Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Iain McDaniel

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075283
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe's Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe's growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome's lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship.Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon.As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson's skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.

1

Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic

IN A FAMOUS 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 acknowledgment. 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 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 first 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 “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 the Roman Principate was a direct legacy of republicanism itself. The first 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 final 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 so-called 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, first 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 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 philosopher and historian Samuel Pufendorf in the first chapter of his influential Introduction to the History of the Principal States and Kingdoms of Europe, first published in 1682. Martial republics, Pufendorf claimed, exhibited a heightened tendency toward expansion 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 find 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

Two aspects of Montesquieu’s narrative in the Considerat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Montesquieu and the Unfree Republic
• 2. Military Government and Empire in the Scottish Enlightenment
• 3. Ferguson and the Moral Foundations of Civil Society
• 4. Trajectories of the Modern Commercial State
• 5. Britain’s Future in a Roman Mirror
• 6. Civil-Military Union and the Modern State
• 7. Revolution and Modern Republicanism
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index