adam ferguson (1723–1816): an annotated bibliography
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Adam Ferguson (1723–1816):
An Annotated Bibliography
Version 2.1, 4 July 2016 (Version 2.0 published on 13 Dec 2015, Version 1.0 published on 13 March 2004)
Zubin Meer and Richard B. Sher
Table of Contents
Abbreviations of Online Repositories
Bibliographies
Editions and Selections
Editions
Selections in Anthologies
Selections in Journals
Book-Length Studies and Collections
Biographical and Contextual Studies
Biographical Accounts
Modern Dictionary and Encyclopedia Articles
Other Biographical and Contextual Studies
Theses and Dissertations
Criticism
Social and Political Thought
Division of Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science
Militia, National Defense, and War
American and French Revolutions
Religion
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Literature and Rhetoric
Connections with European Thought
Abbreviations of Online Repositories
ECCO = Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (available by institutional subscription)
GB = Google Books (https://books.google.com)
HT = Hathi Trust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/)
IA = Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Note: some HT items are not available outside the USA.
Bibliographies
Vincenzo Merolle, Eugene Heath, and Robin Dix, “Introductory Essay,” in The
Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson (2006), pp. lxxxvii–cx, cited below under Editions.
Jane B. Fagg, “Biographical Introduction,” in The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson
(1995), vol. 1, pp. cxviii–cxxxvi, cited below under Editions.
Norbert Waszek, “Adam Ferguson,” in Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (2004),
pp. 603–05 for primary literature and pp. 633–35 for secondary, cited below under
Modern Dictionary and Encyclopedia Articles.
Editions and Selections
Editions o An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). Widely available in the Cambridge Texts in the
History of Political Thought series, this edition of AF’s most famous work
contains a new introduction, a chronology of AF’s life, a bibliographical guide,
the text of the first edition of 1767, a comprehensive list of variants in all six
lifetime editions, and an index. An older edition of the Essay, edited by Duncan
Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966), also contains a reliable reprint
of the first edition and adds a list of textual variants that appeared in the sixth
edition of 1814 (the last of the author’s lifetime), a brilliant introduction from a
civic humanist perspective, and an excellent index. Forbes’s text and list of
variants are also used, without acknowledgment, in a 1980 edition published by
Transaction Books of New Brunswick, NJ. That edition replaces Forbes’s
introduction with a more sociological one by Louis Schneider, which is reprinted,
though misdated, in The Grammar of Social Relations: The Major Essays of Louis
Schneider, ed. Jay Weinstein, with foreword by Robert K. Merton (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984), pp. 77–95.
o Sister Peg: A Pamphlet Hitherto Unknown by David Hume, ed. David Raynor
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982; paperback ed., 2009). Raynor’s
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introduction makes a spirited circumstantial case for David Hume as the author of
this satirical militia pamphlet of 1760, entitled The History of the Proceedings in
the Case of Margaret, commonly called Peg, only lawful Sister to John Bull, Esq.,
and his arguments convinced Duncan Forbes (TLS, 23 July 1982) and a few other
reviewers. Yet most knowledgeable commentators believe that AF was the true
author. See the reviews by Roger L. Emerson in Hume Studies 9:1 (1983): 74–81,
by Richard B. Sher in Philosophical Books 24:2 (1983): 85–91, and by John
Robertson in English Historical Review 100:394 (1985): 191–92, and Jane B.
Fagg’s comments in her “Biographical Introduction” in Merolle, Correspondence
of Adam Ferguson (1995), vol. 1, pp. xxxiv–xxxv, cited below.
o Adam Ferguson and the American Revolution, ed. Yasuo Amoh, Darren Lingley,
and Hiroko Aoki (Tokyo: Kyokuto Shoten, 2015). Consists of Proceedings
(originally published in 2007; see below), plus a facsimile of AF’s 1776 pamphlet
responding to Richard Price added as an appendix as well as an index. The
Proceedings of the British Commissioners in Philadelphia, 1778–9: Partly in
Ferguson’s Hand, ed. Amoh, Lingley, and Aoki (Kyoto: Kakenhi Supplemental
Project Research Report, Kyoto Univ., 2007) itself was first published with the
identical title in two parts, in Research Reports of the Department of International
Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Economics, Kochi University, no. 7 (2006):
155–233 and in Kochi University Review of Social Sciences, no. 88 (March 2007):
223–94. (The latter is available at
https://ir.jimu.kochi-u.ac.jp/dspace/handle/10126/5344.) AF’s pamphlet is also
available at GB, and brief selections of it are also available as appendix 4, pp.
253–60, in Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American
Revolution: Selected from His Pamphlets, with Appendices, edited and interpreted
in an introductory essay by Bernard Peach, with the research assistance of Jon
Erik Larson (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1979). This entire modern edition is
available at GB.
See also: Jane B. Fagg and Yasuo Amoh, “Adam Ferguson’s Rules of
War,” Eighteenth-Century Scotland: The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century
Scottish Studies Society, no. 5 (Spring 1991): 10–13. Reprints nos. 994 (“Dr.
Adam Ferguson to William Eden”) and 995 (“Adam Ferguson’s Notes on the
Enquiry into General Sir William Howe’s Conduct in the American War”) in B.
F. Stevens, ed., Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives relating to
America, 1773–1783, vol. 10 (London: Photographed and printed by Malby and
Sons, 1891). Reprinted as appendix I in Merolle, Correspondence of Adam
Ferguson, vol. 2, but without the editors’ introduction.
o AF’s entry “History,” in the second and third editions of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (Edinburgh: A. Bell and C. MacFarquhar, 1778–83 and 1788–97,
respectively). The entry is lengthy and divided into five sections: General
Definition; Civil History; Ecclesiastical History; Composition of History; and
Historical Chart. The historical chart, the first of its kind in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, is signed by AF. The Modern Historiography Reader, ed. Adam
Budd, cited below under Selections in Anthologies, pp. 72–77, reprints most of
the first section and what amounts to half of the fourth. The complete entry with
chart, however, is available at http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/700/history3/.
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Online transcription prepared by Silvia Sebastiani and Mario Caricchio in
December 1998 for ELIOHS (Electronic Library of Historiography, Biblioteca di
Storiografia Moderna).
AF’s authorship of the chart and entry, esp. the section on Ecclesiastical
History, has been questioned by Silvia Sebastiani (2002), cited below under
Social and Political Thought. Budd, Modern Historiography Reader, p. 57 n. 5,
acknowledges Sebastiani’s skepticism regarding attribution. This question of
authorship remains an issue that requires further examination, however. Frank A.
