Adam Ferguson on the Separation of the Political and the Economic Spheres

• In Event: Delimiting the Popular and the Political in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

That the ideas of Adam Ferguson sit uneasily alongside key principles of the Scottish Enlightenment has long been recognised by scholars. In works including the Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1765) and the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Ferguson challenged the common association of civilizational and political progress, international peace and the rise of commercial society. As Kalyvas and Katznelson (1998) have emphasised, for Ferguson man develops his capacities and virtues through conflict, rather than in leisure, contemplation or economic activity. The role played by the figure of the ‘enemy’ is thus crucial in ensuring that individuals and political communities maintain a strong national spirit capable of resisting both external threats and internal despotism. Recent scholarship, such as McDaniel (2015), has noted the extent to which such arguments placed Ferguson at odds with a wider eighteenth-century project of reconciling patriotism and cosmopolitanism (of both the philosophical and commercial variants).

This paper will examine the ways in which Ferguson’s account of the morally invigorating aspects of conflict comes to define his account of political activity, as well as the population of men suited to it. Through an analysis and contextualisation of the Essay on the History of Civil Society it will explore how, in Ferguson’s telling, the political sphere in the modern commercial state takes on the characteristics of the economic. As a result, it loses its key attribute: that it be a sphere and set of institutions generated and maintained by self-conscious action and conflict rather than one in which men largely pursue their private goals through a negotiated division of labour. In emphasising the importance of action and conflict within the state as well as against external enemies Ferguson explicitly inverts a Hobbes’s famous analysis of the political predicament. Writing that ‘emulation and the desire of power’ have often been ‘inducements’ to men’s service to their nation, he argues for the importance of cultivating disruptive pride rather than approaching the state through the lens of self-interest. He thus, despite being similarly preoccupied with questions of power, presents a fundamentally different theory of politics.

In making this case, we see Ferguson rejecting a model of citizenship which reduces it to consensual obedience alone. He thus restricts the population capable of engaging in political action through an argument against the specific inapplicability of democratic principles to modern commercial states. By treating citizenship as an ongoing activity, rather than as a status to be acquired, Ferguson aims to prevent those elements of man’s identity which are primarily grounded in social or economic roles from influencing the nature of the political sphere. This concern about the danger of a ‘thin’ concept of civic association emerging through a prioritisation of the economy thus turns the claims of both early social contract theory and of commercial sociability upside down. When the state and civil society is based purely on consent, or on the quiet and peaceful pursuit of private interests, space is opened for the expansion of individual, private commitments at the expense of the common good. Men thus become precisely the selfish utility-maximisers of Hobbes’s theory, and the public sphere of the economy comes to resemble the uncivil state of nature. In contrast to those who would argue that the strengthening of the political sphere requires an expansion of both its participants and its concerns, for Ferguson, for politics to remain political we must return to the rule of the gentleman who has precisely no other commercial or social role or identity, who has not found an alternative space in the modern division of labour, and who exhibits all those prideful traits which cause, rather than ease, conflict.

Author

• Signy Thora Gutnick Allen, London School of Economics