 89–123; Silvia Sebastiani, “Race and National Characters in Eighteenthcentury Scotland: The Polygenetic Discourses of Kames and Pinkerton,” Cromohs 8 (2003): 1–14; Annette Meyer, “Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’,” 131–145. 4. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 80. 5. Ferguson, Principles, 1:72. 6. For Rousseau’s impact on Smith compare Pierre Force, Self-interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2008); Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: CUP, 2009); Daniel Carey, “Reconsidering Rousseau: Sociability, Moral Sense and the American Indian from Hutcheson to Bartram,” British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 21 (1998): 25–38. See also Peter Miller, “Hercules at the Crossroads in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Neo-Stoicism between Aristocratic

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and Commercial Society,” République des Lettres, République des Arts, ed. Colette Nativel (Geneva: Drosz, 2008), 167–192. For the wider relevance of Rousseau in European debates, excellent starting points are Béla Kapossy, “The Sociable Patriot: Isaak Iselin’s Protestant Reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” History of European Ideas 27 (2001): 153–170, and Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (Basel: Schwabe, 2006). 7. For contemporary statements of Ferguson’s importance as a critic of Rousseau see “Avant Propos du Traducteur,” in Adam Ferguson, Essai sur l’histoire de la société civile, trans. Claude François Bergier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1783), 1:v–vi; Philippe-Antoine Grouvelle, De l’autorité de Montesquieu dans la revolution présente (Paris, 1789), 22, n. See also F. L. Escherny, De l’égalité, ou principes généraux sur les institutions civiles, politiques et religieuses. Précédé de l’éloge de J. J. Rousseau, en forme d’introduction, 2 vols. (Paris, 1796), 1:lvii; James Beattie, Eléments de science morale, comprenant l’éthique, l’économique, la politique et la théologie naturelle, trans. M. C. Mallet (3rd ed., Paris, 1840), xxxviii. 8. On Hume’s and Smith’s relationship to eighteenth-century Epicureanism compare James Moore, “Hume and Hutcheson,” in Hume and Hume’s Connexions, ed. M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), 23–57; Force, Self-interest before Adam Smith; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 2006); James A. Harris, “The Epicurean in Hume,” in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 161–181; Neven Leddy, “Adam Smith’s Critique of Enlightenment Epicureanism,” in Leddy and Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment, 183–205. 9. On Stoicism in the political thought of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson see Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 111–124, 159–164. 10. Adam Ferguson, “An Excursion in the Highlands,” in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 47–70, esp. 64. In this and in subsequent quotations from the Manuscripts I have silently modernized Ferguson’s punctuation and capitalization. 11. Cicero, On the Laws, in Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), I.22 (113). On Stoicism in eighteenth-century Scotland see M. A. Stewart, “The Stoic legacy in the early Scottish Enlightenment,” in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 273–296. 12. Christian Garve, Uebersicht der vornehmsten Principien der Sittenlehre, von dem Zeitalter des Aristoteles an bis auf unsre Zeiten (Breslau, 1798), 157– 60; for Ferguson as an acute commentator on Montesquieu see also Garve, Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Moral, der Litteratur und dem gesellschaftlichen Leben, 3 vols. (Breslau, 1796), 2:413– 414, n. See also Friedrich Ast, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie (Landshut, 1807), 389–390; Jacques Le ScèneDesmaisons, Histoire politique de la Révolution en France, ou correspondence entre

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Lord D*** et Lord T***, 2 vols. (London, 1789), 2:82– 83 (I owe this reference to Michael Sonenscher). For Helvétius’s critique of Shaftesbury as a moral sense theorist see Claude Adrien Helvétius, A treatise on man, his intellectual faculties and his education, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 2:12–13. 13. Ferguson, Essay, 7–16, 161–163. 14. Ferguson, Principles, 1:55. This was a rejection of Rousseau’s belief that pity prevented humans from degenerating into monsters or beasts, a claim he associated with Mandev ille; see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse, in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 153. 15. Ferguson, Essay, 10–12, 73. For Montesquieu’s critique of Hobbes see Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 6 (bk. 1, ch. 2). For the relevant passages from Buffon see George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générelle et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, 21 vols. (Paris, 1749–1789), 2:429– 444. 16. Aside from Hobbes and Rousseau, Ferguson was criticizing Bernard Mandev ille’s The Fable of the Bees (1714–1732), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s Essai de philosophie morale (1749), and Claude Adrien Helvétius’s De l’esprit (1758). Ferguson also criticized Helvétius in his Edinburgh lectures for collapsing the differences between man and the animals into the simple fact that humans possessed a prehensile and opposable thumb: see Ferguson, Lectures (lectures of 25 November 1776 and 22 November 1779). 17. Ferguson, Essay, 35. 18. Ferguson to John Macpherson, 13 August 1802, in Correspondence, 2:370. 19. Ferguson, Essay, 37; Joseph Butler, “Preface to the Sermons,” in Butler, The works of the right reverend father Joseph Butler (Oxford, 1885), xii–xvii, xx. 20. Ferguson, Essay, 12, 20–24, 38–39 n. 21. On Shaftesbury see Stanley Grean, “Self-Interest and Public Interest in Shaftesbury’s Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 2 (1964): 37– 45; Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth- century England (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); see also Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 98–149. For Hume’s judgment on Shaftesbury see David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 73. 22. Shaftesbury, “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 287–288; Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend,” in Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 54. For Ferguson’s endorse-

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ments of Shaftesbury see Ferguson, Institutes, 114; Ferguson, Principles, 1:8, 289, 2:121, 127. 23. Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis,” 56. 24. Shaftesbury, “Miscellany III,” in Characteristics, 400, n; see also the criticism of Hobbes in “Sensus Communis,” 44. 25. On Mandev ille see E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Hundert, “Bernard Mandev ille and the Enlightenment’s Maxims of Modernity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1996): 577–593; Istvan Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,” in Goldie and Wokler, The Cambridge History, 379– 418; Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 261–280. 26. Bernard Mandev ille, The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 1:323–325, 333. 27. Ibid., 198–223; see also Bernard Mandev ille, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. By the Author of the Fable of the Bees (London, 1732). For analysis see Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 277–280. 28. For Hutcheson’s significance in the Scottish Enlightenment see T. D. Campbell, “Francis Hutcheson: Father of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1982), 176–185; James Moore, “The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 37–59; Moore, “Hume and Hutcheson”; Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 283–289. 29. Francis Hutcheson, “Inaugural Lecture on the Social Nature of Man,” in On Human Nature, ed. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 134. See also the critique of Mandeville in Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. with an intro. by Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008 [1725]), 101–115. 30. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 2:212–225; Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1753), 267. 31. Ferguson, Institutes, 114; Ferguson, Principles, 1:8, 127, 2:218–219; Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 30 March 1784); Ferguson, Essay, 38, 65. 32. Ferguson’s account of happiness appeared in at least two different French translations: see “Essai sur le bonheur,” Mercure de France (June 1774), 190–211; and Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort, Histoire critique des opinions des anciens, et des systêmes des philosophes, sur le bonheur (Paris, 1778), 274–324. 33. Ferguson, Essay, 19. For a revised but essentially compatible argument about the relationship between happiness and virtue see Ferguson, “Of Happiness and Merit,” in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 71–75; see also Ferguson, “An Excursion in the Highlands,” in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 47–70.

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34. Ferguson, Essay, 54–56. 35. Ferguson, Principles, 2:72–76, 92. 36. Ferguson, Essay, 152, 155, 226, 243–245; Ferguson, Principles, 2:16, 376. 37. Ferguson, Essay, 36. 38. Ferguson, Essay, 254, n. 39. Emmanuel-Joseph, l’abbé Sieyès, Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. Tome II. 1770– 1815, ed. Christine Fauré (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 27–28, and Sieyès, “Discours sur l’étude de la morale,” in Encyclopédie Méthodique. Logique, Métaphysique et Morale, ed. Pierre-Louis Lacretrelle, 4 vols. (Paris, 1786–1791), 4:798– 824, 813– 814. 40. Ibid., 16. 41. Ibid., 21. 42. Hutcheson, Short Introduction, 130–131, n. 43. James Dunbar, Essays on the history of mankind in rude and cultivated ages (2nd ed., London, 1781), 26. 44. Ferguson, Essay, 17, 25, 207. According to Aristotle, man “when perfected, is the best of animals; but if he be isolated from law and justice he is the worst of all”; see Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 1253a [I.ii.§10]. 45. Ferguson, Lectures (lectures of 26 and 29 November 1779 and 3 December 1783). 46. Ferguson, Principles, 1:16, 22–24; 2:206, 266, 410. For Hobbes’s argument about fear and suspicion in civil society see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 89. For Montesquieu’s view of human weakness as a cause of sociability see Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 6 (bk. 1, ch. 2). For Pufendorf’s original argument about mankind’s imbecillitas see Samuel von Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations: Or, a General System of the most Important Principles of Morality, Jurisprudence, and Politics, trans. Basil Kennet (5th ed., London, 1749 [1672]), 98–113 (bk. II, ch. ii, nos. 1–12). 47. Ferguson, Essay, 199. 48. On the intellectual history of the terms otium and negotium, and vita contemplativa and vita activa, see Hans Baron, “The Florentine Revival of the Philosophy of the Active Life,” in Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 2:134–157; Eugene F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), 1:108, 115–116, 217–118. 49. Ferguson, Principles, 2:508. 50. On ataraxia and apatheia in Montaigne and Lipsius see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 50–51.

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51. Ferguson, Essay, 197. For a fuller analysis of man as a “progressive” being whose specific “excellence” consisted in an ambition for perfection see Ferguson, Principles, 1:199–200, 247–248. 52. Ferguson, “Excursion in the Highlands,” in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 52. 53. Ferguson, Essay, 13, 28–29, 242. 54. Ibid., 254, n. 55. Ferguson, Principles, 1:23. 56. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, CUP: 1997), 123. 57. Ferguson, Remarks on a pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, intitled, Observations on the Nature of civil liberty, the principles of government, and the justice and policy of the war with America (London, 1776), 21. 58. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), I.i.4.10 (22–23), I.ii.3.7 (37). For a discussion of Smith’s views on happiness see Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 217–227. 59. Ferguson, Essay, 45, n.; Ferguson, Principles, 2:506–507. For the quotation from Smith see Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VII.ii.1.28 (282–283). 60. Plato, Laws, trans. with notes by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 625e– 626b. For commentary see Henrik Syse, “Plato: The Necessity of War, the Quest for Peace,” Journal of Military Ethics 1 (2002): 36– 44; Victor Alonso, “War, Peace, and International Law in Ancient Greece,” in War and Peace in the Ancient World, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 206–225. 61. Ferguson, Essay, 26, 141. In the Institutes, Ferguson identified the “difference of their manners and customs” as a further cause of the “contempt and aversion” that subsisted among separate nations; see Ferguson, Institutes, 22, 25–26. 62. Hobbes argued that, since undivided command was the best “government” for an army, and that countries were “but so many camps fortified against each other with garrisons and arms,” it followed that undivided monarchical sovereignty was the best form of government for a country. See Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 126. 63. Ferguson, Essay, 28. 64. Ibid., 29. Here Ferguson emphasized the centrality of the concept of union to his defi nition of the nation or country. As Ferguson stressed throughout his career, a patriotic union of men was the most appropriate defi nition of nation or country. From as early as his sermon to his regiment written in 1746, he rejected a purely geograph ical defi nition of the nation and redescribed “country” as a “united body of men” “sharing all the advantages that arise from