Kafker and Jeff Loveland, eds., The Early Britannica (1768–1803): The Growth
of an Outstanding Encyclopedia, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009) both questions Sebastiani’s interpretation, on
p. 7, and endorses it, on p. 183. (The collection also contains other scattered
references to AF.)
o “AF’s Moral Philosophy Lectures: Notes on Lecture Notes from 1775–1785,
Lectures 1–34; 85–103.” A transcription by David Kettler of part of Ferguson’s
lecture notes in Edinburgh University Library, posted online along with other
relevant materials at http://www.bard.edu/contestedlegacies/kettler/works.shtml. o The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, with Eugene Heath
and Robin Dix (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2006). The
latest, most complete and authoritative edition of AF’s thirty-two manuscript
essays in EUL. The “Introductory Essay” is divided into three parts: “Ferguson’s
Political Philosophy” (pp. xi–xlv) by Merolle; “Ferguson’s Moral Philosophy”
(pp. xlvii–lxxvi) by Heath; and “Ferguson’s Aesthetics” (pp. lxxvii–lxxxvi) by
Dix. Appendix B, which excerpts readers’ reactions to AF’s Essay and his Roman history, is particularly useful. This edition supersedes two generally inaccessible
previous editions: Collection of Essays, ed. Yasuo Amoh (Kyoto: Rinsen Book
[Imadegawa, Kawabata, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606, Japan], 1996) and The
Unpublished Essays of Adam Ferguson, ed. Winifred M. Philip, 3 vols. (Kilberry,
UK: W. M. Philip, 1986). Yasuo Amoh also published a preview of the
introduction to his edition, Collection of Essays: “Adam Ferguson, Collection of
Essays: Ferguson’s Posthumous Works,” Kochi University Review of Social
Sciences, no. 50 (July 1994): 1–37 (available at https://ir.kochi-u.ac.jp/dspace/handle/10126/5813). All materials in the three
appendices to Amoh’s edition are included in the appendices to Merolle,
Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson and Merolle, Correspondence of Adam Ferguson,
cited below. All three editions use the same numbering to refer to AF’s thirty-two
unpublished essays. Three essays were also published individually:
Re: no. 14, see Yoshikazu Kubo, “Adam Ferguson and the French
Revolution,” Kwansei Gakuin University Annual Studies 11 (Nov. 1962):
165–73. Re: no. 15, see Yasuo Amoh, “Adam Ferguson and the Division of
Labour: An Unpublished Essay by Adam Ferguson,” Kochi University
Review of Social Sciences, no. 29 (July 1987): 71–85 (available at
https://ir.jimu.kochi-u.ac.jp/dspace/handle/10126/5704). Reprinted,
without the editor’s introduction, as “Adam Ferguson: Of the Separation
of Departments, Professions, and Tasks resulting from the Progress of Arts
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in Society,” Eighteenth-Century Scotland: The Newsletter of the
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 11–14. Re: no. 25, see Ernest Campbell Mossner, “‘Of the Principle of Moral
Estimation: A Discourse between David Hume, Robert Clerk, and Adam
Smith’: An Unpublished MS by Adam Ferguson,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 21:2 (1960): 222–32. With a useful foreword by Mossner. o The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, with an
introduction by Jane B. Fagg, 2 vols. (London and Brookfield, VT: William
Pickering, 1995). Despite some editorial shortcomings, this is a useful collection
of more than four hundred letters, with a fine biographical introduction by Jane
Fagg that is keyed to the correspondence, and seventeen beneficial appendices.
This edition is also available through the InteLex Past Masters database by
subscription at major research libraries.
o Grundsaetze der Moralphilosophie (Institutes of Moral Philosophy), trans.
Christian Garve, with a helpful introduction in English by Heiner Klemme
(Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003; available separately and as vol. 6 in Klemme’s
7-vol. series, Reception of the Scottish Enlightenment in Germany: Six Significant
Translations, 1755–1782). Garve’s 1772 translation of the first edition of AF’s
Institutes (1769) was notable in its own right, but it became a particularly
important work for understanding the German appropriation of the Scottish
Enlightenment as a result of Garve’s extensive documentation (pp. 285–420 in
this edition). This edition is also available at GB, and as part of the reprint edition
of the 15-vol. Collected Works of 1792–1810: Gesammelte Werke, ed. Kurt
Wölfel (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1985).
Selections in Anthologies
o Selections from the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, ed. George Alexander
Johnston (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1915), pp. 197–213. Excerpts AF’s
Principles of Moral and Political Science. Available at HT, IA, and Liberty
Fund’s Online Library of Liberty (oll.libertyfund.org).
o Readings in Early Anthropology, ed. J. S. Slotkin (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).
Excerpts AF’s contributions to physical anthropology from the Institutes of Moral
Philosophy (pp. 199–200) and to social anthropology from across his published
writings (pp. 430–43).
o The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society, ed. Louis Schneider, The
Heritage of Sociology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 77–80, 81–
90, 108–11, 200–07, and 211–19. Excerpts AF’s Essay and Principles of Moral
and Political Science.
o The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 544–70. Excerpts Pt 1, Sects 1, 2, and 4 as well as
Pt 4, Sects 1–2 of AF’s Essay.
o Jane Rendall, The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1707–1776 (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1978), pp. 131–34, 137–39, 143–44, 146–47, 156–57, 165–66,
182–83, 187–89, 201–203. Excerpts AF’s Essay and Principles of Moral and
Political Science.
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o Marte e Mercurio: Sociologia dell’ Organizzazione Militare, ed. Fabrizio
Battistelli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990). See pp. 205–11, which anthologize Pt 3,
Sect 5 of the Essay (“Of National Defence and Conquest”), and pp. 38–53 of the
introduction (“La forza militare tra società civile e natura: Ferguson: Smith,
Spencer”).
o Enlightened Scotland: A Study and Selection of Scottish Philosophical Prose from
the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Philip Flynn (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1992), pp. 279–93. Excerpts AF’s Essay (Pt 1, Sects 1
and 4, and half of Pt 3, Sect 2).
o The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, Viking Portable Library
(London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 380–82. Excerpts AF’s Principles of Moral and
Political Science.
o The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed.
Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996),
pp. 253–61. Excerpts AF’s Essay.
o The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, ed. Alexander Broadie (Edinburgh:
Canongate Books, 1997), pp. 497–506 and 546–57. Excerpts Pt 1, Sect 1 and Pt 6,
Sect 5 of AF’s Essay.
o Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, ed. John Rundell and Stephen
Mennell (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 48–60. Excerpts Pt 5,
Sect 1 and Pt 2, Sect 2 of AF’s Essay.
o The Civil Society Reader, ed. Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Michael W. Foley,
Civil Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Hanover, NH: Tufts
Univ., published by Univ. Press of New England, 2003), pp. 40–62. Excerpts Pt 4,
Sect 1–3 and Pt 5, Sect 3–4 of AF’s Essay. (AF also appears on pp. 293–95 in this
volume, in “The Virtue of Civil Society” by Edward Shils.)
o Readings in the Economics of the Division of Labor: The Classical Tradition, ed.
Guang-Zhen Sun, Increasing Returns and Inframarginal Economics ([Bukit
Batok], Singapore: World Scientific, 2005). Excerpts Pt 4, Sect 1 of AF’s Essay.
