Paulo Roberto de Almeida
A Skeptical Modern
Eighteenth-century Britain's mixture of liberty and empire inspired philosophers. Adam Ferguson thought it spelled doom.
By JEFFREY COLLINS
By the staid standards of the Scottish Enlightenment, the philosopher Adam Ferguson enjoyed a vividly eventful life. Descended from the dukes of Argyll, he received a deluxe education at St. Andrews and Edinburgh. He served as chaplain to the storied 42nd regiment of Highlanders. It was claimed, implausibly, that he was a fighting cleric, leading infantry against the French at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745. "Damn my clerical commission," he supposedly roared. After his military career, Ferguson joined Edinburgh's Select Society, the brain trust of the Scottish Enlightenment. He composed political pamphlets and—embarrassingly—promoted the "newly discovered" epics of Ossian (supposedly a "Celtic Homer" but in fact a hoax). He included among his friends Adam Smith, David Hume and Sir Walter Scott.Ferguson eventually eased into an academic career at the University of Edinburgh. In 1767, he published his most significant book, "An Essay on the History of Civil Society." A "speculative history" of the kind popular with the Scots, the "Essay" hypothesized an account of humankind's emergence from natural barbarity. Ferguson's other major work, his "History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic," remained popular into the 19th century and earned the praise of Edward Gibbon (no easy feat).
Ferguson lived through the "age of revolutions." In 1778 he was sent to America with a hapless commission to negotiate peace with George Washington. In retirement he followed the French Revolution with an initial enthusiasm that faded into gloom. One of his sons died fighting the French, another was captured, and another shipwrecked. The "Scottish Cato" spent his final years rusticating and hosting friends. He died in 1816 at the age of 92. His last words were: "There is another world!" He had certainly experienced a great deal of this one.
You will learn none of this from Iain McDaniel's "Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment." Presumably written for academics, the book is almost perversely devoid of biographical narrative. This is a missed chance, and the uninitiated may find the book's style austere. Persistence, however, will be rewarded. Amid his military and political diversions, Ferguson grappled with every major philosophical figure of the Enlightenment. Mr. McDaniel skillfully captures the cut and thrust of these intellectual engagements.
What emerges is a reminder that, if Scotland and France were the pre-eminent sites of the Enlightenment, England was its abiding subject. For the philosophes, 18th-century Britain's rise to imperial pre-eminence exemplified the new political dynamics of the modern age.
The superstructure of British power was naval might and trading wealth, but its foundation was fiscal mastery. The Bank of England and London's stock exchange established Europe's first major secondary market in government bonds. This market allowed Britain to float open-ended loans serviced with dedicated tax revenues. To the investors of Europe, a free parliament (itself made up of bondholders) was far more credit-worthy than an absolute and capricious king. While the French monarchy frantically sold off assets and borrowed at ruinous rates, Britain created a perpetual, rolling national debt. Smaller than France, Britain mobilized its wealth with vastly greater efficiency. The "financial revolution" made fortunes at home and an empire abroad. Its consequences are with us still.
These British paradoxes—debt and wealth, liberty and empire—transfixed the enlightened intelligentsia. The more utilitarian among them—Smith and Hume, above all—considered commerce, self-interest and investment foundational to modern civility. The "ancient liberty" of the warrior and the citizen-statesman had given way to a "modern liberty" of privacy and consumption.
Ferguson recoiled from this appraisal. As a student of Caesar and Napoleon, he was obsessed "with the causes propelling modern states toward instability, revolution, and military government," Mr. McDaniel writes. Ferguson rejected the view that "sweet commerce" would pacify the state system of Europe.
To Ferguson, Britain in particular had thrown itself into a sordid scramble for riches. Defended by mercenaries, ruled by sybaritic oligarchs, Britain would—like Rome—succumb to despotism. "The combination of public credit and national aggrandizement," writes Mr. McDaniel, characterizing Ferguson's view, "had poisoned the foundations of the constitution." Britain's vaunted Parliament couldn't check this slide toward subjugation, Ferguson believed. Nor would a population interested only in cheap Caribbean sugar and secure bonds rise to the constitution's defense.
Ferguson's was a politics of nostalgia, inveighing against the "pathological features of advanced commercial societies." Mr. McDaniel adeptly presents Ferguson's thinking and places it in dialogue with luminaries such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Adam Smith. The payoff is a richer understanding of Enlightenment debate as it confronted modern political economy.
Whether this book establishes Ferguson as a "major political thinker" with "contemporary resonance" is another matter. Modern Americans will wince at Ferguson's jeremiads against organizing public finance according to the "vicissitudes of the gaming table," but his belief that the "lucrative arts" would empower "populist demagogues" and despotic British generals must rank among the worst prognostications of the 18th century.
Neither commercial wealth nor imperial power has yet undermined the British constitution (or its American cousin). For good or ill, commerce, consumption and interest are the springs that feed modern liberal society. Hume, Smith and Tocqueville understood that these currents were irreversible. Ferguson didn't, and for this reason his writings haven't endured. For all of their idiosyncrasies, however, they retain the capacity to instruct.
Mr. Collins is a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
A version of this article appeared March 25,
2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: A Skeptical Modern.
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