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such a union.” Adam Ferguson, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh language to his Majesty’s First Highland Regiment of Foot (London, 1746), 6. A slightly revised defi nition reappeared in the Institutes, where he wrote that a nation was “any independent company or society of men acting under a common direction,” while the “united force of numbers and the direction under which they act, is termed the state.” See Ferguson, Institutes, 263. 65. Ferguson, Principles, 1:23, 33. 66. Ferguson, Essay, 61, 116–117. 67. Ibid., 28, 99. 68. Dugald Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 274–275, 293. For contemporary descriptions of the Essay as a form of theoretical history (or histoire raisonnée or allgemeine Cultur- Geschichte) see Robert Bisset, “Biographical Sketch of Dr. Adam Fergusson,” in The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific Magazine, 3 vols. (London, 1799–1800), 3:45; Alexander Bower, The History of the University of Edinburgh, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1830), 3:10; Daniel Jenisch, Universalhistorischer Ueberblick der Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, als eines sich fortbildenen Ganzen. Eine Philosophie der Culturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1801), 1:25. On “conjectural history” and the “four-stages theory” see H. M. Höpfl , “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 19– 40; Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four Stages’ Theory,” in Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 159–184; Karen O’Brien, “Between Enlightenment and Stadial History,” British Journal of Eighteenth- Century Studies 16 (1993): 53– 63. 69. John Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (2nd ed., London, 1758), ix. 70. Ferguson, Essay, 119; compare Rousseau, Second Discourse, 161. 71. Ferguson, Essay, 69. 72. Adam Ferguson, Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1766), 50–51; see also Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 17 December 1779). 73. Ferguson, Essay, 98, 118–131. 74. Ibid., 87– 88. 75. Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, which are dependent on the province of New-York in America, and are the barrier between the English and French in that Part of the world, 2 vols. (3rd ed., London, 1755), 1:2–3. 76. Ferguson, Essay, 84. 77. Ibid., 75, 83– 85, 87, 92, 98, 178. For a similarly positive description of the savage’s “passion for the real and superior distinctions of courage and forti-

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tude” see Ferguson, Principles, 2:377–378. For Kames’s critique of Ferguson’s description of savages see Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James A. Harris, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 1:33. 78. Ferguson, Essay, 97–100, 142. On Smith’s account see Adam Smith, LJ (A), iv.43–57 (216–221). On this aspect of Smith’s thought see Istvan Hont, “Adam Smith’s History of Law and Government as Political Theory,” in Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn, ed. Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 131–171. 79. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 8. 80. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 282–283 (bk. 17, ch. 5). 81. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994 [1776–1789]), 1:1032, n.; Smith, LJ (A), iv.41– 60 (215–222); Kames, Sketches, 2:390, n. On these issues see Rolando Minuti, “Gibbon and the Asiatic barbarians: notes on the French sources of The Decline and Fall,” in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed. David Womersley (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 21– 44. 82. Ferguson, Essay, 102. 83. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 99 (bk. 7, ch. 4). 84. Ferguson, Essay, 229–230. 85. Ibid., 101. For the original passage, see Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus, trans. M. Hutton, R. M. Ogilvie, and E. H. Warmington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), ch. 44 (205). For Tacitus’s account of how the love of wealth drove the acceptance of political slavery among the nobility of imperial Rome, see Tacitus, Histories Books IV–V; The Annals Books I– III, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), I.ii (245). 86. Ferguson, Essay, 248. 87. Ibid., 102. 88. Ibid., 101. 89. Ibid., 128.

4. Trajectories of the Modern Commercial State 1. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 2:376–380. 2. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 198. On pre-eighteenth-century ideas of decline see Peter Burke, “Tradition and Experience: The Idea of Decline from Bruni to Gibbon,” Daedalus 105 (1976): 137–152; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three. The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). 3. Adam Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 24 December 1779); Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1799), 5:419.

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4. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 1:313. 5. Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 24 December 1779). 6. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the subversion of the Roman Empire, to the beginning of the sixteenth century, 3 vols. (London, 1769). For discussions of Robertson’s work as an example of cosmopolitan history see especially Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 93–166; Nicholas Phillipson, “Providence and Progress: An Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 55–73; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Two. Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 258–329; Alex du Toit, “Cosmopolitanism, Despotism and Patriotic Resistance: William Robertson on the Spanish Revolts against Charles V,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86 (2009): 19– 43. 7. Ferguson, Essay, 174. 8. Ferguson, Lectures (lectures of 7 December 1779 and 15 December 1783). 9. Ferguson, Principles, 1:242–243, 254. 10. Ferguson, Essay, 247. On Hume’s and Smith’s view of the relationship between commerce and liberty in Eu ropean history see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 105–111; see also Hont, “Adam Smith and the Political Economy of the ‘Unnatural and Retrograde’ Order,” in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 354–388. For a contemporary interpretation of Smith’s understanding of the connection between wealth and liberty see Dugald Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 313. 11. Ferguson, Essay, 229, 242. 12. John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (4th ed., Dublin, 1768), v–xvi. On Gregory see Lisbeth Haakonssen, Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Percival and Benjamin Rush (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), 46– 85, and Paul Wood, “The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Science 27 (1989): 89–123. 13. Gregory, Comparative View, xiii. 14. Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy: Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations, 2 vols. (London, 1767), 1:237–249, 322. On Steuart see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 81– 87; Deborah Redman, “Sir James Steuart’s States-

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man Revisited in Light of the Continental Influence,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 43 (1996): 48–70. 15. Ferguson, Principles, 1:252; see also the revised (1768) edition of the Essay: Ferguson, Essay, 195, n. For a similar comment on Ferguson’s defi nition of civilization see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson’s Politics of Action,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 153. 16. Ferguson, Principles, 2:430. 17. “A Merchant,” Consolatory Thoughts on American Independence; shewing the great advantages that will arise from it to the manufactures, the agriculture, and commercial interest of Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1782); John Knox, A view of the British Empire, more especially Scotland; with some proposals for the improvement of that country, the extension of its fi sheries, and the relief of its people (London, 1784), xxxi; [George Stewart], Reflections, moral and political, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1787), 2:175–176. 18. Ferguson, Essay, 220–223. 19. On these passages see David Kettler, “Political Education for Empire and Revolution,” in Heath and Merolle, Adam Ferguson, 87–114. 20. Ferguson, Essay, 205. For a brief discussion of this aspect of Ferguson’s thinking see Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country-Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), 271–315. 21. Ferguson, Essay, 172–179. 22. Ibid., 179, 225, 235; Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 12 December 1783). For a similar argument see Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), 296: “Commercial nations of a small extent are, in the result of distinctions that arise from the practice of arts, and the unequal distribution of property, best fitted to aristocratical government, or to mixed republic.” 23. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 362 (bk. 20, ch. 7). On Scottish attitudes to Athens see David Allen, “The Age of Pericles in the Modern Athens: Greek History, Scottish Politics and the Fading of Enlightenment,” Historical Journal 44 (2001): 391– 417; more generally see Jennifer Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 24. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1990), 1:474. The passage about helots is also discussed in Georg Lukacs, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 402– 403.

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25. Ferguson, Essay, 178. 26. Ibid., 207. Emphasis in original. 27. For Herder’s description of the modern state as a machine see Johann Gottfried Herder, “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 316–320. 28. Ferguson, Essay, 208. 29. Ibid., 218. 30. Ibid., 217. Ferguson borrowed a copy of Plutarch’s Lives from Edinburgh University Library in 1764, which may have supplied him with the basis for this argument. A new edition of Plutarch’s Lives had appeared in Edinburgh in 1763: see Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives. In Six Volumes. Translated from the Greek, with explanatory and critical notes, from Dacier and others. To which is prefi xed, the Life of Plutarch, written by Mr. Dryden, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1763), 5:10; see Jane B. Fagg, “Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library: 1764–1806,” in Heath and Merolle, Adam Ferguson, 39– 64. 31. Ferguson, Essay, 211, 219, 229. 32. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Limits of State Action, ed. J. W. Burrow (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), 80. On Tocqueville’s assessment of this issue see, most recently, Paul A. Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and the Modern Prospect (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 143–270. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. On these views of China see William Temple, “Of Heroick Virtue,” in The Works of Sir William Temple, 4 vols. (London, 1770), 3:316–335; Andrew Fletcher, “Speeches by a Member of the Parliament” [1703] in Fletcher, Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 163; David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 66– 67, n. See also Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy, 2:310; Eustace Budgell, A letter to Cleomenes, King of Sparta. With some account of the manners and government of the Greeks and Romans; and Refl ections thereon (London, 1731), 91. For a similar emphasis on Ferguson’s critique of China see David Kettler, “History and Theory in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society: A Reconsideration,” Political Theory 5 (1977): 437– 460. 35. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 127 (bk. 8, ch. 21), 211 (bk. 12, ch. 29), 317–321 (bk. 19, chs. 16–20); Jean-Baptiste du Halde, Description Géographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique, et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise, 4 vols. (The Hague, 1736). On Montesquieu’s account of China see A. H. Rowbotham, “China in the Esprit des Lois: Montesquieu and Mgr. Foucquet,” Comparative Literature 2 (1950): 354–359, and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, “On the Proper Use of the Stick: The Spirit of Laws and the Chinese Empire,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 81–95.