See also pp. 21–23 in the introduction (in “Spontaneous Order, Money and
Knowledge: Mandeville, Ferguson and the Austrian Insights”).
o Adam Ferguson: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Eugene Heath, Library of
Scottish Philosophy (Exeter and Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2007).
Excerpts a number of AF’s books and his manuscript essay, “Of the Principle of
Moral Estimation: David Hume, Robert Clerk, Adam Smith.”
o Teoría social y política de la Ilustración escocesa: Una antología, ed. Maria
Isabel Wences Simon (Madrid and Mexico City: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas y Plaza y Valdés, 2007), pp. 103–06, 107–08, 164–79,
218–22, 281–83, 284–87, and 304–09. Excerpts mainly from AF’s Essay.
o The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources, ed. Adam Budd (London
and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 72–77. Excerpts AF’s “History” article in
two late eighteenth-century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For more
on this contemporary article, including the attribution controversy, see above
under Editions.
o Foundations of Anthropological Theory: From Classical Antiquity to Early
Modern Europe, ed. Robert Launay (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-
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Blackwell, 2010), pp. 277–88, which excerpt parts of Pt 2 and Pt 4 of AF’s Essay.
See also pp. 24–27 of the editor’s introduction.
Selections in Journals
o Anon., “Adam Ferguson on Population and Wealth,” Population and
Development Review 33:1 (2007): 171–78. Provides a brief introduction to, and
excerpt from, Pt 3, Sect 4 of AF’s Essay.
o Matthew Arbo, “Adam Ferguson’s Sermon in the Ersh Language: A Word from 2
Samuel on Martial Responsibility and Political Order,” Political Theology 12:6
(2011): 894–908. Provides a good introduction to, and transcription of, AF’s
Sermon in the Ersh Language (1746).
Notes:
1. No edition of AF’s collected works has ever been published. Although some of
his books have occasionally been reprinted, none has remained consistently in
print except the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). However, nearly all
eighteenth-century British and Irish editions of AF’s works, as well as some of the
eighteenth-century English-language editions published in Basel (spelled Basil in
the imprints), are available to those with institutional access to ECCO. The Hathi
Trust Digital Archive also has an excellent collection of Ferguson publications
online, including post-eighteenth-century and foreign-language editions. Some
editions are also available at GB and IA.
2. For a list of foreign-language editions of AF’s works, contemporary and modern,
see Norbert Waszek, “Adam Ferguson” (2004), p. 604, cited above under
Bibliographies.
Book-Length Studies and Collections
David Allan, Adam Ferguson, Aberdeen Introductions to Irish and Scottish Culture
(Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Univ. of Aberdeen, 2006). The
second chapter on AF as moralist and university teacher and the concluding chapter on
his impact and influence are particularly useful.
Yasuo Amoh, Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment (Tokyo: Keiso, 1993). In
Japanese.
Matthew Arbo, Political Vanity: Adam Ferguson on the Moral Tensions of Early
Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). Despite the title, focuses on the
implications of AF’s work for Christian theology.
Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Univ. of Southern Illinois Press, 1987). Short monograph
that stresses the unplanned nature of social development for AF and fellow Scots, within
the conservative tradition of analysis associated with F. A. Hayek.
Ronald Hamowy, The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek
(Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005). Reprints all four of Hamowy’s published works
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cited elsewhere in this bibliography, including The Scottish Enlightenment and the
Theory of Spontaneous Order in its entirety.
Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and
Human Nature, The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long
Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2008;
paperback ed., 2016 by Routledge). An indispensable collection, along with its
companion volume below. Contents: Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, “Introduction,” pp. 1–6; John D. Brewer,
“Ferguson’s Epistolary Self,” pp. 7–22; David Allan, “Ferguson and Scottish History: Past and Present in
An Essay on the History of Civil Society,” pp. 23–38; Jane B. Fagg, “Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh
University Library: 1764–1806,” pp. 39–64; David Raynor, “Ferguson’s Reflections Previous to the
Establishment of a Militia,” pp. 65–72; Yasuo Amoh, “Ferguson’s Views on the American and French
Revolution,” pp. 73–86; David Kettler, “Political Education for Empire and Revolution,” pp. 87–114; Iain
McDaniel, “Ferguson, Roman History and the Threat of Military Government in Modern Europe,” pp.
115–30; Annette Meyer, “Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in Combining History and Science: The History
of Historiography Revisited,” pp. 131–45; Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson’s Politics of Action,” pp. 147–56, Craig Smith, “Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind,” pp. 157–70; Jeng-Guo S. Chen,
“Providence and Progress: The Religious Dimension in Ferguson’s Discussion of Civil Society,” pp. 171–
86.
Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and
Society, The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long
Eighteenth Century, vol. 8 (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2009;
paperback ed., 2016 by Routledge). Contents: Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, “Introduction,” pp. 1–8; Michael Fry, “Ferguson
the Highlander,” pp. 9–24; Bruce Buchan, “Adam Ferguson, the 43rd
, and the Fictions of Fontenoy,” pp.
25–43; David Raynor, “Why Did David Hume Dislike Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil
Society?,” pp. 45–72; Vincenzo Merolle, “Hume as Critic of Ferguson’s Essay,” pp. 73–87; Jack Russell
Weinstein, “The Two Adams: Ferguson and Smith on Sympathy and Sentiment,” pp. 89–106; Lisa Hill, “A
Complicated Vision: The Good Polity in Adam Ferguson’s Thought,” pp. 107–23; Michael Kugler, “Adam
Ferguson and Enlightened Provincial Ideology in Scotland,” pp. 125–42; Christopher J. Berry, “‘But Art
Itself is Natural to Man’: Ferguson and the Principle of Simultaneity,” pp. 143–53; Eugene Heath,
“Ferguson on the Unintended Emergence of Social Order,” pp. 155–68.
Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political, and Moral Thought of Adam
Ferguson (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006). Approaches AF’s thought as a
coherent system rather than as “a mish-mash of conflicts and incompatible commitments
as it first appears” (p. 28). A bibliography subsection, “Sources Known or Likely to Have
Been Consulted by Ferguson,” pp. 238–44, should be read alongside the chapter by Fagg
on AF’s use of Edinburgh University Library, in Heath and Merolle (2008), cited above.
Herta Helena Jogland, Ursprünge und Grundlagen der Soziologie bei Adam Ferguson
(Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1959). Part of a long-standing German tradition of
scholarship on AF.
David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio
State Univ. Press, 1965). Still a good read, with a useful biographical chapter (Chap 3).
Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
2005) is a widely available reprint, with a new introduction and afterword.
William C. Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930). The first sustained argument in English for AF as a
founder of the discipline.
Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and
Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013). Explores in
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detail AF’s thought in relation to war and to Montesquieu, with an emphasis on AF’s
History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783).
