notes Reviews Eric Schliesser Universiteit Leiden

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1 barbarous and civilized government is central to his overarching argument. It is to McArthur s credit that he does not ignore Hume s embrace of civilizing imperialism (74). McArthur is a bit generous in claiming that Hume never goes so far as to advocate a project of ongoing conquests by civilized nations of their barbarous neighbors. Hume does reject unlimited conquests (85). But, as McArthur notes, Hume s defense of commerce is, in part, based on the military advantages that commercial societies possess (e.g., 91ff). Hume s political thought is still relevant and can continue to disturb. notes Eric Schliesser Universiteit Leiden 1 I was a bit sad that McArthur completely ignored Livingston s efforts to enlist Hume as a supporter of the Confederate secession avant la lettre. McArthur also ignores entirely the Hayekian appropriation of Hume. (Hayek and McArthur both emphasizes the importance of the common law tradition (13) to Hume, but end up with diverging readings, nevertheless.) But McArthur s ability not to get distracted by scholarly controversy pays off in the clarity of his argument. 2 My reading of the epigraph echoes Paul Russell s (1988) Atheism and the Title- Page of Hume s Treatise, Hume Studies XIV.2, pp , but he does not draw these connections. Of course, Hume may have come to change his mind by the time of My Own Life, but this issue cannot be pursued here. 3 McArthur correctly treats civilized as a technical term in Hume. 4 This may also have something to do with size of the state or society; see the passage quoted (47 8) from History of England. Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, edited by Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, London: Pickering and Chatto pp. H/b. $99. ISBN In a letter to a friend, Adam Ferguson remarked that he did not share the view of some philosophers and intellectuals that there is a dignity in keeping aloof from present affairs, and writing only for posterity (75). This is consonant both with his highly normative conception of moral philosophy as the study of what men ought to be, and of what they ought to wish, for themselves and for their country (149), and his emphasis on action and business, with a corresponding suspicion of what he took to be a peculiarity of modern Europe, the tendency to rest so much of the human character on what may be learned in retirement, and from the information of books (151). More than any of his famous Scottish contemporaries, Ferguson thought the value of philosophical enquiry and education lay as much in practical contemporary relevance as in philosophical or scientific adequacy. Both his own writings, and his lectures to students, are thoroughly permeated by this belief. 107

2 However laudable such a conception of academic enquiry may be, two hundred years later it presents the study of his works with an important dilemma. Does the practical relevance at which he aimed mean that they must be understood entirely in historical context? If so, then they seem to lose any enduring philosophical interest, precisely because the context for which he wrote has long receded into the past. Or does their theoretical character allow matters of enduring philosophical import to be abstracted from their historical context? If so, does this not inevitably distort the thought of a philosopher so committed to practical relevance? The essays in this new collection are of a uniformly high quality, written by some of the very best contemporary students of Ferguson. Together they display the nature of the dilemma, and reveal an interesting dynamic set in train by the attempt to negotiate it. David Allan, in a paper subtitled Past and Present in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, most clearly represents the first, severely historical approach when he suggests that the explanation of a widespread failure to see Ferguson s work as a whole has been the tendency... to decontextualize his intellectual achievements, which is to say, Ferguson s immersion in the peculiar perspectives and concerns of eighteenth-century Scotland (24). In defending this contention, however, Allan is several times driven to discount the plain nature of the text. So, following a passage in Ferguson about the happy translation our species has made from barbarity to civilization, and a quite general warning about the dangers of replacing warriors and statesmen with clerks and accountants, Allan is obliged to say that Ferguson s words may speak explicitly of no contemporary community in particular. But their potential application in Edinburgh and London in 1767 could not have been clearer to his first readers (33). Perhaps, but the text, obviously, provides no evidence for this contention. And the fact remains that Ferguson s own words make no reference to context. Are we wrong then to take him at face value, and ask whether it is true that the demise of military activity is dangerous? By contrast, David Raynor writes about one of Ferguson s most highly contextualized pieces, his pamphlet entitled Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. This pamphlet, Raynor tells us, records an interesting and distinctive stage in [Ferguson s] intellectual development (66). In reality, as it seems to me, the pamphlet (which Ferguson himself declared a tedious Performance ) is so context specific that whatever its interest to parliamentary historians of the period, any attempt to draw wider implications from it will be no less strained than Allan s resolve to work in the opposite direction. On the strength of this pamphlet, there is no more reason to be interested in the writings of Ferguson than in the speeches of the unknown Lord Chancellor Hardwicke whose views he opposed. There is in any case a question about just what Ferguson s context should be taken to be. Allan has no doubt that it is Scotland, but the essay by John 108