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36. Ferguson, Essay, 254–255. 37. Ibid., 206, 214–215. 38. For a wide-ranging historical contextualization of this kind of argument see Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 1–156. See also Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 39. For an important contemporary discussion of the problems of imperial government and trade at the beginning of the Seven Years War see William Burke, Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (2nd ed., London, 1758), 2:16–18; Burke, Remarks on the Letter Address’d to Two Great Men. In a Letter to the Author of that Piece (3rd ed., London, 1760). 40. On this transformation in perceptions of Britain as an empire see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 185–187. A similarly positive view of commerce was stated by the English publicist John Campbell, who noted that “Commerce, not Conquest, is our true Principle of Acquisition.” John Campbell, The Present State of Europe. Explaining the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its several Powers (London, 1750), 11. 41. George Johnstone, Thoughts on our acquisitions in the East Indies; particularly respecting Bengal (London, 1771), iv, 10–14, 18–19. Johnstone’s book contained multiple quotations from the Essay on the History of Civil Society. On Johnstone, and on his preoccupations with imperial decline and fall, see Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth- Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 126. 42. Ferguson, Essay, 132. 43. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Phocion’s Conversations: Or, the Relation between Morality and Politics (London, 1769), 287. For a very similar argument, grounded on a similar admiration for Rome’s military system, see JacquesAntoine-Hippolyte de Guibert, Essai Générale de Tactique, Précédé d’un Discours sur l’état actuel de la Politique & de Science Militaire en Europe, 2 vols. (London, 1772), 1:vi–xvii. 44. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Observations on the Romans (London, 1751), 147–148. 45. Guillaume Thomas François, l’abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. O. Justamond, 8 vols. (London, 1783), 1:21. On the Histoire des Deux Indes see Yves Benot, Diderot, de l’athéisme à l’anticolonialisme (Paris: François Maspero, 1970); Girolamo Imbruglia, “Despotisme et féodalité dans l’Histoire des deux Indes,” in L’Histoire des deux Indes: réécriture et polygraphie, ed. Anthony Strugnell and Hans-Jurgen Lüsebrink (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 105–117; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 72–121; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Four. Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 229–328; Peter

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Jimack and Jenny Mander, “Reuniting the World: The Pacific in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 41 (2008): 189–202. 46. Raynal, History, 3:191; 8:189, 237, 240. 47. Ibid., 1:224; 8:212–213. 48. Ibid., 3:228; 8:132. 49. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, from the death of Akbar, to the complete settlement of the empire under Aurungzebe. To which are prefi xed, I. A dissertation on the origin and nature of despotism in Hindostan. II. An enquiry into the state of Bengal; With a Plan for restoring that Kingdom to its former Prosperity and Splendor (London, 1772), xxxix– cliv. 50. Ibid., 8:72. 51. Ibid., 8:216, 232. 52. Guillaume Thomas François, l’abbé Raynal, The History of the Office of Stadtholder from its origin to the present times (London, 1747), 50–51. 53. Raynal, History, 3:238; 8:20. 54. Ibid., 8:155. 55. Ferguson, Lectures (lectures of 26 November 1779 and 1 December 1784). 56. Ferguson, Essay, 62. 57. For earlier Scottish accounts of the balance of power as a model for European stability see especially William Grant’s essay on the balance of power in François de Salignac de la Mothe de Fénelon, Two Essays on the Ballance of Europe. The First written in French by the late Archbishop of Cambray, and translated into English. The Second by the Translator of the First Essay (London, 1720), 30–58; David Hume, “Of the Balance of Power,” in Hume, Political Essays, 154–160. For wider discussion see John Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig Doctrine,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 349–374, and Frederick G. Whelan, “Robertson, Hume, and the Balance of Power,” Hume Studies 21 (1995): 315–332. 58. Francis Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy, 2:240–250; see also Hutcheson’s criticism of military rule over colonies in ibid., 2:306–309. 59. Andrew Fletcher, “An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind,” in Fletcher, Political Works, 214. On Fletcher see John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,” in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue: The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition, 137–178; Robertson, “An Elusive Sovereignty: The Course of the Union Debate in Scotland 1698–1707,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 198–227; Robertson, “Andrew Fletcher’s Vision of Union,” in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 203–225; Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 161–183; Istvan Hont,

Notes to Pages 113–119

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“Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 185–266; Shigemi Muramatsu, “Andrew Fletcher’s Critique of Commercial Civilisation and His Plan for Eu ropean Federal Union,” in The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. T. Sakamoto and H. Tanaka (London: Routledge, 2003), 8–21. 60. Fletcher, “Account of a Conversation,” 203, 206–207, 210, 214. Here I follow the analysis of Hont, “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics,” 258–266. 61. Ferguson, Principles, 2:501–502; Ferguson to James Edgar, 23 September 1795, in Correspondence, 2:372. 62. Ferguson, Essay, 61. 63. Ferguson to William Eden, 2 January 1780, in Correspondence, 1:230; see also Ferguson to John Macpherson, 18 December 1779, in Correspondence, 1:223. For the background and aftermath see James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992); Martyn J. Powell, “British Party Politics and Imperial Control: The Rockingham Whigs and Ireland 1765–1782,” Parliamentary History 21 (2002): 325–350. 64. Ferguson, Principles, 2:500. 65. Ferguson, Essay, 145. 66. Ibid., 222. For a similar evaluation of the Dutch public debt see David Hume, “Of the Jealousy of Trade,” in Hume, Political Essays, 152–153. 67. Ferguson, Principles, 2:452. 68. Ferguson, Essay, 223. 69. Ibid., 148. 70. For examples of Ferguson’s continuing preoccupation with Britain’s vulnerability to foreign conquest see Ferguson to John Macpherson, 27 July 1779; Ferguson to John Macpherson, 18 December 1779; and Ferguson to William Eden, 2 January 1780 in Correspondence, 1:218–219, 222–225, 232–236.

5. Britain’s Future in a Roman Mirror 1. Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1783). A slightly modified edition, in five volumes, appeared in 1799; see Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1799). Hereafter all references to the History are to the revised 1799 edition unless otherwise indicated (by the addition of “Edinburgh, 1783”). 2. He claimed in 1782 that he had been “about twelve years employed on this subject.” Ferguson to William Strahan, 15 July 1782, in Correspondence, 2:284. 3. Ferguson to Edward Gibbon, 18 April 1776, in Correspondence, 2:141. In an earlier letter to Gibbon, Ferguson conceded that his own basically “charitable”

250

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view of human nature had been destabilized by his reading of the Decline and Fall, which had proved that “the Clearest stream may become foul when it comes to run over the muddy bottom of human Nature.” Ferguson to Edward Gibbon, 19 March 1776, in Correspondence, 1:136. 4. Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:1. 5. Ferguson, History, 1:xxv; see also 5:73, 353. See also Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:1. For an almost identically phrased argument see Ferguson, “Of History and its Appropriate Style,” in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 21. On the moral and didactic purposes of history in the Scottish Enlightenment see Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 151, 167. 6. Ferguson to William Strahan, 12 October 1782, in Correspondence, 2:288. 7. See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth- Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Frank M. Turner, “British Politics and the Demise of the Roman Republic: 1700–1939,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 577–599; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Gareth Sampson, “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Historian: The Eighteenth Century in the Roman Historical Tradition,” in Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History, ed. James Moore, Ian Macgregor Morris, and Andrew J. Bayliss (London: University of London/Institute of Historical Research, 2008), 187–218. 8. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 2:707. For context see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 467– 477. 9. Livy, From the Founding of the City, trans. B. O. Foster, 14 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), VII.xix.10 (3:423). For the relevance of the Roman distinction between power and authority see Richard Tuck, “Power and Authority in Seventeenth- Century England,” Historical Journal 17 (1974): 43– 61; see also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, intro. by Jonathan Schell (New York: Penguin, 2006 [1963]), 169–170, 191–192. 10. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: CUP, 1977), 174. In his Prerogative of Popular Government, Harrington suggested that the “genius of the Roman commonwealth” consisted precisely in this division between senatorial auctoritas and popu lar jussus; see Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government, in Political Works, 507. For Sidney’s reference to the phrase see Algernon Sidney, The works of Algernon Sidney (London, 1772), 79. 11. Sir William Temple, “An essay upon the original and nature of government”, in Temple, Works, 4 vols. (London, 1770 [1671]), 1:34–35.

Notes to Pages 123–124

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12. For Stanhope’s query and Vertot’s reply see James, Earl Stanhope, A true copy of the political queries, Relating to the Constitution of the Roman Senate (London, 1721), 17. On the political context see John F. Naylor, The British Aristocracy and the Peerage Bill of 1719 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 13. Middleton, a Church of England clergyman, is best known for his biography of Cicero and his account of miracles in the early Church; see Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 3 vols. (London, 1742), and Middleton, A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church (London, 1749). Hervey is noted in modern historiography as a prominent Court Whig; see his Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compar’d (London, 1734), and his The Conduct of the Opposition, and the Tendency of Modern Patriotism (London, 1734). On Hervey see Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); see also Mark Goldie, “The English System of Liberty,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 40–78. Turner, “British Politics and the Roman Republic,” discusses Middleton and Hervey but not the controversy about the Roman senate. 14. Lord John Hervey and Conyers Middleton, Letters between Lord Hervey and Dr. Middleton concerning the Roman Senate, ed. Thomas Knowles (London, 1778), 11, 221. 15. Ibid., 112–113. 16. [Edward Spelman], A fragment out of the Sixth Book of Polybius, containing a dissertation upon government in general, particularly applied to that of the Romans, together with a description of the several powers of the consuls, senate, and people of Rome, translated from the Greek with notes (London, 1743). 17. Conyers Middleton, A treatise on the Roman Senate (London, 1747), 6, 13, 42– 43, 75. 18. Thomas Chapman, An Essay on the Roman Senate (London, 1750), 120–121. 19. See Nathaniel Hooke, Observations on I. The Answer of M. L’Abbé de Vertot to the late Earl Stanhope’s Inquiry, concerning the Senate of Ancient Rome: Dated December 1719 II. A Dissertation upon the Constitution of the Roman Senate, by a Gentleman: Published in 1743. III. A Treatise on the Roman Senate, by Dr. Conyers Middleton: Published in 1747. IV. An Essay on the Roman Senate, by Dr. Thomas Chapman: Published in 1750. (London, 1757). See also Nathaniel Hooke, The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth, 4 vols. (5th ed., London, 1770). On Hooke see Addison Ward, “The Tory View of Roman History,” Rice Studies in English Literature 4 (1964): 413– 456; Michael Sonenscher, “Property, Community, and Citizenship,” in Goldie and Wokler, The Cambridge History, 465– 494. 20. For Spelman’s description of Hooke see William Spelman, “Hints towards a life of Mr. Hooke,” in William Bowyer, An Apology for some of Mr.

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Hooke’s Observations concerning the Roman Senate (London, 1782), ix, n. See also William Hamilton, A short review of Mr. Hooke’s Observations, &c. concerning the Roman senate, and the character of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (London, 1758). 21. On an earlier Jacobite-inspired vision of monarchy see Doohwan Ahn, “From Greece to Babylon: The Political Thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743),” History of European Ideas, 37 (2011), 421– 437. 22. Hooke, Observations, 199. 23. Ibid., 10–11, and see Livy, From the Founding of the City, IV.iv.7 (2:271). 24. Hooke, Observations, 200, 246, n. Hooke was following Hume’s discussion of the English monarchy under James I, where Hume cited Walter Raleigh’s distinction between absolute and limited monarchies and had gone on to claim that England in this period was a popular but absolute monarchy. As Hume wrote, “I have not met with any English writer of that age, who speaks of England as a limited monarchy, but as an absolute one, where the people have many privileges. That is no contradiction. In all European monarchies, the people have privileges; but, whether dependent or independent on the will of a monarch, is a question, that, in most governments, it is best to forbear.” See David Hume, History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:561–563 [note P]. 25. Hooke, Observations, 184–185. 26. John Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law (Cambridge, 1755), 205. 27. Hooke, Observations, 197. 28. Ferguson, History, 1:97, n. 29. Ferguson’s ostensible predilection for aristocracy came under sustained attack in the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon; see Robert Patton, “An historical review of the monarchy and republic of Rome, upon the principles derived from the effects of property,” in Charles Patton, The effects of property upon society and government investigated (London, 1797), 158–159; Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, Geschichte der Gracchischen Unruhen in der Römischen Republik (Hamburg, 1801), 4, 76; Pierre- Charles Levesque, Histoire critique de la république romaine, ouvrage dans lequel on s’est propose de détruire des préjugés invétérés sur l’histoire des premiers siècles de la république, sur la morale des romains, leurs vertus, leur politique extérieure, leur constitution, et le caractère de leurs hommes célèbres, 3 vols. (Paris, 1807), 1:xxxiv. 30. Adam Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 16 December 1779). 31. Ferguson, History, 1:10–12, 39, 87. In his lectures at Edinburgh, Ferguson repeated the point that Rome’s “several Powers were joined in the Sovereignty not by an Established Concurrence in every act of Sovereignty, but by separate Acts in which they mutually bound each other”; see Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 16 December 1779). For Rousseau’s critique of hereditary aristocracy in Rome, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 107, n.