Vincenzo Merolle, Saggio su Ferguson, con un Saggio su Millar (Rome: Gangemi,
1994). Text in Italian with two detailed summaries in English: see pp. 183–94 for the one
on AF.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in
Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Despite the general title,
this book is almost entirely focused on the conceptual “problems” associated with
translating AF into German, with individual chapters devoted to Garve, Lessing, Jacobi,
Schiller, and others. Based on the author’s 1991 Oxford University DPhil dissertation,
indispensable for English-language readers interested in AF’s contemporary reception
and influence in Germany.
Clotilde Prunier, ed., Autour de l’Essay on the History of Civil Society d’Adam Ferguson
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2014). A brief textbook for English
language and culture students in France. Contents: Clotilde Prunier, “Avant-propos,” pp. 9–14; Alexander Broadie, “Why Should We Read
Adam Ferguson Today?,” pp. 15–30; Katherine Nicolai, “The Role of Ancient Philosophy in An Essay on
the History of Civil Society,” pp. 31–43; Bertrand Binoche, “Montesquieu, Rousseau dans l’Essai sur
l’histoire de la société civile,” pp. 45–55; Norbert Waszek, “Progrès et déclin chez Ferguson: ‘A Long,
Cool Look at Both Sides of the Medal of Modern Civilization’ (Duncan Forbes),” pp. 57–66; and Michel
Faure, “Adam Ferguson ou les ambiguïtés d’une nostalgie ecossaise dans An Essay on the History of Civil
Society,” pp. 67–78. Selections from Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Kames, Smith, Millar,
Robertson, and Stewart.
Pasquale Salvucci, Adam Ferguson: Sociologia e Filosofia Politica (Urbino: Argalia,
1972). Highly regarded by readers of Italian. Subject of a useful review essay by William
C. Lehmann, in History and Theory 13:2 (1972): 165–81.
Jean-Pierre Séris, Qu’est-ce que la division du travail?: Ferguson (Paris: J. Vrin, 1994).
María Isabel Wences Simon, Sociedad civil y virtud cívica en Adam Ferguson (Madrid:
Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2006).
Biographical and Contextual Studies
Biographical Accounts o Anon., “Dr. Adam Ferguson,” in The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the
Year 1817 (London, 1817), pp. 227–72. Available at GB and HT. o Anon., “Ferguson, Adam,” in A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen,
ed. Robert Chambers, rev. Thomas Thomson, new ed., 3 vols. (London: Blackie
and Son, 1870 [orig. 1835]), vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 145–48. Available at HT, as are
various editions at GB and IA. o R[obert] B[isset], “Doctor Adam Fergusson,” in Public Characters of 1799–1800
(Dublin, 1799), pp. 325–43. Available at HT. o John Lee, “Adam Ferguson,” in Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth
Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1824), vol. 4, pp.
239–43. Lee is identified as the author in keys at the beginning of vols. 1 and 4.
Available at GB, HT, and IA.
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o Jane B. Fagg, “Biographical Introduction,” in Merolle, Correspondence of Adam
Ferguson (1995), vol. 1, pp. xix–cxvii, cited above under Editions. The standard
biography, superseding Small (cited below) and the author’s PhD dissertation
(cited under Theses and Dissertations, below). Various chapters address
“American Crisis,” “Ossian,” and “The French Revolution.”
o John Small, “Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Professor
of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh,” Transactions of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh 23:3 (1864): 599–665. Reprinted as a stand-alone book by
Neill and Co. in Edinburgh in 1864, and available at GB and HT. The traditional
biographical account, now superseded by Fagg (above).
See also the anonymous review of Small’s biography, attributed to James
Lorimer, in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 125 (Jan. 1867): 48–85
(also available in double-column format, pp. 25–44). Both versions of the review
are available at HT, as is the former only at GB.
Note: For other nineteenth-century writings with relevance for AF, see esp. the following parts of
the bibliography in Fagg, “Biographical Introduction,” in Merolle, Correspondence of Adam
Ferguson (1995), vol. 1, cited above under Editions: III. Biographical Sketches of Adam
Ferguson, pp. cxix–cxx; IV. Biographical Dictionaries, Biographies, and Autobiographies, pp.
cxx–cxxiv; and V. Correspondence, Journals, and Memoirs, pp. cxxiv–cxxvi.
Modern Dictionary and Encyclopedia Articles o Anon., “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment,
rev. ed., ed. Peter Hanns Reill and Ellen Judy Wilson (New York: Facts on File,
2004 [orig. 1996]), pp. 195–96.
o Paul Baines, Julian Ferraro, and Pat Rogers, “Ferguson, Adam,” in The Wiley-
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing, 1660–1789
(Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 125.
o Troy O. Bickham, “Adam Ferguson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol.
336, Eighteenth-Century British Historians, ed. Ellen J. Jenkins (Detroit:
Thomson Gale, 2007), pp. 104–09.
o John Braeman, “Adam Ferguson,” in Dictionary of World Biography, Vol. 4: The
17th
and 18th
Centuries, ed. Frank N. Magill (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn;
Pasadena: Salem Press, 1999), pp. 454–57.
o Harvey Chisick, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Historical Dictionary of the
Enlightenment (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), pp. 167–68.
o Yiftah Elazar, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in The Encyclopedia of Political
Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons, 8 vols. (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), vol. 3, pp. 1297–98.
o Francis Espinasse, “Ferguson, Adam,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed.
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, vol. 18 (London: Smith, Elder, 1889), available
online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ferguson,_Adam_%281723-
1816%29_%28DNB00%29.
o Jane B. Fagg, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Encyclopedia of the
Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
11
2003), vol. 2, p. 47. See also, within the same volume, Fania Oz-Salzberger’s
entry on Christian Garve, pp. 101–02, with a short but useful bibliography.
o Ronald Hamowy, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in The Encyclopedia of
Libertarianism, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), pp. 176–77.
o Eugene Heath, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Encyclopedia of Business
Ethics and Society, ed. Robert W. Kolb, 5 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2008), vol. 2, pp. 887–88.
o Eugene Heath, “Scottish Enlightenment: Influence on the Social Sciences,” in
Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, ed. Byron Kaldis, 2 vols.
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), vol. 2, pp. 835–40. Includes a discussion of
salient Enlightenment themes as well as some individual discussion of AF.
o Lisa Hill, “Civil Society Theory: Ferguson,” in International Encyclopedia of
Civil Society, ed. Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler (Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer, 2009), pp. 400–04. Esp. clear and nuanced. Also, seven
cross-references helpfully accompany this entry, including three on the civil
society theories of Hegel, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.
o Lisa Hill, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Encyclopedia of Political Theory,
ed. Mark Bevir, 3 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), vol. 2, pp. 506–08.
o David Kettler, “Ferguson, Adam,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward Craig, 10 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), vol. 3, pp.
