INTRODUCTION

John Millar occupied the Regius Chair of Civil Law in the University of Glasgow from 1761 to 1801. He was the pupil, then friend and colleague of Adam Smith. Before being called to the Bar in 1760, Millar had served as tutor to George Home Drummond, the son of Lord Kames. Kames had a high regard for his protégé, whose lectures on law were the only contemporary ones to escape the judge's censure. Yet in 1952, W C Lehmann could justly describe Millar as “to-day almost completely forgotten”. Apart from accounts in histories of the University of Glasgow, in the previous fifty years Millar had been discussed, and then briefly, only three times: twice as a type of materialist sociologist, somehow anticipating Marx, and once as a constitutional historian of the “conjectural” school. Since that date, discussion of Millar, if not quite burgeoning, has developed considerably, in line with the ever-growing interest in the Scottish Enlightenment. This literature has tended to focus on Millar's role as a social theorist and historian, concentrating on his published works, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks and An Historical View of the English Government. He has been viewed as a precursor of Marx, or, more generally, of sociology. In a more sophisticated approach, Duncan Forbes has argued in an important essay that Millar was a “scientific Whig” who forms the link between Adam Smith and the English Utilitarians. Peter Stein has viewed Millar as a legal evolutionist, anticipating, if not directly influencing, Henry Maine, though R J Smith has argued that Millar was a “Whig” historian (in both the political and pejorative sense) of the English constitution. Caroline Robbins and J G A Pocock have interpreted Millar as a republican commonwealthman following in the tradition of Harringtonian Civic Humanism, while Hans Medick and Annette Lepert-Fögen have considered him the ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie.14 Michael Ignatieff partly explains the variety of approaches by arguing that Millar was “caught between two languages which bifurcate in his own lifetime – civic humanist moralism and political economy”, whose “work palpably did not hold together”, and who showed how the synthesis in Smith of morality and economics could be sundered.