Notes to Pages 128–131

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32. This review was largely positive: the reviewer claimed that the History combined history with philosophy, and had surpassed even Montesquieu’s Considérations in its account of the “military and political conduct of the Roman People.” Mercure de France (18 June 1785), 126–130. 33. For Hume’s critique of the Roman comitia see David Hume, “Of Some Remarkable Customs,” in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 182–184. On Delolme’s critique of the Roman republican constitution see Jean-Louis Delolme, The Constitution of England, ed. David Lieberman (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 167–169. 34. Ferguson, History, 1:93, 95. 35. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 129. 36. Ferguson, History, 1:89. Several of Ferguson’s predecessors had underlined the significance of plebeian access to higher magistracy in tempering Rome’s internal divisions; see, e.g., Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 2:249. For the idea of aequa libertas in Roman and Renaissance political thought see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: CUP, 1950); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), 1:80– 81; Maurizio Viroli, “Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), 143–172. 37. Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:206; Ferguson, History, 1:90. 38. Ferguson, History, 1:26. For Rousseau’s discussion of the dictatorship see Rousseau, Social Contract, 138–140, but see also Considerations on the Government of Poland, in Rousseau, Social Contract, 219, where he argued that the dictatorship was “directly contrary to the laws of Rome and to the spirit of its government,” and “ended by destroying it.” For Machiavelli on the dictatorship see Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. Julia Condaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91– 96. 39. Ferguson, History, 1:94, 286, 381; 2:31; 5:80. 40. Ibid., 1:300. Much of his account follows Polybius, The Histories, ed. and trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), vi.19– 42. 41. Ferguson, History, 1:68. 42. Ibid., 1:102–103. The success of the Roman constitution in providing for the superiority of merit and ability over wealth and birth was emphasized in Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 298–300. 43. David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” in Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 377– 464; Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in antient and modern times: in which the superior Populousness of Antiquity is maintained. With an Appendix, Containing Additional Observations on the same Subject, and Some Remarks on Mr. Hume’s Political Discourse, of the Populousness of Ancient

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Notes to Pages 132–135

Nations (Edinburgh, 1753). On Wallace see Robert B. Luehrs, “Population and Utopia in the Thought of Robert Wallace,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 20 (1987): 313–335. 44. For Tucker’s prognosis of a new division of property see Josiah Tucker, A Treatise on Civil Government (London, 1781), 290–291, as quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, “Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price,” in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 184. For Ferguson’s highly cautious stance toward the parliamentary reform movement associated with Christopher Wyvil see Ferguson to Christopher Wyvil, 2 December 1782, in Correspondence, 2:291–292; see also David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 21. 45. Ferguson, History, 1:12. 46. For these references see Edward Wortley Montagu, Reflections on the rise & fall of the antient republicks. Adapted to the present state of Great Britain (London, 1760), 261; Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Observations on the Romans (London, 1751), 18; Rousseau, Social Contract, 113–116, 139–140; see also l’abbé Seran de la Tour, Histoire du tribunat du Rome, depuis sa création, l’an 261 de la fondation de Rome, jusqu’a’ la réunion de sa puissance à celle de l’empereur Auguste, l’an 730 de la fondation de Rome. Son influence sur la décadence & la corruption des mœurs (Amsterdam, 1774). 47. Ferguson, History, 1:31. 48. Ibid., 1:372; see also Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 14 (bk. 2, ch. 2). Both Ferguson and Montesquieu were following Cicero’s attack on the secret ballot in De Legibus; see Cicero, On the Laws, in On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), III.34–37 (170–171). 49. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994 [1776–1789]), 2:784. 50. Ferguson, History, 1:372–373; 2:83– 84. 51. Rousseau, Social Contract, 135. 52. For Cicero’s account of property and justice see especially Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), I.20–21 (9–10), II.74–78 (93– 95). 53. Ferguson, History, 1:396. 54. Ibid., 1:131, 1:390–396, 2:22, 32, 42. 55. Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), 249. The same passage, with very minor modifications, appeared in Ferguson’s Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 2:372. 56. Ferguson, History, 2:15, 411. 57. Patrick Lindsay, The Interest of Scotland Considered, with regard to its Police in imploying of the Poor, its Agriculture, its Trade, its Manufactures, and Fisheries (Edinburgh, 1733), 17.

Notes to Pages 136–140

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58. Adam Ferguson, The morality of stage-plays seriously considered (Edinburgh, 1757), 24–25. 59. Ferguson, Institutes, 149. 60. Ferguson, Principles, 2:371, 423, 463. 61. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 246–250. 62. Ferguson, History, 1:375, 2:84, 2:359. 63. On agrarian laws as a topic in early modern political theory see especially Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); see also Lea Campos Boralevi, “James Harrington’s ‘Machiavellian’ Anti-Machiavellism,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 113–119. For the period of the French Revolution see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 182–212. 64. Walter Moyle, “An Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government” [c. 1699], in Two English Republican Tracts, ed. Caroline Robbins (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), 201–259. For a recent reexamination of Moyle’s relationship to Machiavelli and Harrington see Vickie Sullivan, “Walter Moyle’s Machiavellianism, Declared and Otherwise, in An Essay Upon the Constitution of the Roman Government,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 120–127. 65. Moyle, “Essay,” 238. 66. Sallust, The Works of Sallust, translated into English. With political discourses upon that Author (London, 1744), 78– 80. 67. Walter Moyle, Democracy Vindicated. An Essay on the Constitution & Government of the Roman State; from the Posthumous Works of Walter Moyle, with a Preface and Notes by John Thelwall (Norwich, 1796), 12–15, n., 20, n. 68. Nathaniel Hooke, Roman History, 2:520–560. 69. Monthly Review 30 (February 1764), 110. 70. Nathaniel Hooke, Observations, xi, n. Emphasis in the original. 71. Richard Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments (3rd ed., London, 1773), 379– 431; Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (London, 1784), 68–73. For a recent discussion of Price’s concern with agrarian equality in the context of British debates on enclosure see S. J. Thompson, “Parliamentary Enclosure, Property, Population, and the Decline of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-century Britain,” Historical Journal 51 (2008): 621– 642. 72. William Ogilvie, An essay on the right of property in land (London, 1781). On Ogilvie and his “modern agrarian” see Sonenscher, “Property, Community, and Citizenship,” 465– 494. For a later development of Ogilvie’s argument see Anna Plassart, “A Scottish Jacobin: John Oswald on Commerce and Citizenship,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 71 (2010), 263–286. 73. Ogilvie, An essay, 54, 126–127, 175–177, 205–206. 74. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig, 1782). On Meiners see Luigi Marino, Praeceptores

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Notes to Pages 140–145

Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995); Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael C. Carhart, “The Enlightenments of J. G. A. Pocock,” Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001): 123–139. For an account of Meiners that assesses his relationship to Ferguson see Fania OzSalzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in EighteenthCentury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 229–256. 75. Carhart, “The Enlightenments of J. G. A. Pocock,” 123–139. Meiners discussed the development of an “unrepublican” inequal ity of property and wealth (unrepublikanische Ungleichheit der Güter) in Geneva in Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 4 vols. (Tübingen, 1791), 2:250–251. 76. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten europäischen Völkern, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1792), 1:635. 77. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten, 19–20, n., 71– 91 (esp. 82– 83, n.), 127, 135–136. 78. Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:3. 79. Ferguson, History, 3:36, n. 80. Ibid., 5:129; Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ed. and trans. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 91– 92. 81. Ferguson, History, 2:319. 82. See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); Armitage, “Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 2:29– 46. 83. On Moyle’s view of colonies see Caroline Robbins, “The ‘excellent use’ of Colonies. A Note on Walter Moyle’s Justification of Roman Colonies, ca. 1699,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 620– 626. See also Thomas Blackwell, Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1753), 1:104–109. 84. Ferguson, History, 2:133. 85. Ibid., 1:386. 86. Hume, “Of the Balance of Power,” in Hume, Political Essays, 154–160. 87. Ferguson, History, 2:59– 60. 88. Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 1:174. 89. Ferguson, History, 2:146. 90. For Hume’s thinking on this issue see John Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig Doctrine,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: CUP), 349–374. 91. Ibid., 1:121. 92. Ibid., 1:120–121, 1:336, 1:147–148. 93. Ibid., 5:144–145.

Notes to Pages 146–149

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94. William Robertson, The History of America, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 1:18–19. 95. Ferguson, History, 5:144–148. On Davenant’s critique of Mexia see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 436– 437; see also Ahn, “From Greece to Babylon,” 421– 437. 96. Ferguson, History, 5:153, 238. 97. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron, et sur les moeurs et les écrits de Sénèque, 2 vols. (London, 1782). On Diderot’s Essai see William Thomas Conroy, Diderot’s Essai sur Sénèque (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1975). 98. Montesquieu, Considerations, 130; Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:31. For the centrality of Tacitus in eighteenth-century British thought see Howard D. Weinbrot, “Politics, Taste, and National Identity: Some Uses of Tacitism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 168–184. For Tacitus’s equally fundamental place in French political thought see Orest Ranum, “D’Alembert, Tacitus, and the Political Sociology of Despotism,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 191 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980), 547–558; Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite en France de Montesquieu à Chateaubriand (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993). 99. Ferguson, History, 5:136, n., 155. For Bruni’s claim that imperator began to signify “lordship and domination” under Augustus see Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. James Hankins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2007), 1:89. 100. Ferguson, History, 5:155, 338, 404. 101. Ibid., 2:84, 5:76, 155. See also Tacitus, Histories Books IV–V; The Annals Books I– III, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), I.ix (261). 102. Ferguson, History, 5:76. For Hooke’s defense of Caesarian monarchy see Hooke, Roman History, 4:238–257. For ancient and early modern thinking about monarchical and nonmonarchical republics see James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38 (2010): 452– 482. 103. Ferguson to Christopher Wyvil, 2 December 1782, in Correspondence, 2:292. 104. Ferguson, History, 3:169, 4:139–140, 5:285, 395. 105. Ferguson, History (Edinburgh, 1783), 3:323; Ferguson, History, 5:93. The reference to the diseases or pathologies of the body politic closely resembles the language of Machiavelli’s Prince: “For if the fi rst signs of trouble are perceived, it is easy to fi nd a solution; but if one lets trouble develop, the medicine will be too late, because the malady will have become incurable.” See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), 11.