630–33.
o A. M. Kinghorn, “Ferguson, Adam,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul
Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, and London:
Collier-Macmillan, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 187–88. A second edition of this
encyclopedia was issued by Thomson Gale as a 10-vol. set in digital format
(2005) and in print (2006), ed. Donald M. Borchert, for which Aaron Garrett
provides a fresh entry on AF in vol. 3, pp. 604–06. See also vol. 4, p. 24, in the
2nd
ed. for the entry on Christian Garve, AF’s German translator (with the 1967
entry by Giorgio Tonelli, and updated bibliography by Tamra Frei).
o Robert Launay, “Ferguson, Adam,” in Theory in Social and Cultural
Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, ed. R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, 2
vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 262–63. On the Iroquois as
AF’s paradigm of savagery.
o William C. Lehmann, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, 15 vols. (1931;
repr. New York: Macmillan, 1963), vol. 5, p. 184.
o Petra Nagelschmidt, “An Essay on the History of Civil Society,” in Lexikon der
philosophischen Werke, ed. Franco Volpi and Julian Nida-Rümelin (Stuttgart: A.
Kröner, 1988), pp. 248–49. See also the entry for the Institutes of Moral
Philosophy (pp. 361–62) and for the Principles of Moral and Political Science (p.
587) by the same author in this volume.
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in The New Palgrave
Dictionary of Economics and the Law, ed. Peter Newman, 3 vols. (London:
Macmillan Reference and New York: Stockton Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 125–27.
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004; online ed., Oct. 2009).
12
o Fiona Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson, Adam,” in Encyclopedia of Modern Political
Thought, ed. Gregory Claeys, with Michael S. Cummings and Lyman Tower
Sargent (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), pp. 290–91.
o David Raynor, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Dictionary of Eighteenth-
Century British Philosophers, ed. John W. Yolton, John Vladimir Price, and John
Stephens, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 324–28.
o Ian Simpson Ross, “Adam Ferguson,” in Lexikon ökonomischer Werke: 650
wegweisende Schriften von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Dietmar Herz
and Veronika Weinberger (Stuttgart: Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen im
Sch ffer-Poeschel Verlag, 2006), pp. 131–33. Begins with a short biography of
AF.
o Richard B. Sher, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” in Britain in the Hanoverian
Age, 1714–1837: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gerald Newman (New York: Garland,
1997), pp. 250–51.
o Norbert Waszek, “Adam Ferguson,” in Großes Werklexikon der Philosophie, ed.
Franco Volpi, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 2004 [orig. 1999]), vol. 1, pp. 470–72.
o Norbert Waszek, “Adam Ferguson,” in Grundriss der Geschichte der
Philosophie: Die Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut Holzhey and
Vilem Mudroch, Vol. 1: Grossbritannien und Nordamerika, Niederlande (Basel:
Schwabe, 2004), pp. 603–18. By far the most comprehensive entry in this list,
divided into sections on Life, Works, Ideas, and Influence (with the Essay,
Institutes, and Principles each receiving individual treatment in the Works
section).
Note: thumbnail sketches of AF are available in the Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment,
Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature: Augustan Literature, Collins Dictionary of Sociology,
Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland, and Oxford Dictionary of Sociology.
Other Biographical and Contextual Studies o David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish
Enlightenment, 1740–1830, Routledge Studies in Cultural History (New York and
London: Routledge, 2008).
o Robert G. W. Anderson and Jean Jones, eds., The Correspondence of Joseph
Black, 2 vols. (Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Contains a wealth of information on AF, in the form of information provided by
the editors and passing references to AF in the letters of Black and others.
o Andrew Blaikie, “Before and after Modernity: The Legacy of Adam Ferguson,”
in The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory: Representations of Belonging in a
Changing Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 29–52. Pp. 34–
36 (“A Myth of Biography?”) build upon Brewer (2007), cited below.
o John D. Brewer, “Putting Adam Ferguson in His Place,” British Journal of
Sociology 58:1 (2007): 105–122. Regards the emphasis on AF’s identity as a
Gaelic Highlander as romantic exaggeration. (Brewer [2014], cited below under
Division of Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science, continues
the author’s strong biographical revisionism.)
13
o Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall, eds., The Edinburgh History of the
Book in Scotland, Vol. 2: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–1800 (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012).
o James Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World
(London: John Murray, 2003). Reprinted in Edinburgh by Birlinn in 2007, and
published in North America as Crowded with Genius: The Scottish
Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins,
2003). Contains much on AF.
o Charles Camic, Experience and Enlightenment: Socialization for Cultural Change
in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983). A
strained sociological interpretation of the achieving characters of AF and some of
his friends.
o Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk
1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, new ed. with many additional notes (London
and Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910 [orig. 1860]). An important contemporary
source on AF and his circle. The superior 1910 “new edition” (London and
Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis) is available at HT and
http://books2.scholarsportal.info/viewdoc.html?id=/ebooks/oca1/10/autobiograph
yoft00carluoft, and as a 1990 reprint from Thoemmes Press with a new
introduction by Richard B. Sher. Carlyle’s autobiography has also appeared in a
modern edition, with a new title: Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, ed.
James Kinsley (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).
o Jeremy J. Cater, “The Making of Principal Robertson in 1762: Politics and the
University of Edinburgh in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Scottish
Historical Review 49:147, Pt 1 (1970): 60–84. Contains biographical information
on AF and his academic patron, Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton (paternal nephew
of the famous Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun).
o Aylwin Clark, An Enlightened Scot: Hugh Cleghorn, 1752–1837, foreword by
Nicholas Phillipson (Duns, UK: Black Ace Books, 1992). It is well known that
AF looked up to William Cleghorn, his predecessor in the chair of moral
philosophy at Edinburgh from 1745 to 1754, but Clark reveals that William’s
nephew Hugh, in turn, admired AF throughout his life. Illuminating also on AF’s
last years and death (pp. 251–56) and on his unpublished “Dialogue on a
Highland Jaunt” (pp. 7–9).
o A. L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The
Doctrines and Discourses of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1975). Contains a few passing references to AF and, in
Chaps 7 and 9, to AF’s biography of Black (AF’s second cousin).
o Roger L. Emerson, “The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select
Society of Edinburgh, 1754–1764,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century 114 (1973): 291–329. Helpful account of one of the major clubs to which
AF belonged, though his date of admission should read 3 August 1756.
o Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow,
Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press,
2008). Contains some biographical information on AF and more on his patron
Lord Milton. There is also coverage of the latter in Emerson, An Enlightened
14
Duke: The Life of Archibald Campbell (1682–1761), Earl of Ilay and 3rd
Duke of
Argyll (Kilkerran, UK: Humming Earth, 2013).
o Jane B. Fagg, “‘Complaints and Clamours’: The Ministry of Adam Fergusson,
1700–1754,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 25, pt. 2 (1994):
288–308. An account of AF’s father that is biographically significant for the son.
o John Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London:
John Murray, 1962). AF was a close friend of Robert Adam from university days.
o Duncan Forbes, “Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Community,” in Douglas Young
et al., Edinburgh in the Age of Reason: A Commemoration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 40–47. Along with the introduction to Forbes’s edition of
the Essay (1966), initiates the modern trend in seeing AF’s Highland background
as crucial to his thinking. The essays in this book were first broadcast as talks on
the BBC’s Scottish Home Service in 1967. Forbes’s contribution was later
reprinted as a pamphlet with a limited run of 200 numbered copies: Adam
Ferguson and the Idea of Community (Paisley, UK: Gleniffer Press, 1979).
o Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1992).
