Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816)

Ferguson was a noted figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. His major work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, offers a natural history of the development of society and examines the role of the citizen in the modern commercial state. Born near the Highlands of Scotland and educated at the University of St. Andrews and at Edinburgh, Ferguson was an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian). He was later appointed to the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and subsequently was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy. His works include Institutes of Moral Philosophy, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, and Principles of Moral and Political Science.

Preeminently a moralist, and influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics, Ferguson maintains that the moral good lies in happiness, the perfection of character. Not reducible to pleasure, happiness requires activity and achievement, including benevolent action. There is no conflict between genuine selfinterest and the well-being of society. Because this theoretical knowledge of moral goodness requires an awareness of human nature and social circumstances, these provide the subject matter of much of the Essay on Civil Society.

Ferguson opens this work declaring that human beings are forever found in groups. There is no state of nature out of which isolated individuals contract to form society. Nor can human motivation be reduced to egoism, as Thomas Hobbes or Bernard Mandeville seemed to believe. Blessed with multiple propensities, including a natural affection for society, humans also have an impulse to competition and opposition, seemingly negative tendencies that may, Ferguson maintains, contribute to social cohesion and the preservation of liberty. The human being also possesses an instinct to excel and seek improvement, and this operates at both the individual and the species level. Society progresses from savage and barbaric stages (with no or little property) to a refined state with landed property, government, and liberty under law. Notable in Ferguson's account is how institutions, including constitutional and social arrangements, develop and emerge in a slow and unintended fashion. What is attributed to rational foresight or conscious agreement is often the result of the myriad actions and adjustments of individuals responding to circumstances over time.

Although Ferguson prefers the prosperity and liberty of the modern commercial society, he worries that modern individualism puts at risk communal bonds and public spirit. The division of labor, an unintended development, is essential for prosperity, but overspecialization may leave the citizen distinct from the soldier and the soldier distinct from the statesman; it may also create inequalities between those in liberal and mechanical vocations. Ferguson warns that a fixation on material fortune, including luxury goods, may distract citizens from the public weal and sunder all social connections except those of trade and exchange. Such a corruption of the self, with its indifference, cowardice, and loss of vigor, leads to despotism.

Ferguson's thought manifests a sympathetic awareness of the risks that accrue to modern and commercial societies. He also discerns how social order emerges slowly and spontaneously, often from the interplay of agents in conflict. That unintended outcomes may also be beneficial is an important idea that also has a home in the work of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and, more recently, F. A. Hayek.

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