7 - ‘But Art itself is Natural to Man’: Adam Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
Summary
One of the central characteristics of the social thought of the group of thinkers who collectively constitute the Scottish Enlightenment is their adoption of a stadial account of social development. This is usually labelled the ‘four-stages theory’, although explicit avowals in published work are not as common as might be supposed (see Berry 2013: Ch. 2 for a thorough examination of this question). Typically it is associated with Adam Smith (pre-eminently) but other names, such as those of John Millar, William Robertson and Lord Kames, are usually invoked. David Hume is acknowledged not to have subscribed to it explicitly, although passages in his Political Discourses (1752), in particular, betray clear recognition of step-changes in the history of commerce and the refinement of arts. Adam Ferguson is another whose relation to this theory is not straightforward.
A preliminary step is to note that there are clear expressions in Ferguson's work of a stadial approach in its presumptively typical form. Two are worthy of note. One occurs in his Essay on the History of Civil Society where he appropriates, without acknowledgement, Baron de Montesquieu's division between savage and barbarian nations (ECS 82; Montesquieu [1961: Bk 18, Ch.11). Moreover, the difference between these ‘nations’ is made in terms of ‘property’– savages are not acquainted with it while barbarians are albeit without formal legal form (ECS 82). In addition, in a manner typical of the four-stages version, savages are essentially hunter-gatherers, although some ‘rude agriculture’ may be practised (for Montesquieu, the distinction was explicitly between chasseurs and pasteurs). Both savage and barbarian societies are labelled ‘rude’ and thus can be contrasted with ‘civilised’. This latter more generic contrast is also stadial. Indeed, in the same context that he distinguishes savage and barbarian, Ferguson remarks that ‘property is a matter of progress’ and he identifies as the ‘principal distinction in the advanced state of mechanic and commercial arts’ that there is a ‘habit’ formed of taking ‘a view to distant objects’. What this signifies, typical of the underlying psychology of the four stages (Berry 1997: Ch. 5; and see Chapter 6 in this volume), is the necessity to separate property from possession to enable ‘industry’ to develop and overcome the disposition of the ‘uncivilised’ to live indolently always in the present (ECS 82).
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- Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment , pp. 109 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018