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106. Ferguson, History, 4:418. 107. Ibid., 5:216, 244; Ferguson, Essay, 210. 108. For eighteenth-century discussions of the Roman lex regia see for example Thomas Bever, A discourse on the study of jurisprudence and the civil law; being an introduction to a course of lectures (Oxford, 1766), 22; William Bollan, The free Britons supplemental memorial to the electors of the members of the British Parliament, wherein the origin of parliaments in Europe, and other interesting matters are considered (London, 1770), 9–10; James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: or, an enquiry into public errors, defects, and abuses, 3 vols. (London, 1774–1775), 1:4. For background on the lex regia see Quentin Skinner, “Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), 389– 452, esp. 392–395. For a useful discussion of the Roman concept of maiestas see Clifford Ando, Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 64– 80. 109. Ferguson, History, 5:331. For Cicero’s phrase see Cicero, De Oratore I– II, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), II.xxxix.164. 110. Ferguson, History, 5:331. 111. Ferguson, Principles, 2:411. 112. Ferguson, History, 5:269, 328–329. 113. Adam Smith, LJ (A), iv.97–98 (237–238). 114. Adam Smith, LJ (B), 45 (414). For discussion see Duncan Forbes, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 179–202; Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). 115. Ferguson, History, 5:253, 412– 413; Montesquieu, Considerations, 163. 116. Ferguson, History, 5:414. 117. Ibid., 5:155. Ferguson to William Strahan, 12 October 1782, in Correspondence, 2:288. 118. William Robertson, A Sermon upon the situation of the world at the time of Christ’s appearance, and its connexion with the success of his religion (Edinburgh, 1755), 11. 119. Ferguson, History, 5:417– 418.

6. Civil-Military Union and the Modern State 1. For the description of his program as a “project” see Adam Ferguson, “Of Statesmen and Warriours,” in Manuscripts, 42. 2. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 62, 69, 126, 184. Compare Smith’s claim that “monarchies now sett the fashion,” in Smith, LJ (B), 79 (428). For an excellent

Notes to Pages 158–160

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discussion of the “small-republic thesis” in late eighteenth-century thought see Jacob T. Levy, “Beyond Publius: Montesquieu, Liberal Republicanism, and the Small-Republic Thesis,” History of Political Thought 17 (2006): 50– 90. A very clear rendition of the standard argument can be found in Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, “Législateur,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société des gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751–1761), 9:357–363. 3. Ferguson, Essay, 126–127. 4. Ibid., 127. 5. Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), 44. 6. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689– c.1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 178. On the Scottish critique of nobility see also Rosalind Mitchison, “Patriotism and National Identity in Eighteenth-century Scotland,” in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence, ed. T. W. Moody (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978), 73– 95; Colin Kidd, “The Ideological Significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 122–144; Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 111–112. 7. Adam Smith, LJ (A), iv.165–166 (264). 8. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the subversion of the Roman Empire, to the beginning of the sixteenth century, 3 vols. (London, 1769), 1:170. 9. Ferguson, Essay, 70–71, 226, 237, 241–243. 10. Johann Gottfried Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), 104. 11. Saint-Lambert, “Honneur” and “Législateur,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 8:288–291, 9:357–363. See also Ronald Grimsley, “Saint-Lambert’s Articles in the Encyclopédie,” in Voltaire and His World: Studies Presented to R. H. Barber, ed. R. J. Howells, A. Mason, H. T. Mason, and D. Williams (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985), 293–306; John Pappas, “La campagne des philosophes contre l’honneur,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 205 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1982), 31– 44; Giralomo Imbruglia, “From Utopia to Republicanism: The Case of Diderot,” in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 63– 85; Céline Spector, “Honor, Interest, Virtue,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 49–79. For further information on the Eu ropean reception of Montesquieu see Ulrich Adam, “Nobility and Modern Monarchy: J. H. G. Justi and the French Debate on Commercial Nobility at the Beginning of the Seven Years War,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003):141– 157; Edgar Mass and Alberto Postigliola, ed. Lectures de Montesquieu (Paris: Cahiers Montesquieu, 1993); Wyger R. E. Velema, “Republican Readings of Montesquieu: The Esprit des Lois in the Dutch Republic,” in Velema, Republicans:

260

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Essays on Eighteenth- Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 93–114. 12. Saint-Lambert, “Législateur,” 359. 13. Saint-Lambert, “Honneur,” 289. 14. Saint-Lambert, “Législateur,” 359–361. 15. Ferguson, Essay, 238, 246. 16. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffi n and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), I.64– 67 (26–27). 17. For Epaminondas as a crucial example of “greatness of mind” see Michel de Montaigne, “On the Useful and the Honourable,” in The Complete Essays, ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), 905; for Shaftesbury’s view see Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” in Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 139. 18. On this theme see Quentin Skinner, “Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume II Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 213–244. 19. Ferguson, Essay, 68, 144. 20. John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). 21. Ferguson to Gilbert Elliot, 14 September 1759, in Correspondence, 1:37–38. 22. William Eden, Four Letters to the Earl of Carlisle (2nd ed., London, 1779), 53–54, 59. 23. Ferguson to John Macpherson 27 July 1779, in Correspondence, 1:218–219. 24. For a flavor of the mixture of patriotism and anxiety that marked British political discourse in the late 1750s see John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2 vols. (London, 1757); Anon., National Spirit, Considered; as a natural source of political liberty (2nd ed., London, 1758); Edward Wortley Montagu, Reflections on the rise and fall of the antient republicks. Adapted to the present state of Great Britain (London, 1759), 310; 373–374. See also the critique of Brown’s argument in Robert Wallace, Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (2nd ed., London, 1758). 25. Montagu, Reflections, 374–375. 26. Adam Ferguson, Reflections previous to the establishment of a militia (London, 1756), 2–3. For analysis of the foreign policy debates at the beginning of the Seven Years War see Daniel Baugh, “Withdrawing from Europe: AngloFrench Maritime Geopolitics, 1750–1800,” International History Review 20 (1998): 1–32; Eliga J. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 35–52.

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27. Ferguson, Reflections, 3. 28. Ibid., 7, 12–14, 35–36. 29. For an earlier example see Laurence Dickey, “Power, Commerce and Natural Law in Daniel Defoe’s Political Writings 1698–1707,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 63– 96. For the 1730s compare the arguments set out in Lord George Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian in England (2nd ed., London, 1735), 162, 212, with John Hervey, The Conduct of the Opposition, and the tendency of modern patriotism (London, 1734). 30. Josiah Tucker, “Instructions for Travellers,” in Tucker, The Collected Works of Josiah Tucker, 6 vols. (London: Thoemmes Reprints, 1993), 3:69. For a similar view from later in the century see Thomas Erskine, Observations on the prevailing Abuses in the British Army, arising from the corruption of civil government (London, 1775), 26. 31. Anon., National Spirit, Considered; as a natural source of political liberty. The second edition, with an appendix (London, 1758), 26. 32. Ferguson, Reflections, 25, 28. 33. Ferguson to William Eden, 2 January 1780, in Correspondence, 1:228. 34. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James Harris, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 2:401–520. 35. Ferguson, Reflections, 31, 36, 40, 53. Ferguson’s claim that the Crown would play a key role in the nomination of officers overlapped with much thinking of militia reformers from the mid-1750s. On this theme see Eliga H. Gould, “To Strengthen the King’s Hands: Dynastic Legitimacy, Militia Reform and Ideas of National Unity in England 1745–1760,” The Historical Journal 34 (1991): 329–348. 36. J. S. Richardson, “Imperium Romanum: Empire and the Language of Power,” Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 1–9. For Cicero’s discussion of the relationship between civil and military powers see Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffi n and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), I.74– 80 (29–32). 37. Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Author’s Preface,” in The Art of War, in Machiavelli, The works of Nicholas Machiavel, secretary of state to the republic of Florence, 2 vols. (London, 1762), 2:vii– ix; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), 42–51. 38. John Milton, Eikonoklastes. In answer to a book intitled, Eikon Basilike, the portraiture of his sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings [1649] (London, 1756), 42; Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian, 162; Sallust, The Works of Sallust, translated into English: With Political Discourses upon that author (London, 1744), 163. For a general overview and interpretation see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 401–505. 39. Ferguson, Essay, 143.

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40. François-Jean, marquis de Chastellux, An Essay on public happiness, investigating the state of human nature, under each of its particular appearances, through the several periods of history, to the present times, 2 vols. (London, 1774), 1:96–99, 128–30, 237–239. For his criticisms of Montesquieu see Chastellux, Essay on Public Happiness, 1:241–242, where Chastellux accused Montesquieu of insufficiently acknowledging the similarity between Roman and modern aristocracies. On Chastellux see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 290–302. 41. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The State of War” and “Considerations on the Government of Poland,” both in Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 162–176; 177– 260; for the early title of the manuscript see the note on 307–308. On Rousseau’s idea of graduated promotions see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 237. 42. On Mably see Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in EighteenthCentury France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Johnson Kent Wright, “Mably and Berne,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 427– 439. 43. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, De la Législation, ou Principes des Loix, in Mably, Œuvres complètes de l’abbé Mably, 13 vols. (London, 1789), 9:256–258; see also Mably, Des Droits et Devoirs du Citoyen, in Œuvres complètes, 11:307. For Mably’s prioritization of merit and honor above birth and wealth see Mably, Observations on the Romans (London, 1751), 24. 44. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Phocion’s Conversations; or, the relation between morality and politics (London, 1769), xxiv, 155–157, 286. 45. Mably, De la Législation, 9:256–258. 46. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Du gouvernement et des loix de la Pologne, in Mably, Œuvres complètes de l’abbé de Mably, 13 vols. (London, 1789–1790), 8:155–156. 47. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Observations on the government and laws of the United States (London, 1784), 74–75. 48. Ibid., 76. 49. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its influence on general virtue and happiness, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1793), 2:339, n. 50. Mably, Observations, 76–78. 51. On equality of property as a distinctive feature of Spartan politics see Walter Moyle, “An essay upon the Lacedaemonian Government,” in Moyle, A select collection of tracts by Walter Moyle, Esq; Containing I. An Essay upon the Roman Government. II. Remarks upon Dr. Prideaux Connection of the Old and New Testament. III. An Essay upon the Lacedemonian Government. IV. An Argument against a standing Army (London, 1728), 167–188; Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Observations on the Greeks (London, 1776), 24; Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, during the middle of the fourth century before the Christian aera,

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5. vols. (London, 1796), 2:434– 445. For the broader debate on Sparta see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 52. Ferguson, Essay, 141–142, 151–155. 53. Ibid., 142–144. 54. Ibid., 144, 254. 55. Adam Ferguson, History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1799), 2:424. 56. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), V.i.a.1–28 (2:700); Ferguson, History, 1:300–301. 57. Ferguson, History, 1:102–103, 144, 367. 58. Ferguson to William Eden, 2 January 1780, in Correspondence, 1:226–231. 59. Ferguson, History, 1:378. 60. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 1:265. 61. On Burke’s ideas about stability, liberty, and empire see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 331–349; Richard Bourke, “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 453– 471. 62. Ferguson, Principles, 2:452. 63. Ferguson to John Macpherson, 9 February 1797, in Correspondence, 2:412. 64. Ferguson, Principles, 1:245, 2:100, 126; Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. and trans. Cyril Bailey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), V.1113–1114 (1:490– 491). For Smith’s acceptance of the utility of a wealth-based distinction of ranks see Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), I.iii.2.1– 9 (50–58), IV.1.9–10 (183). 65. Ferguson, Principles, 2:473, n. 66. Ibid., 2:484– 485, 492. 67. For contemporary criticisms of the principle of military aristocracy see Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Part 1 (1791), in Paine, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 90– 91; see also the critique of Sparta as a military aristocracy in David Williams, Lectures on Political Principles; the subjects of eighteen books, in Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (London, 1789), 53. 68. Ferguson, Lectures (lecture of 13 January 1784). 69. Ferguson, Principles, 1:259. 70. Ibid., 2:493, n. 71. Ferguson to Allan Maconochie, 12 October 1779, in Correspondence, 1:219–220.