3 D Brewer that opens this collection makes a good case for thinking that the Scottishness of Ferguson has been much overstated. A close consideration of letters and papers other than the published works leads Brewer to the conclusion that those to whom it seems self-evident... that Ferguson had Scotland on his mind when, for example, he valorized... small independent nations,... mixed government, and moderate religion, amongst other things confront the problem that Ferguson never mentions this in either the public record or his private correspondence (20). Since he finds the most obvious attempts to explain this absence quite unpersuasive, Brewer is led to conclude that Ferguson was seeking to advance knowledge of society in general rather than a specific country (22). In its turn, though, this conclusion still has to be squared with the emphasis Ferguson unquestionably places on the practical relevance of a knowledge of society in general. Since such relevance is necessarily directed at real rather than imagined issues, the understanding and interpretation of Ferguson has to strike a balance of some sort between historical context and philosophical interest. Perhaps the contributor to this collection who does this most successfully is Fania Oz-Salzberger in her essay Ferguson s Politics of Action. Well known as the editor of the most widely used modern edition of An Essay, in this paper Oz-Salzberger amplifies a theme from her introduction to that edition Ferguson s republicanism. This aspect of his thought puts great emphasis on social and political participation as necessary components of both a happy life and a healthy society. What Oz-Salzberger shows, however, is just how deeply an unquestioning male supremacy is built into this conception. Ferguson s language is masculine throughout, and he uses effeminate as a term to describe conditions of weakness and decline. This must appear extraordinarily myopic to the modern mind, and its natural implication is either that women cannot have happy lives, or that whether they do or not is of little consequence. In this respect of course, Ferguson, though even more dismissive of women than either Hume or Smith, is simply a man of his time, someone whose writings are both coloured by and trapped in the presuppositions of his age. And yet, at the same time as revealing the historically conditioned nature of his writing, Oz-Salzberger interestingly draws on Ferguson s opposition to the idea that Politics may be reduced to a science (the title of Hume s essay), to throw critical light on the potential paucity of the general utilitarianism which is the mark of modern politics. In short, while revealing him to be so evidently a product of his time, Oz-Salzberger shows how Ferguson can speak to us still. Craig Smith s essay on a similar theme Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind draws out the sharp contrast between Ferguson s emphasis on action as essential to happiness, and the sensual conceptions of the useful and the agreeable that we find both in Hume and in the utilitarian philosophy taken up and advanced by J S Mill. Smith argues that Ferguson s idea of virtue falls unmistakeably within a Stoic tradition which by the late 18 th century was fast 109

4 losing ground, leaving Ferguson something of an anachronism in his own time (though, if so, it is an anachronism he shared with Reid). Smith offers his account as a contextualizing interpretation of the kind Allan favours. But for my part, I think that as recounted here Ferguson s robust Stoicism, being nearer our own age in time, serves to cast modern presuppositions in critical relief more adequately than the works of the ancient writers can, and continues to have philosophical relevance for that reason, regardless of how it stands in comparison with other writings of the same period. Another important element of context is religion dominant in Ferguson s world, very much less so in the Europe of today. Jeng-Guo S. Chen makes a convincing case that Ferguson s central theme of human history as the progressive development of civil society out of barbarity is closely tied to a background providential theology of an optimistic kind to which, he argues, Ferguson sincerely subscribed. This is an interesting scholarly contention, because most recent students of Ferguson have been inclined to David Kettler s authoritative verdict that his thought is fundamentally secular and certainly not Christian (Kettler 1965: 131). But it is an important contention in a wider context too. Thanks to an innovative idea with which he is widely credited that social forms arise from the unintended consequences of intentional actions Ferguson has long been regarded as a key figure in the emergence and development of the social sciences, and especially sociology. This is a development made possible, it would seem, by social philosophy s breaking free of moral and religious confines from which the natural philosophy on which it is modelled had earlier escaped. But if in fact Ferguson s sociology is steeped in providentialism, this raises a question about just how far he can plausibly be held to lay important methodological foundations for later entirely secular studies. The issue relates not only to religion, and is treated here at length by Annette Meyer in an examination of Ferguson s Appropriate Stile in Combining History and Science. It is this combination, she argues, that raises Ferguson s endeavours beyond the historical writings of his best known fellow historians, Hume and Robertson. For them, history simply supplies a stock of empirical evidence which might be used for scientific (i.e. generalizing) purposes; Ferguson, by contrast, is trying to investigate the historical process itself. Following the German philosopher Kraus (translator of Hume s Essays) Meyer finds in Ferguson both a precursor to and an attempt to mediate between the natural history of man (Anthropologie) and the philosophical history of mankind (Geschictsphilosophie) (140). Nowadays, even though it is generally supposed that anthropology, especially allied to biological evolution, can stand alone, all strictly positivistic social enquiry has encountered serious criticism. This may explain why Hegelian-type grand narratives have been making something of a comeback. Yet they too remain generally suspect for their tendency to apriorism and lack of empirical grounding. If Meyer is right, a serious attempt to revisit 110

5 An Essay, not in Ferguson s context but in ours, might prove of compelling interest as a model of how a new mediation between the two could be secured. In the light of this conjecture, I am inclined to say that, though Ferguson s language and many aspects of his style of thought are dated in ways that Hume, Reid and Smith are not, overall the essays in this volume show Ferguson to be of contemporary and not just historical interest. Some evidence in support of this contention is to be found in the increasing attention which Ferguson is receiving after a very long period of general neglect. Gladys Bryson s Man and Society published in 1945 began a re-assessment of Ferguson s importance, and twenty years later, David Kettler s notable study of The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson gave great stimulus to the same process. But it is only since the beginning of the 21 st century that the study of Ferguson has really gathered pace with a number of new books and a steady flow of articles. Two other essays in this collection aim to enrich future study of this kind Jane B Fagg s painstakingly assembled bibliography of the works Ferguson borrowed from Edinburgh University Library, and David Kettler s selected and annotated notes from lectures on political education that Ferguson gave to his moral philosophy students between 1779 and A companion volume of essays from the same editors entitled Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society is currently in preparation, and if this first volume is any indication, it can be expected to advance scholarly interest still further. It would be nice, though, if the publisher could make the next book match the quality of its contents. A cover price of $99 is a powerful disincentive to individual purchasers, and quite unjustified by the radically reduced costs of production nowadays, especially since it has an unimaginative cover of a quality too poor to enable the book to keep its shape. Gordon Graham Princeton Theological Seminary 111

THE CHALLENGES FOR EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY: EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 1. Steffen Ducheyne

Philosophica 76 (2005) pp. 5-10 THE CHALLENGES FOR EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY: EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 1 Steffen Ducheyne 1. Introduction to the Current Volume In the volume at hand, I have the honour of appearing