Contains scattered information on AF: e.g., that he “failed,” on account of his
apparent irreligiosity, “to get a post at St Andrews because of a critical reference
from [Dr George] Hill” (p.180).
o M. M. Gilchrist, Patrick Ferguson: “A Man of Some Genius” (Edinburgh: NMS
Enterprises, 2003), esp. p. 51.
o Henry Grey Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London:
Adam and Charles Black, 1908 [orig. 1901]). Part of Chap 5 is devoted to AF.
Available at HT and IA.
o Sir Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during Its First
Three Hundred Years, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1884). Vol. 2 contains
a two-page life of AF in appendix 13; though based on Small (cited above under
Biographical Accounts), it is striking for the early casting of its subject as a
practitioner of “Sociology” (p. 339). Other histories of the University of
Edinburgh with content on AF include those by Alexander Bower (vol. 3, 1830,
pp. 7–12) and Andrew Dalzel (vol. 2, 1864, intermittently between pp. 428–51).
All three of these works are available at HT and IA.
o J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1932). Besides three letters from Hume to AF, two of which concern the Essay’s
reception, it also contains five letters to Hugh Blair and others on the Essay
(revealing Hume’s real opinion of the book), as well as a letter addressed to
Alexander Carlyle (dated 3 February 1761), where Hume claims credit for AF’s
militia pamphlet Sister Peg. Many letters addressed to others concern AF.
o Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of
How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created our World and Everything in It
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). Published outside North America as The
Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London:
Fourth Estate, 2001).
o Hans P. Jaeck, “Adam Ferguson: Gesellschaftsheoretiker, Moralphilosoph,
Historiker,” in Geschichtsdiskurs, ed. Wolfgang Küttler, Jörn Rüsen, and Ernst
Schulin, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 239–48.
15
o Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner, ed., New Letters of David Hume
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).
o Michael Kugler, “Provincial Intellectuals: Identity, Patriotism, and Enlightened
Peripheries,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 37:2 (1996):
156–73. Highlights AF’s provincial identity.
o Michael Kugler, “The London Prospects of Adam Ferguson and James Boswell,
1745–1763,” Scotia 30 (2006): 1–17.
o Gordon MacIntyre, Dugald Stewart: The Pride and Ornament of Scotland
(Brighton, UK and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2003). Contains a few
passages biographically relevant for AF, Stewart’s predecessor in the moral
philosophy chair at Edinburgh University.
o James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy: Biographical, Expository, Critical, from
Hutcheson to Hamilton (London: Macmillan, 1875), pp. 255–61 on AF. Available
at GB and HT.
o Zubin Meer, “Blindness and Insight in a Letter (1800) by Rev. Charles Findlater
on Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society,” Eighteenth-Century
Scotland: The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, no.
30 (Spring 2016): 6–9. Findlater, a former student of AF’s, viewed the Essay as
Rousseauist.
o Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Adam Ferguson’s ‘Dialogue on a Highland Jaunt’
with Robert Adam, William Cleghorn, David Hume, and William Wilkie,” in
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald
McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 297–
308.
o Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980). The classic biography of Hume dating from 1954, with much
information on his ties with AF.
o Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, eds., The Correspondence of
Adam Smith, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Besides AF’s letters to
Smith, which appear in the first edition from 1977, the second edition, appendix
E, adds fourteen letters related to AF and the “Chesterfield affair” (on this affair,
see two articles by Raphael and one by Raphael, Raynor, and Ross, all cited in
this section, below).
o Katherine Nicolai, “Adam Ferguson’s Pedagogy and his Engagement with
Stoicism,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12:2 (2014): 199–212.
o Douglas Nobbs, “The Political Ideas of William Cleghorn, Hume’s Academic
Rival,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26:4 (1965): 575–86. (See also Grote
[2010], cited below under Theses and Dissertations, and Clark [1992] and
Mossner [1963], both cited above in this section.)
o D. D. Raphael, “The Professor’s Pension,” The Times Higher Education
Supplement 22 (March 1985): 15. Introduces the Lord Chesterfield tutor affair,
discussed more fully in the two articles that follow.
o D. D. Raphael, D. R. Raynor, and I. S. Ross, “‘This Very Awkward Affair’: An
Entanglement of Scottish Professors with English Lords,” Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century 278 (1990): 419–63. New correspondence relating to AF’s
difficulties in getting paid for his work as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield.
16
o D. D. Raphael, “Adam Ferguson’s Tutorship of Lord Chesterfield,” Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 323 (1994): 209–23. More correspondence
relating to the Chesterfield affair.
o Ian Simpson Ross, Life of Adam Smith, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2010). Biographically relevant for AF. The same applies to the older biographies
of Adam Smith.
o Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The
Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press and Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1985; Edinburgh Classic Edition, with a new preface,
2015). Treats AF within the cultural and institutional world of the William
Robertson circle of Moderate clergymen of letters in Edinburgh.
o Richard B. Sher, “‘The Favourite of the Favourite’: John Home, Bute and the
Politics of Patriotic Poetry,” in Lord Bute: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. Karl W.
Schweizer ([Leicester]: Leicester Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 181–212, esp. pp. 193–
95, analyzing a letter of 6 November 1760 from AF to Gilbert Elliot.
o Richard B. Sher, “Professors of Virtue: The Social History of the Edinburgh
Moral Philosophy Chair in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in the Philosophy of
the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
pp. 87–126. Emphasizes ideological and financial themes in regard to the moral
philosophy chair that AF held.
o Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their
Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago and
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007). Contains new information on the
publication arrangements for AF’s two major books.
o Roy Sorenson, “Fame as the Forgotten Philosopher: Meditations on the
Headstone of Adam Ferguson,” Philosophy 77:299 (2002): 109–14. Reprinted in
Sorenson, A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities: A Collection of Puzzles,
Oddities, Riddles, and Dilemmas (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), pp. 244–
50.
o Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols.
(London: Smith, Elder, 1876), vol. 2, pp. 214–15 (Chap 10, Sect 89). A harshly
critical account of AF’s Essay (which “has the superficial merits which were
calculated for the ordinary mind”) and its author (“a facile and dexterous
declaimer, whose rhetoric glides over the surface of things without biting into
their substance”). Available at GB and IA, and later editions are available at HT.
o Mark R. M. Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their
Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820, Library of the Written World, The
Handpress World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). Contains much new evidence
on the reception of AF’s books in Scotland.
