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Enlightened histories: civilization, war and the Scottish enlightenment

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/108487705200030101

1470-1316

Bruce Buchan,

Irish and British Studies

Abstract The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of civilization grounded in more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Notes The exception here is the work of Norbert Elias; see the second volume of his The Civilising Process, translated as: Power and Civility, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982). See, for example, Adam B. Seligman, “Civil Society as Idea and Ideal,” in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, ed. S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13–33. For a more detailed critique on this, see Bruce Buchan, “Liberalism and Fear of Violence,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 4(3) (2001): 27–48. Steven Holmes, “Can Weak-State Liberalism Survive?” in Liberalism and Its Practice, ed. D. Avnon and A. de-Shalit (London: Routledge, 1999), 38, 48, 37. Ibid., 37. Anthony Pagden, “The ‘Defence of Civilization’ in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory,” History of the Human Sciences 1(1) (1988): 34. F. Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. A. Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 160. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion; Vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 258–62. C. J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 64. This ambition notwithstanding, Hume was also humble enough to see that many historical details remain “for ever buryd in Oblivion.” Hume to David Mallet, 7 April 1763, The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 385. Lisa Hill, “The Puzzle of Adam Ferguson's Political Conservatism,” Eighteenth-Century Scotland 15 (2001): 12–7. Jones, “On Reading Hume's History of Liberty,” in Liberty in Hume's History of England, ed. P. N. Capaldi and D.W. Livingston (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 10–7. A. B. Stilz, “Hume, Modern Patriotism, and Commercial Society,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 27; J. Darwin, “Civility and Empire,” in Civil Histories, ed. P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 324; J. Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 152–7. David Hume, Political Essays [1772, 1777], ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 63. S. K. Wertz, “Hume, History, and Human Nature,” in Hume as Philosopher of Society, Politics and History, ed. D. Livingston and M. Martin (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1991), 77–92. N. Phillipson, “Propriety, Property and Prudence: David Hume and the Defence of the Revolution,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 313, 318–9. Also: David Wootton, “David Hume ‘The Historian’,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hume, ed. D. F. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 292–3. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, vol. 2 (London: J. Mcreery, 1807), 106. Hereafter cited as History. Ibid., vol. 2, 140, 138. Ibid., vol. 2, 142. Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975), 303–5. Hume, History, vol. 5, 488. Also, Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87. Hume, History, vol. 6, 170. Ibid., vol. 5, 66; vol. 6, 165. Ibid., vol. 6, 186. Hume neglects to mention any original inhabitants of those lands that had become “colonies,” which although possessing “noble rivers” and “fertile soil,” were presumably empty before English colonists “sought for freedom amidst those savage deserts!” Ibid., vol. 5, 483. Ibid., vol. 2, 432. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 461–2. Hereafter cited as Spirit. William Robertson, History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth [1769], vol. 1 (London: George Routledge, 1856). See, for example, 15–6, 26, 34. Hereafter cited as History. Hume to William Robertson, November–December 1768, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2, 193. Karen O’Brien, “Robertson's Place in the Development of Eighteenth-Century Narrative History,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. S. J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 77. Robertson, History, vol. 1, 72–8. Ibid., vol. 1, 67, 86. Ibid., vol. 1, 93. Ibid., vol. 2, 60, 338–9. Ibid., vol. 2, 340. Ibid., vol. 2, 413. Ibid., vol. 2, 413–4. William Robertson, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India (London, 1791), 167. As others have noted, Robertson did not advocate a rigid and inflexible view of historical progress; there was nothing inevitable in the progress from primitive savagery to commercial civilization. Neil Hargraves, “Enterprise, Adventure and Industry: The Formation of ‘Commercial Character’ in William Robertson's History of America,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 33–54; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 132–6. Robertson in fact referred to the emergence within these states of more peaceful forms of “government” or “management.” Robertson, History, vol. 2, 426. Montesquieu, Spirit, 487. Hume, Political Essays, 94. It was in a similar vein that Montesquieu praised Britain's subordination of “political interests” to “the interests of its commerce.” Montesquieu, Spirit, 343–6. N. Phillipson, “Providence and Progress: an Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Brown, 59, 64. G. T. F. Abbe Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, Volume I, trans. J. Justamond, 3rd edn (London, 1777), 3 and 1; William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe [1769], ed. F. Gilbert, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 67. Also, R. B. Sher, “From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. D. Wootton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 368–401. See, for example, J. G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff, 241–5. Hume, Political Essays, 98. Lisa Hill, “Ferguson and Smith on ‘Human Nature’, ‘Interest’ and the Role of Beneficence in Market Society,” History of Economic Ideas 4(1–2) (1996): 353–99. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 25. Hereafter cited as Theory; D. Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 175. Smith, Theory, 173, also 34–9. C. L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 182–3. Smith, Theory, 190. Smith to Sir Gilbert Elliott, 10 October 1759, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 49. Smith, Theory, 239–40; also, Lisa Hill and Peter McCarthy, “Hume, Smith and Ferguson: Friendship in Commercial Society,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 2(4) (1999): 33–49. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence [1762–66], ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Hereafter cited as Lectures. Ibid., 486–7. Ibid., 538. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], ed. E. Cannan, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1961), 8, 11, 12. Hereafter cited as Wealth. Ibid., vol. 1, 15. Ibid., vol. 1, 433. The following information has been taken from Ibid., 433–43. For contrasting views on Smith's “determinism,” see A. Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots Invention of the Modern World (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), 85; R. F. Teichgraeber, “Free Trade” and Moral Philosophy: Rethinking the Sources of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 144. On “conjectural history” and “stadial theory,” see G. H. Murray, “Historiography,” and Aaron Garrett, “Anthropology: The ‘Original’ of Human Nature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 258–79, 79–93; E. J. Harpham, “Liberalism, Civic Humanism, and the Case of Adam Smith,” The American Political Science Review 78 (1983): 769; Winch, Adam Smith's Politics, 63–5; Harro M. Hopfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17(2) (1978): 36; R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). As Robertson observed in his Historical Disquisition, this process involved the uniting of families in “independent tribes and communities,” followed by the uniting of those tribes in alliances for mutual defence, and only later to developing an economy to “provide for the wants” of each and finally to “conduct the affairs of a numerous society” (263). Smith, Wealth, vol. 2, 151. Ibid., vol. 2, 77, 79, 104–5, 141. Ibid., vol. 1, 462–7. Ibid., vol. 1, 467–8. Ibid., vol. 2, 213–4. Ibid., vol. 2, 216–7. Ibid., vol. 2, 231. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, vol. 1, 152, 287–90. Smith, Wealth, vol. 2, 78–9, 99, 141. See also Robertson, An Historical Disquisition, 336. Smith, Lectures, 542–3; see also Robertson, History, 27, 51–2; and Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe [1769], ed. Gilbert, 32, 56. R. B. Sher, “Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defence,” Journal of Modern History 61(2) (1989): 245–6. Robertson hailed the Wealth of Nations as “a Political or Commercial Code to all Europe” and claimed that Smith would be his “Guide and instructor” on colonial affairs thereafter. Nonetheless, as O’Brien notes, Robertson's thought was characterized by “imperialist complacencies.” William Robertson to Adam Smith, 8 April 1776, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, 192–3; O’Brien, “Robertson's Place in the Development of Eighteenth-Century Narrative History,” 91. A. Kalyvas and I. Katznelson, “Adam Ferguson Returns: Liberalism through a Glass, Darkly,” Political Theory 26(2) (1988): 176; Sher, “National Defence,” 240–68. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, 347. Alternatively, see M. S. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 183–4. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 1. Hereafter cited as Essay; Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe, 97. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science [1792], vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975), 143. Hereafter cited as Principles. Ibid., 151. Ferguson, Essay, 58, 73. Ibid., 81–2; Ferguson, Principles, vol. 2, 426. Lisa Hill, “Anticipations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Social Thought in the Work of Adam Ferguson,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 37(1) (1996): 217. Ferguson, Essay, 84, 98. Ibid., 97, 101, 107. Ibid., 125. Ferguson to Sir John Macpherson, 13 August 1802, in Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. V. Merolle, vol. 2 (London: William Pickering, 1995), 482. Ferguson, Essay, 156, 161, 205. Ibid., 143; Adam Ferguson, “Of the Separation of Departments, Professions, and Tasks Resulting from the Progress of Arts in Society,” in The Unpublished Essays of Adam Ferguson, ed. W. M. Philip, vol. 2 (London: Weeks and Son, 1986), 94; R. Hamowy, “Progress and Commerce in Anglo-American Thought: The Social Philosophy of Adam Ferguson,” Interpretation 14(1) (1986): 83. Ferguson, Essay, 150. Sher, “National Defence,” 254. Ferguson, Essay, 155, 189; see also Ferguson, Principles, vol. 1, 250. Ferguson, “Of the Separation of Departments,” vol. 1, 98; Ferguson, “Of Statesman and Warriours,” in The Unpublished Essays of Adam Ferguson, vol. 3, 4–22. Ferguson's letters do not indicate that he was present himself. See letter no. 1 (to John Adam, 11 September 1745) and no. 15 (to Gilbert Elliot, 19 March 1758), in The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, 3–6; 26–7. D. Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 45–7. Hume to John Home, 4 October 1746, and Hume to Henry Home, n.d. 1747, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, 96, 99. Ferguson, Essay, 198, 199. Ferguson, Principles, vol. 2, 295. Ferguson, Essay, 200. R. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Battle from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (London: Pimlico, 1993), 211. Adam Ferguson, “Notes on the Enquiry into General Sir William Howe's Conduct in the American War, 10 May 1779,” in Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, 561. Ibid., 562–4. Ferguson, Essay, 230. J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1985), 7. Ferguson, “Of Statesmen and Warriours,” vol. 3, 9. Ferguson, Principles, vol. 2, 415, 425; Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson, 100–1, n. 11. Smith, Wealth, vol. 2, 217–9. Letter no. 89, Ferguson to Smith, 1776, in Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 1, 142–3. On Hume's positive though critical opinion on the Wealth of Nations, see Hume to Adam Smith, 1 April 1776, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2, 311–2. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 88–90. Ferguson, Essay, 222. Smith, Wealth, vol. 2, 228. Ferguson, Essay, 216–7. Ibid., 219–20. Ibid., 148, 257. Notwithstanding these concerns, Ferguson would later take a hard-line against American Independence. See Ferguson, “Notes,” and “Memorial Respecting the Measures to be Pursued on the Present Immediate Prospect of a Final Separation of the American Colonys from Great Britain,” in Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2, 564; 556–9, respectively. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, 350. Ferguson, Essay, 225. Lisa Hill, “Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” History of Political Thought 18(4) (1997): 677–706. Ferguson, Essay, 225, 228, 238–9. Hill, “Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” 681–3. Interestingly, while Robertson admired it, Hume disliked Ferguson's Essay, comparing it unfavourably to Montesquieu's Spirit of the Law. Hume to Hugh Blair, 11 February 1766, and Hume to Hugh Blair, 1 April 1767, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2, 11–2, 133–4. John Keane, Reflections on Violence (London: Verso, 1996), 137, 139, 141, 154–5; John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 236–7. Norbert Elias, “Violence and Civilisation,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. J. Keane (London: Verso, 1988), 179, 197. John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 147. For further discussion of this point, see my “Liberalism and Fear of Violence,” 27–48.