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72. Allan Maconochie, “Essay on the Origin and Structure of the European Legislatures,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1788), 3– 42; 133–180; esp. 36. For information on Maconochie’s career, and the content of his lecture course in Edinburgh, see John W. Cairns, “The First Edinburgh Chair in Law: Grotius and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Fundamina (2005): 32–58; see also Henry, Lord Brougham, Memoir of the late Hon Allan Maconochie of Meadowbank, one of the Senators of the College of Justice in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1845), 10–12. 73. Machonochie, “Essay,” 17, n., 27–28, 34, 171–180. 74. Ibid., 37, 41– 42. 75. Ferguson, Principles, 2:493. 76. Ibid., 2:493.

7. Revolution and Modern Republicanism 1. Ferguson to John Macpherson, 19 January 1790, in Correspondence, 2:337. 2. Ferguson to John Macpherson, undated letter of March 1796, and 1 August 1796, in Correspondence, 2:384–386, 401. 3. David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 93. See also Yasuo Amoh, “Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 73– 86. 4. For the European dimensions of these debates see Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Ser vice in France and Germany, 1789– 1830 (London: Routledge, 2008), 11–114; Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 141–196. 5. On the Carlisle commission and the relevance of Eden’s ideas to its program see Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 101–118; Sadosky, “Reimagining the British Empire and America in an Age of Revolution: The Case of William Eden,” in Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leornard J. Sadosky, Peter Nicolaisen, Peter S. Onuf, and Andre J. O’Shaugnessy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 2010), 83–104. 6. Adam Ferguson, Remarks on a pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, intitled, Observations on the Nature of civil liberty, the principles of government, and the justice and policy of the war with America (London, 1776); Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London, 1776); see also Price, Additional Observations on

Notes to Pages 185–191

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the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London, 1777), 49– 50. For commentary see Ronald Hamowy, “Scottish Thought and the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson’s Response to Richard Price,” in Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. with an introduction by David Womersley (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 348–387; more generally see Dalphy I. Fagerstrom, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954): 252–275. 7. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James Harris, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 2:395; Anon., A letter to his Grace the Duke of Buccleugh, on national defence (Edinburgh, 1778), 13. See Jacob T. Levy, “Beyond Publius: Montesquieu, Liberal Republicanism and the Small-Republic Thesis,” History of Political Thought 27 (2006): 50– 90. 8. J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790. Part 1: The Imperial Crisis,” in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 246–282. 9. William Barron, History of the Colonization of the Free States of Antiquity, applied to the Present Contest between Great Britain and her American Colonies (London, 1777), 139. For further evidence of Barron’s interest in the relations between separate political nations see William Barron, History of the political connection between England and Ireland, from the reign of Henry II to the present time (London, 1780). 10. Barron, History of the Colonization, 108, 151. 11. James Anderson, Free Thoughts on the American Contest (Edinburgh, 1761), 40. 12. On the extent to which American events were viewed through a European prism see Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); Eliga Gould, “American Independence and Britain’s Counter-Revolution,” Past and Present 154 (1997): 107–141. 13. Allan Ramsay, A succinct review of the American contest, addressed to those whom it may concern (London, 1782), 3– 4. 14. Auguste Verdeil, Histoire du Canton de Vaud, 3 vols. (Lausanne, 1849– 1852), 3:298. I owe this reference to Béla Kapossy. 15. John Gillies, “A Discourse upon the History, Manners, and Character, of the Greeks, from the Conclusion of the Peloponnesian War to the Battle of Chæronea,” in The Orations of Lysias and Isocrates (London, 1778), xvii, xix. 16. John Gillies, History of Ancient Greece, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1786), 2:237, 317. 17. Gillies, “A Discourse,” lxii– lxiii. 18. Ferguson, Remarks, 2–3, 4, 9, 14. Emphasis in original. 19. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 2:282.

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20. Ferguson, Remarks, 12. 21. Ibid., 23–24, 52. 22. Ibid., 59. 23. Ibid., 27, 46. 24. [George Stuart], Reflections, moral and political, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1787), 1:175–176. 25. Anon., Letters of Crito (Edinburgh, 1796), 9, 41, 82. 26. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event (London, 1790), 307. See also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Comparison of France with Rome” [1802], in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3: Essays on His Times in the Morning Post and the Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 1:311–340. For an interesting contemporary critique of “the empire of a military democracy” see S. A. Joerrson, Adam Smith and Thomas Paine: A Critical Essay (Hamburg, 1796), 101. On Burke’s characterization of the French Revolution as an attempt to establish an ancient democracy see Richard Bourke, “Enlightenment, Revolution and Democracy,” Constellations 15 (2008): 10–32. 27. Arthur Young, The example of France, a warning to Britain (London, 1793), 99, 113. For a similar demand for a militia as a bulwark against democracy see David Stewart Erskine, Earl of Buchan, Letters on the impolicy of a standing army, in time of peace (London, 1793). 28. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae and other writings on the French Revolution [1791], ed. with an introduction by Donald Winch (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006). On Mackintosh’s argument see Lionel A. Mackenzie, “The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform: James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 14 (1981): 264–282, and Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 261–293. 29. Mackintosh, Vindiciae, 158–160. 30. Ibid., 22, 122, 124–127, 160; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 232–239. Mackintosh’s assumption that France would soon recognize the authority of Enlightened philosophy, and so disband its commercial colonies, was cited by Lieutenant James Green in his An historical essay on different governments (Edinburgh, 1793), 295. 31. Ibid., 27. The passage is also discussed in Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 50–51. 32. Mackintosh, Vindiciae, 28. 33. John MacLaurin, The Works of the late John MacLaurin, Esq. of Dreghorn. One of the Senators of the College of Justice, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1798).

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34. MacLaurin, Works, 1:173–176. Marchamont Nedham’s Excellency of a Free State had been reprinted in 1767 and seems to have had some impact upon the American political thinker John Adams; see Colleen A. Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self- Government (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 33– 40. 35. MacLaurin, Works, 1:159–160. 36. John Gillies, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, comprising his practical philosophy, translated from the Greek. Illustrated by introductions and notes; the critical history of his life; and a new analysis of his speculative works, 2 vols. (London, 1797), 2:317. 37. Ibid., 2:383, n. 38. Ibid., 2:318. 39. Ibid., 2:54–55, 164, 327, n. 40. Ibid., 2:56, 62, 65– 66, 71, 393, n. 41. Ibid., 2:61– 63, n. 42. Ibid., 2:178. The reference is to Aristotle’s account of politeia or “polity”; see Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. with introduction and notes by Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 1279b (3.vii.§4). 43. Gillies, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, 2:55, 386–389, n., 399, 411, n. 44. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1790–1793), 2:385. 45. Ibid., 2:372–374, 382–383, 387–389, 395, 419. 46. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 2:457, 515. 47. Ibid., 1:314, 2:457. 48. Ibid., 2:459– 461. 49. Ferguson, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” in Manuscripts, 217. 50. Ferguson, Principles, 2:467– 475, 483– 494. 51. Ibid., 2:421– 422, 464. 52. Ibid., 2:511. See also David Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press,” in Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 1–3. 53. These essays are collected in Ferguson, Manuscripts, 33– 46, 133–152. Based on internal evidence and on the watermarks of the paper, the three essays can be dated to the period between 1803 and 1807. 54. Ferguson, Manuscripts, 149. 55. Ibid., 144. 56. Ibid., 145. For Fletcher’s position see Andrew Fletcher, “Two Discourses concerning the Affairs of Scotland,” in Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 63– 64. 57. Xenophon, Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates. With the defence of Socrates, before his judges, trans. Sarah Fielding (London, 1767), 199–201. 58. Ferguson, Manuscripts, 147. 59. Ibid., 148–150.

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Notes to Pages 208–216

60. Ibid., 134. 61. Ibid., 134. The analysis overlapped with the broad swath of patriotic opposition within France to the French aristocracy in the period immediately preceding the revolution; see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 175–181. 62. Ferguson to Alexander Carlyle, 2 October 1797, in Correspondence, 2:423. 63. Ferguson, Manuscripts, 35–36. 64. Ibid., 36, 39. 65. Ibid., 136. 66. Ibid., 35–36, 40. 67. Ibid., 137. 68. Ibid., 39. 69. Ibid., 137–138. 70. Ibid., 139. 71. Ibid., 139.

Conclusion 1. Several of Herder’s writings bear traces of an engagement with Ferguson’s works; for an apparent reference to Ferguson’s analysis of national enmity see Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 151–152 (I am grateful to Eva Piirimäe for pointing me toward this passage). See also Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Something Lessing Said: A Commentary on Journeys of the Popes,” trans. Dale E. Snow, in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth- Century Answers and Twentieth- Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191–201; Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. John Burrow (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), 50, 58, n. 2. Robert Bisset, “The History of Literature for 1799,” in The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific Magazine, ed. Robert Bisset, 3 vols. (London, 1800), 2:181. 3. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols. (London, 1787–1788), 1:334–361. 4. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: CUP, 2010); Lisa Hill, “Adam Smith’s Cosmopolitanism: The Expanding Circles of Commercial Strangership,” History of Political Thought 31 (2010): 449– 473. 5. Johannes von Müller, “Beobachtungen über Geschichte, Gesetze und Interessen der Menschen,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Johann Georg Müller, 40 vols. (Stuttgart, 1831–1835), 37:60–71; Müller, Allgemeine Aussicht über die Bundes-

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republik im Schweizerland, Deutsche Fassung 1776–1777 Erstausgabe, ed. Doris and Peter Walser-Wilhelm (Zürich: Ammann Verlag, 1991), 28–29, 143–151. 6. On France see Michael Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes: An Eighteenth- Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 283–361. 7. See Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 106–132; Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Ser vice in France and Germany, 1789–1830 (London: Routledge, 2008). On the idea of establishing a republican meritocracy through the army in France see David Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 68–98. 8. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Idées sur le despotisme, in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris, 1847–1849), 9:157–158. On Condorcet’s Idées sur le despotisme see David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 75– 80. AntoineJoseph Barnave, Power, Property, and History: Joseph Barnarve’s Introduction to the French Revolution and Other Writings, trans. Emanuel Chill (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 103–105. For further evidence of Barnave’s concern with military despotism see Barnave, Oeuvres, ed. Bérenger de la Drôme, 4 vols. (Paris, 1843), 1:54– 63; 2:20. For Barnave’s resemblance to Ferguson on this issue see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 319– 321; see also, most recently, Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 195–228. 9. Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 47. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), §271 (304–305), §324–§339 (360– 366). Hegel had probably read Ferguson in Berlin, and also absorbed his ideas through his reading of Schiller and Garve; on Ferguson’s importance for Hegel see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), 181–293; Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil Society” (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). 11. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Politics of Historiography,” Historical Research 78 (2005): 1–14. 12. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:545. 13. For the Considerations as a handbook or “manual” of republican politics see Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, in a series of a letters (London, 1796), 111. For the Considerations as a prediction of the end of the eighteenth century see A. Adrien de Texier, Du Gouvernement de la République Romaine, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1796), 2:92, n.