Notes:
1. For more on AF’s Highland background, see esp. Brewer’s and Allan’s
chapters in Heath and Merolle (2008), and Buchan’s, Fry’s, and Kugler’s
chapters in Heath and Merolle (2009), cited above under Book-Length Studies
and Collections; Kugler (1994) and Testa (2007), cited below under Theses
17
and Dissertations; Forbes (1967), cited below under Social and Political
Thought; and Carr (2008), cited below under Militia, National Defense, and
War.
2. For other biographical treatments of AF, see also Chap 2 in Allan’s
monograph (2006), and Chap 3 in Kettler’s (1965), both cited above under
Book-Length Studies and Collections.
3. On Hume’s antipathy to AF’s Essay upon publication, see esp. pp. 57–60 in
Kettler (1965) and the essays by Raynor and by Merolle in Heath and
Merrolle (2009), cited above under Book-Length Studies and Collections; and
appendix B in Teng (1988), cited below under Theses and Dissertations.
Theses and Dissertations (excluding those made into published books)
Hiroko Aoki, “Civil Society as Conceived by Adam Ferguson: Preservation of ‘Civil
Liberty’ and Avoidance of ‘Despotism of the Many’ in Modern Civilized Society” (PhD
diss., International Christian Univ., 2004). In Japanese.
Esther Lynn Barazzone, “The Politic Philosopher: Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832)
and the Scottish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Columbia Univ., 1982), pp. 43–44 and much
of Chap 7, “Ethics and Politics.”
John Peter Bradwell, “Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, and British
Romanticism” (PhD diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1993), esp. pp. 79–85 (“Scott and
Ferguson”).
Ashley Nicole Carroll, “‘Preparing the Youthful Mind for Virtuous Actions’: Adam
Ferguson at the University of Edinburgh” (MA thesis, North Carolina State Univ., 2007).
Suggests that it is AF’s pedagogy that sets him apart from his Moderate peers.
Spencer Davis, “Scottish Philosophical History: Hume to James Mill” (PhD diss., Univ.
of Toronto, 1981).
Michael Dey, “Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Economic Change and
Class Limitations in 18th
Century Scotland” (PhD diss., Univ. of Aberdeen, 1984).
Jane Bush Fagg, “Adam Ferguson: Scottish Cato” (PhD diss., Univ. of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1968).
Penny Fielding, “Walter Scott and Eighteenth Century Thought” (DPhil diss., Oxford
Univ., 1990), esp. Chap 6, “Truth and Action: Redgauntlet and Adam Ferguson.”
Heinrich Fisch, “Adam Ferguson und seine Gedanken zur Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft”
(PhD diss., Univ. of Frankfurt, 1957).
Simon William Grote, “Moral Philosophy and the Origins of Modern Aesthetic Theory in
Scotland and Germany” (PhD diss., Univ. of California Berkeley, 2010). Chap 2 is
devoted to the aesthetic theory of William Cleghorn, professor of moral philosophy at
Edinburgh University from 1745 to 1754. But see specifically pp. 57–58, 62–65, and
105–07, which examine Cleghorn’s personal relationship with AF as well as the latter’s
fictional Highland jaunt with Cleghorn and other Lowland friends. (This dialogue is no. 5
in Merolle, Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, cited above under Editions.) Pp. 63–64 raise
the possibility that AF penned the brief obituary for Cleghorn in the Edinburgh Evening
18
Courant, 26 August 1754, based on the suspicion of nephew Hugh Cleghorn,
communicated in a letter of 1836.
Ronald Hamowy, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Adam Ferguson: A
Commentary on his Essay on the History of Civil Society” (PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago,
1969). Detailed exegetical commentary.
Rick Incorvati, “Sympathy and the Social Order: The Politics of Emotional Relationships
from Hume to Wordsworth” (PhD diss., Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001),
pp. 106–15 (“‘The Bosom Kindles in Company’: Adam Ferguson’s Sympathy of Public
Spirit’).
Lora Kahn, “James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’: Genesis and Response” (PhD diss., City
Univ. of New York, 1989).
Michael James Kugler, “Savagery, Antiquity, and Provincial Identity: Adam Ferguson’s
Critique of Civilization (Volumes I and II)” (PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1994).
James Mitchell Lee, “Benjamin Constant: The Moralization of Modern Liberty” (PhD
diss., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003), pp. 130–38 (“Adam Ferguson and the
Separation of Civic Personality”).
Wang Zhen Lin, “Analysis of Social Attitudes of Adam Ferguson” (MA thesis, National
Taiwan Univ., 2002). In Chinese.
Zisai Lin, “On Adam Ferguson’s Ethical Thought” (PhD diss., Fujan Univ., 2013). In
Chinese.
Christie LeAnn Maloyed, “The Religious Foundations of Civic Virtue” (PhD diss., Texas
A&M Univ., 2010), esp. Chap 3 (“Adam Ferguson: Providential Order and the Civic
Tradition”), pp. 60–86.
Scott McLean, “Rousseau, Ferguson and Societal Development Theory: A Historical
Analysis in the Sociology of Knowledge” (MA thesis., Univ. of Alberta, 1989).
Katherine Cecilia Nicolai, “The ‘Scottish Cato’?: A Re-examination of Adam Ferguson’s
Engagement with Classical Antiquity” (PhD diss., Univ. of Edinburgh, 2011). Available
at https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/8248.
Patricia Diane Nordeen, “Adam Ferguson on Civil Society: Enlightenment, Community,
and the Market” (PhD diss., Yale Univ., 2003).
Michael Philip, “Scott as an Heir of the Enlightenment: Aspects of Selected ‘Scottish’
Novels in Light of the Social Thought of Adam Ferguson” (MLitt thesis, Univ. of
Stirling, 1982).
Winifred M. Philip, “The Contribution of Adam Ferguson to Social Science” (DPhil
diss., Univ. of Surrey, 1985).
Sarah Ramirez, “The Road to Virtue and the Road to Fortune: The Scottish
Enlightenment and the Problem of Individualism in Commercial Society” (PhD diss.,
Loyola Univ., 2012). Chap 4 is devoted to AF.
Uma Satyavolu Rau, “The Enlightenment Idea of Civilization and the Production of
‘Victorian’ Historiography” (PhD diss., West Virginia Univ., 1997), esp. pp. 32–38.
Youssef Sabbah, “Philosophical History in Scott’s Waverly Novels” (DPhil diss., Univ.
of Wales, Bangor, 2003).
Michael Jonathan Schwartz, “Cultivating the Nation: The Georgic Mode in Mid-
Eighteenth Century Britain” (PhD diss., New York Univ., 2002), pp. 25–31.
19
James Sheets, “Adam Ferguson: The ‘Good Preceptor’ of Empire” (PhD diss., Univ. of
Rochester, 1993). Shows how “Ferguson defended the ideal of empire throughout his
work.”
Deepak Shenoy, “James Mill and Political Economy” (PhD diss., Univ. of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 2003), pp. 27–39 (“Adam Ferguson: Progress and Public Spirit”).