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Notes to Pages 218–219

14. Anon., “Adam Ferguson,” Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1817, vol. 1 (London, 1817), 249. 15. For “republican emperor” see, for example, Thomas Jefferson to John Langdon, 5 March 1810, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscombe and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–1904), 12:374–375.

Q Index

Adams, John, 214 agrarian laws, 131–141, 194, 204; Vertot on, 19–20; Dalrymple on, 44; Hooke on, 124, 138–139; Ferguson on, 134–137, 204 America, 43, 65; central, 14; inhabitants of, 85– 86, 115. See also colonies American Revolution, 48, 56, 98, 120, 131, 139, 163, 184–192, 196, 200; Ferguson on, 184–185, 189–192; Gillies on, 188–189. See also revolution Anderson, John, 186–187 Arendt, Hannah, 5 Aristotle, 18, 27, 68, 71, 76, 197–202 Asia, 14, 43, 51, 65, 158, 183; Montesquieu on, 26–27; Ferguson on, 88– 91 Athens, 17, 33, 40, 43, 82, 170, 188, 191, 197–202; Ferguson on, 100–102. See also Greece auctoritas, 125–126 Augustus, 18, 20–21, 30, 55, 141, 146–147, 150

Beccaria, Cesare, 47– 48 benevolence, 2, 72, 108; Hutcheson on, 71; Ferguson on, 72, 75 Bisset, Robert, 214 Blackwell, William, 142 Bodin, Jean, 88 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, First Viscount, 34, 40, 123 Bonaparte. See Napoleon Bonaparte British constitution, 40–50; 121–126; Montesquieu on, 27, 32–38; Dalrymple on, 45; Smith on, 51–53; Ferguson on, 56–58 British Empire, 43, 47, 49, 105–106, 109, 142; Montesquieu on, 34; Ferguson on, 142 Brown, John, 163 Bruni, Leonardo, 147 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 16 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, 65, 68 Burke, Edmund, 2, 49, 176, 193, 194–196 Butler, Joseph, 68

balance of power, 8, 111, 143, 187; Ferguson on, 94, 114, 117, 145, 210 barbarism, 53–54, 83– 84, 98, 109–111, 169, 193–195, 216; Ferguson on, 87– 91, 115, 126 Barnave, Antoine-Joseph, 216 Barron, William, 186 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, 172 Bayle, Pierre, 16, 68 Beattie, James, 201–202

Caesar, Julius, 16, 18, 19, 65, 131, 132, 158, 180, 202, 203; Smith on, 51; Ferguson on, 166; Gillies on, 198 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 61 Carlisle Commission, 184–185 Carlyle, Alexander, 209 Carthage, 17, 109, 197; Montesquieu on, 18–19; Mably on, 106; Ferguson on, 144–145, 163 Cassius Longinus, Gaius, 16

272

Index

Chapman, Thomas, 124, 126 Charlevoix, Pierre François-Xavier, 85 Chastellux, François Jean, marquis de, 156, 168–169, 174 Christianity, 107, 153 China, 8, 14, 25, 93, 98, 108; Ferguson on, 103–104 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 66, 129, 134, 150–151, 161, 167, 235n61 civic humanism, 14, 120, 152, 202 civil-military relations, 155–156, 167–169, 193–194, 196–197, 216–217; Montesquieu on 14, 21, 23, 26, 29–30, 36–37; Hume on, 42; Smith on, 53; Ferguson on, 59– 60, 101–102, 130–131, 143–144, 162–167, 172–175, 178–179, 207–212; Mably on, 169–172; Mackintosh on, 194–196; Gillies on, 200–201 civilization, 3, 7– 9, 66, 85, 92– 93; Ferguson on, 81, 95– 97, 103, 174–175; Herder on, 101; Diderot on, 110 Colden, Cadwallader, 85– 86 colonies, 186, 187, 195, 196; American, 43, 48, 196, 211; Ferguson on, 163–164 comitia, 127–129, 133 commerce, 5– 8, 92–118, 145–146, 163–165, 214–215; Montesquieu on 18–19, 25, 30–31, 34–35; Ferguson on, 94–104, 163–165; Raynal on, 107–111 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 216 conjectural history, 6– 9, 13, 64– 66, 81, 98, 107, 134, 179, 214; Ferguson on, 83– 91 conquest, 16–17, 139, 183–184, 187, 195, 201, 218; Montesquieu on, 18–19, 25, 27, 28, 88; Ferguson on, 89– 91, 93– 94, 105, 113–115, 117, 141–146, 158, 162, 185, 211–212; Fletcher on, 113 Constant, Benjamin, 218 Constantine, 51 Cromwell, Oliver, 40, 42, 44, 51, 151–152, 170, 201, 203 Dalrymple, John, 13, 44– 46, 52, 65, 131 Davenant, Charles, 146 decline, 92– 93, 107, 110, 140, 146, 163, 186; Montesquieu on, 19; Ferguson on, 92– 93, 95, 105, 116, 152, 192 debt, public, 43, 44, 46– 47, 52, 107, 139, 187, 197; Ferguson on, 98, 116, 176

debts, plebeian, 131–132, 136, 141 Delolme, Jean-Louis, 128, 156, 174, 198, 202, 215 democracy, 5– 6, 42–50, 193, 195, 196, 200, 214; Montesquieu on, 25, 32–34, 36; Ferguson on, 54– 63, 99–101, 121, 132, 133, 148, 190–192 dictatorship, Roman, 51, 61– 63, 129, 131–132, 147, 173, 174, 198, 201 Diderot, Denis, 47, 107–111, 117, 147, 215 Dio Cassius, 16 Diocletian, 51 distinction of ranks. See ranks division of labor, 52, 93, 94, 194, 210; Ferguson on, 98–104, 205–208 Dow, Alexander, 109 Dunbar, James, 76 Dutch Republic, 22, 25, 45, 109–110, 173, 185, 192, 196, 199; Ferguson on, 116 East India Company, 105, 109, 142 Eden, William, 114, 163, 166, 175, 184 Egypt, 108 Elliott, Gilbert, 162 empire, 4– 6, 8, 43–50, 105–118, 185, 187, 201, 216–219; republican, 4, 6, 15–16, 18, 22, 40, 120–121, 141–146, 202, 205–212, 218–219; Montesquieu on, 15–16, 18, 20–22, 25, 34, 88– 89; Roman, 21, 22, 25, 27, 43, 51, 89, 98, 141–154, 193; commercial, 34, 48, 98, 100, 105–118, 142, 144–145, 195; Ferguson on, 88– 91, 105–106, 115–118, 121, 135, 141–154, 184, 191–192, 210–212 ; Raynal on, 109, 110. See also universal monarchy emulation, 5, 31, 155, 167, 169, 172, 181, 209; Ferguson on, 73–74, 77, 81– 82, 88, 128–129 entails, law of, 44– 45, 131, 171 Epaminondas, 162 Epictetus, 72 Epicureanism, 9, 31, 66, 67, 70–71, 73, 177 equality, 6–7, 19–20, 47, 82, 131–141; Montesquieu on, 20, 24–25, 31; Ferguson on, 58– 60, 62, 84– 85, 86, 129, 147, 204; Mably on, 171–172. See also inequal ity executive power, 46, 48– 49, 86, 122–123, 128, 152, 178, 181, 198–202;

Index Montesquieu on, 23, 29–30, 33, 36–37, 38; Ferguson on, 6, 178, 204–205. See also legislative power faction, 46, 186; Montesquieu on, 34, 35; Ferguson on, 55, 79, 80, 204–205. See also rivalry Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe de, 111 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 218 Fletcher, Andrew, 2, 60, 103, 111–114, 164, 166, 207, 218 feudalism, 13, 44, 107, 158, 179–180; Montesquieu on, 28 Frederick the Great, 139 free states: idea of, 5, 10, 14, 96, 121, 127, 137–139, 167–168, 196, 198, 208; Montesquieu on, 32–33, 35; Ferguson on, 56, 61– 62, 175, 191, 203; Mably on, 171–172 French Revolution, 183–184, 192–202. See also revolution Geneva, 140. See also Swiss republicanism Germans, neo- German politics, 4, 54, 127, 176, 178–181, 215; Montesquieu on, 27–29; Ferguson on, 87– 91, 157–159, 178–179 Gibbon, Edward, 2, 89, 120, 133, 147, 153 Gillies, John, 188–189, 197–202 Gentz, Friedrich, 218 Glorious Revolution, 70. See also revolution Godwin, William, 172 Gordon Riots, 49 Gordon, Thomas, 121, 137, 168 Gracchi (Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus), 19, 24, 121, 134–135, 137–139, 141, 187 Grant, William, 111 Greece, 80, 99, 102, 111–112, 158, 188–190, 194, 199. See also Athens Gregory, John, 96, 98 Guibert, Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de, 156 Halde, Jean-Baptiste du, 103 happiness, 110, 208; Ferguson on, 69, 72–73, 78, 172; Smith on, 80 Harrington, James, 121–122, 137, 166, 193; Montesquieu on, 36; Hume on, 42

273

Harris, James, 12, 71 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 217 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 68 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 8– 9, 101, 160, 214–215 Hervey, Lord John, 36, 123–124 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 16, 65–72, 75, 81, 93, 109; Ferguson on, 65, 67– 68 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 13, 46, 64– 65, 83, 86, 87, 89, 111, 131, 166, 185, 189; on Britain, 43– 44; on Ferguson, 87 honor, 58, 74, 159–162, 170, 215; Montesquieu on, 29, 31; Mandev ille on, 70; Ferguson on, 74, 130, 155, 159–162, 167, 173, 177, 209–210 Hooke, Nathaniel, 124–126, 138, 148 human nature, 64, 65, 67– 83, 119–120, 136 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 103, 214, 217 Hume, David, 7– 8, 9, 50, 64, 65, 66, 69, 72, 82, 83, 87, 90, 95, 97, 103, 111, 125, 131, 143, 146, 174, 180, 193, 205, 217, 218; on Ferguson, 2; on republicanism, 6, 40– 43, 128; on sociability, 74, 214 Hutcheson, Francis, 12, 66– 67, 69–71, 76, 92, 111–112, 190 India, 105, 139 industry: Ferguson on, 135–136, 146 inequal ity, 19–20, 99, 108, 120, 138, 140, 161, 171; Montesquieu on, 24, 31; Smith on, 52; Ferguson on, 83– 91, 134–136, 206–207, 209. See also equality Iroquois, 85– 86 Ireland, 22, 112, 114, 139 Iselin, Isaac, 2 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 214 Jacobite political thought, 124 Jacobitism, 42, 165 Japan, 4, 108, 212 Johnson, Samuel, 41 Johnstone, George, 105, 184 Juvenal, 66, 73, 74 justice, 51, 58, 134, 137, 142, 204; Ferguson on, 71–72, 86, 133; Smith on, 151–152 Kames. See Home, Henry, Lord Kames Kant, Immanuel, 6, 11, 216

274

Index

Lafitau, Joseph-François, 85 large states, 40, 196, 216; Montesquieu on, 24; Ferguson on, 132, 134, 148. See also small states legislative power, 53, 121–126, 178–181, 195; Montesquieu on, 23, 27, 29, 33, 37–38; Ferguson on, 127, 129–130, 152, 178, 203–204. See also executive power lex regia, 150 Licinius Stolo, Gaius, 137, 138 liberty, 45, 47, 96, 137, 142, 159, 186–187, 188, 198, 201; Montesquieu on, 14–15, 22, 23, 24, 32–33, 35, 36, 89; Hume on, 41– 42, 95; Smith on, 52–53, 95, 151–152; Ferguson on, 56, 57, 60, 62, 91, 129, 148, 151, 158, 185, 189–192, 203–205 Lindsay, Patrick, 135 Lipsius, Justus, 123 Livy, 121, 125, 129 Locke, John, 198 London, 43, 60– 61, 112–113 Lucretius, 177 luxury, 19–20, 108, 141, 148, 161; Montesquieu on, 20, 30–31; Ferguson on, 90, 98–100, 120, 136–137 Lycurgus, 83 Lyttelton, Lord George, 168 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 106–107, 133, 156–157, 169–172, 180, 194 Madison, James, 10, 216 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 14, 15–16, 18, 26, 113, 133, 136, 160, 168, 199 Maconochie, Alan, 179–181 Mackintosh, James, 194–196 Macpherson, Sir John, 68, 114, 163, 176, 183 MacLaurin, James, 196–197 maiestas, 126, 150–151 Mandev ille, Bernard, 31, 66– 67, 68–73 Marcus Aurelius, 72 Marius, Gaius, 36, 51, 143 Marx, Karl, 100 Maupertius, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, 68 Meiners, Christoph, 140–141, 215 Melon, Jean-François, 18 Middleton, Conyers, 123–126, 140 military government, 1, 5, 17, 39– 63, 121, 141, 143, 193–195, 202; Montesquieu on, 13–14, 21–22, 26, 30, 37; Hume on,

41– 43; Ramsay on, 49–50; Smith on, 51–53, 151–152; Ferguson on, 54, 61, 62, 102, 117, 141, 143, 148, 152–153, 191–192, 209–210; Raynal on, 109–111; Rousseau on, 169; Mably on, 170 military ser vice, 10, 29, 31, 130, 155, 162, 165 militia, 7, 21, 50, 193–194, 201, 208, 217; Montesquieu on, 30, 36; Fletcher on, 113; Ferguson on, 155, 162–167; Mably on, 170–171 Millar, John, 6, 53–54, 64, 83, 159, 193 Milton, John, 168 mixed government, 5, 33, 56, 121–126, 148, 191, 205; Ferguson on, 127–128, 252n31 Molyneux, William, 198 monarchy, 17, 96, 124–125, 140, 148–149, 188, 198, 201; commercial, 4, 8, 15, 40, 94, 104, 176; Montesquieu on, 21, 22, 24, 25–31, 38, 89– 90; Hume on, 42, 125; Smith on, 51, 52; Ferguson on, 87, 91, 120, 148–149, 156, 157–162 Montagu, Edward Wortley, 133, 163 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 4–7, 12–14, 68, 74, 88– 89, 97, 103, 105, 107, 109, 140, 147, 156, 168–169, 174, 180, 181, 217–218; on republics, 14, 15–25; on monarchy, 25–31; on Britain, 32–38; Scottish reception of, 39, 40– 47, 50–54, 64– 65, 84, 186–187, 195, 201; Ferguson on, 40, 55, 58, 60– 61, 89, 93– 94, 99, 100, 104, 120, 127, 129, 132, 133, 141–142, 144, 157, 159–161, 178, 185, 190–191, 203, 215; on sociability, 77, 240n46 Moyle, Walter, 137–138, 142, 172 Müller, Johannes von, 216 Napoleon Bonaparte, 6, 184, 198, 210–212, 218–219 natural authority, 84, 86, 129, 134 Nedham, Marchamont, 196–197 negotium, 78 neo-Roman politics, 5, 14, 27, 40, 163, 177–178 nobility, 10, 45– 46, 53–54, 140, 155, 177–182; Montesquieu on, 28–31, 35; Ferguson on, 87, 91, 149–150, 157–162, 177–179, 208–210

Index Ogilvie, William, 139–140 otium, 78 Paine, Thomas, 10, 198 parliamentary reform, 131, 196, 254n44 patriotism, 5, 40, 160, 166; Montesquieu on, 4, 20; Ferguson on, 10, 57, 82– 83, 130, 155, 159, 161, 209–211; Rousseau on, 169 Phocion, 102, 106 Plato, 48, 81 Pliny, 65 Plutarch, 43, 102, 140 Pocock, J. G. A., 186, 217 Poland, 169, 170, 171, 211 Polybius, 130 Pompey, 18 Pope, Alexander, 73 potestas, 126 praetorian guards, 60, 147, 152, 217 Price, Richard, 138–139, 185, 189–192, 198, 203 Priestley, Joseph, 198, 203 primogeniture, 44, 131, 138 Principate, 5, 146–154; Montesquieu on, 15, 20–22; Ferguson on, 6, 146–154 Pufendorf, Samuel, 16–17, 70–71, 77, 218 Pulteney, William, 60– 61 Ramsay, Allan, 46–50, 55, 187, 189 ranks, 6–7, 44– 46, 159, 161, 176–182; Montesquieu on, 23, 30, 35; Ferguson on, 11, 58–59, 84– 85, 91, 99, 126, 132, 133, 135–136, 150, 161, 179, 208–210 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, l’abbé de, 8, 107–111, 215 representation, 10, 131, 169, 180, 186, 196, 199, 216; Montesquieu on, 27–28, 33; Ferguson on, 56, 133 republics, 2–7, 10–11, 42, 46, 86, 121–126, 137–141, 159–160, 167–169; ancient, 10, 15, 54, 58, 109, 169, 171, 183–184, 188, 200; modern, 2, 10–11, 53, 157, 183–202; Montesquieu on, 14–25, 27, 29, 30, 31; Smith on, 51–53; Ferguson on, 54– 63, 126–131, 131–137, 147, 149, 156, 172–175, 177–178; Mably on, 106, 169–172; and international politics, 111–114, 141–146, 184–192, 193–196, 200, 205–212

275

revolution: conceptions of, 19, 48, 183–184, 192–193, 197, 211; Rousseau on, 9; Ferguson on, 54–55, 60, 93, 120, 127, 153, 182, 208–210; Gillies on, 188. See also American Revolution; French Revolution; Glorious Revolution Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal de, 29 rivalry: social, 56, 74– 81, 128, 176; international, 81– 83, 108, 111 Robertson, William, 7– 8, 9, 13, 86, 93– 94, 111, 159, 188 Rochefoucauld, François de la, 68 Romulus, 83 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8– 9, 66, 79, 96, 156, 169, 172, 194–195, 196, 198, 205, 214, 215; Ferguson on, 65– 66, 67– 68, 84, 86; on Rome, 127, 129, 133, 134; on patriotism, 169 Saint-Lambert, Jean-François de, 160 Sallust, 140 savages, 69, 83, 84, 85– 87, 98, 203 science of man, 2, 13, 64– 65, 140 Scotland, 44– 45, 98, 112, 162 secret ballot, 133, 137 self-interest, 68– 69, 75–76, 78 senate, Roman, 24, 122–126, 127, 129, 134, 144, 147, 190, 201 Seneca, 198 Servius Tullius, 23 Seven Years War, 41, 55, 105, 107, 118, 163 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 12, 66– 67, 69–72, 162 Sidney, Algernon, 122 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 2, 10, 75, 156, 215–216 Sigonio, Carlo, 123 skepticism, 9, 65– 66, 69, 70 slavery, 28, 75, 107–108, 141, 196; Smith on, 51–52; political, 57, 60, 75, 88, 89– 90, 149, 190; Ferguson on, 80, 97, 99, 206–207 small states, 111–112, 114, 185. See also large states Smith, Adam, 2, 7– 8, 13, 64, 66, 74, 83– 84, 88, 95, 131, 156, 157, 174, 177, 186, 207–208, 214–216; Britain, 50–54; on Rome, 51, 151–152; on happiness, 79– 80; on justice, 151–152; on nobility, 44, 159

276 sociability, 2, 8, 9, 64– 67, 71–73, 108; Rousseau on, 65– 66; Ferguson on 67– 69, 74– 83 Social War, 186 Spanish empire, 106, 145, 196 Sparta, 2, 79, 82, 84, 97, 108, 172 Spelman, Edward, 123–124 stadial history, 7, 50, 83 Staël, Anne-Louise Germaine de, 218 Stanhope, James, First Earl, 122 Steele, Richard, 73 Steuart, James, 96 Stewart, Dugald, 13, 83 Stoicism, 12, 66– 67, 70–72, 78, 161–162 Strahan, William, 41, 153 Stuart, Gilbert, 180 Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, 51, 61– 62 sumptuary laws, 19; Ferguson on, 136–137. See also luxury Swiss republicanism, 166, 171, 172, 185, 205, 216. See also Geneva sympathy, 66, 74, 177 Tacitus, 28, 55, 65, 87– 90, 127, 147–148, 151, 178–180 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius, 23, 122, 125 Taylor, John, 126 Temple, William, 103, 122 Thelwall, John, 138 Tiberius, 20, 55, 151, 207 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 103 tribunate, 130, 132–133, 137 Tucker, Josiah, 132, 165 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 198

Index union, models of, 112–114 United States, 139, 170–172, 184–192, 199, 214 universal monarchy, 4, 15, 16–19, 49, 94, 111–112, 144–146, 210–212, 218; Montesquieu on, 25; Kames on, 43, 89; Ramsay on, 47; Mably on, 106; Fletcher on, 112; Ferguson on, 117, 210. See also empire utopianism, 42, 48, 67, 192 Vertot, René Aubert, abbé de, 19–21, 122–125 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 9 Wallace, Robert, 131 Walpole, Horace, 123, 165 war, 16, 17, 40, 41, 43– 44, 46– 47, 105–118, 184–189, 200–201; Montesquieu on, 18, 26; Ferguson on, 58, 68, 74– 83, 87, 88, 90, 115–116, 141–146, 152–154, 173–175, 211; Raynal on, 108, 109, 110–111; Rousseau on, 169. See also Seven Years War wealth, 8, 19, 27, 93, 95, 159; Ferguson on, 87– 90, 97– 99, 115, 116, 136 Wilkes, John, 41, 60, 131 William III, 46, 112 Wyvil, Christopher, 254n44 Xenophon, 172, 207 Young, Arthur, 193–194 Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 156