Alan George Smith, “The Political Philosophy of Adam Ferguson Considered as a
Response to Rousseau: Political Development and Progressive Development” (PhD diss.,
Yale Univ., 1980).
Richard F. Teichgraeber III, “Politics and Morals in the Scottish Enlightenment” (PhD
diss., Brandeis Univ., 1978). Chap 5 is devoted to AF’s Essay.
Ronald Teng, “Virtue, Corruption, History: Adam Ferguson’s Moral Philosophy,” in 2
vols. (PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1988). Includes an appendix on Hume’s potential
reasons for disliking and wanting to suppress AF’s Essay.
Denise Ann Testa, “‘A Bastard Gaelic Man’: Reconsidering the Highland Roots of Adam
Ferguson” (PhD diss., Univ. of Western Sydney, 2007). Concentrates on AF in relation to
the “concrete reality of the locale, language and vestigial shame-honour culture” of the
Highlands.
Daniel J. Wells, “The Scottish Literati and the Problem of Scottish National Identity”
(MA thesis, Univ. of Western Ontario, 1997). AF is central to Chap 2, “The Scottish
Militia: Harnessing the Martial Past.”
Alice Jacoby Wheeler, “Society History in Eighteenth-Century Scotland” (PhD diss.,
Emory Univ., 1966).
Jean Carolyne Willke, “The Historical Thought of Adam Ferguson” (PhD diss., Catholic
Univ. of America, 1962).
Criticism Social and Political Thought (including civil society, civilization, conjectural
history, moral philosophy, primitivism, progress, republicanism, and
spontaneous order) o David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of
Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1993).
Highly critical account of AF and his fellow literati as overrated “historical demi-
gods” (p. 233).
o Yasuo Amoh, “Moral Philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment in the Case of
Adam Ferguson,” Kochi University Review of Social Science, no. 28 (March
1987): 1–26. In Japanese.
o Edward G. Andrew, Imperial Republics: Revolution, War, and Territorial
Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution (Toronto: Univ.
of Toronto Press, 2011), Chap 8, “Imperial Pride and Anxiety: Gibbon’s Roman
Empire and Ferguson’s Roman Republic.”
o Hiroko Aoki, “Adam Ferguson’s Perception of History and Historiography: The
Significance of ‘Virtues of Rude Men,’” History of Economic Thought 47:2
(2005): 57–74. In Japanese, with an English summary. Available at
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/jshet2005/47/0/_contents.
20
o Hiroko Aoki, “The Significance of Freedom of Rude Men in Commercial
Society—In Search of Reinforcing Liberty of Civilized Men by Adam Ferguson,”
Journal of Social Science, no. 60 (2007): 181–207. Available at
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110007001168/.
o Sergio Bartolommei, “Forza del ‘progetto,’ potere delle ‘circostanze’ e teoria del
‘progresso’ in An Essay on the History of Civil Society di Adam Ferguson,” Il
Pensiero Politico 12 (1979): 344–60.
o Sergio Bartolommei, “Adam Ferguson critico delle ‘notions of vulgar minds,’” Il
Pensiero Politico 18 (1985): 164–81.
o Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A
Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and France
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994).
o Emile Benveniste, “Civilization: A Contribution to the History of the Word,” in
Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (1966; Coral
Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 289–96. Largely based on a 1759 letter
from Hume to Adam Smith regarding a “treatise on Refinement” (presumably an
early draft of the Essay that AF had been working on for some time), suggests that
it is possible that AF coined the word “civilization.” But because this early draft
perused by Hume has never been located, as Benveniste had hoped, we have no
idea how similar it is to the finished Essay and his tantalizing conjecture,
accordingly, remains merely that. The current honor of coining the word
civilization, in French, remains with the physiocrat Victor de Riquetti, Marquis de
Mirabeau, in his treatise on population L’Ami des hommes, ou Traité de la
population (dated 1756 but published in 1757).
o John Andrew Bernstein, “Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Progress,” Studies in
Burke and His Time (now The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation)
19:2 (1978): 99–118. Argues that “Ferguson’s demand for perpetual striving” is
the heart of his doctrine of progress and “the key to his entire thought.”
o Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical
Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). Contains a few
scattered but useful remarks, esp. on pp. 147, 150, and 162.
o Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1997). Treats AF among other social theorists of the
“Scottish school,” updating Bryson’s classic 1945 account (see below).
o Christopher J. Berry, “Sociability and Socialisation,” in The Cambridge
Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 243–57.
o Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2013). Contains much on AF,
esp. in Chap 6, “The Dangers of Commerce.”
o Troy O. Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American
Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), Chap
5, “‘Under the Rudest Form in Which We Can Conceive Man to Subsist’: The
Scottish Enlightenment and the North American Indians.”
21
o Bertrand Binoche, Les trois sources des philosophies de l’histoire (1764–1798)
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). See esp. Chap 5, “L’histoire
naturelle de l’humanité (I): Ferguson.”
o Kenneth Bock, Human Nature Mythology (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois
Press, 1994), esp. 54–55 and 58–60, which address the tension in AF’s thought
between purposive action and its unintended consequences.
o Henri Bouet, “Adam Ferguson et ses Idées Politiques et Sociales,” Journal des
Économistes: Revue Mensuelle de la Science Économique et de la Statistique, 5th
ser., 36 (Oct.-Dec., 1898): 321–34.
o Sophie Bourgault and Robert Sparling, eds., A Companion to Enlightenment
Historiography (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), esp. pp. 322–25 (in an essay by
David Allan on Scottish historiography) and pp. 482–83, 494–95, and 500–501
(in an essay by C. Akça Ataç on Roman historiography).
o Brett Bowden, “The Ideal of Civilisation: Its Origins and Socio‐political
Character,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 7:1
(2004): 25–50. Revisits the debate surrounding the origins of this keyword,
including Benveniste (cited above), but without any conclusive determination.
o Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the
Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001). See throughout.
o Alexander Broadie, “Adam Ferguson, Classical Republicanism and the
Imperative of Modernity,” in MacCormick’s Scotland, ed. Neil Walker,
Edinburgh Studies in Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 107–30.
o Alexander Broadie, “Adam Ferguson on Human Nature and Enlightened
Governance,” in Scientific Statesmanship, Governance and the History of
Political Philosophy, ed. Kyriakos N. Demetriou and Antis Loizides, Routledge
Innovations in Political Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp.
137–51.
o Alexander Broadie, “Scotland’s ‘Science of Man,’” in The Enlightenment in
Scotland: National and International Perspectives, ed. Jean-François Dunyach
and Ann Thomson, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation, 2015), pp. 85–105. Pp. 95–96 concern AF’s critique of the
concept of the state of nature by Hobbes and Rousseau, and pp. 100–05 concern
AF’s 1756 militia pamphlet as a serious contribution to the “science of man”
project.
o Daniel Brühlmeier, Helmut Holzhey, and Vilem Mudroch, eds., Schottische
Aufklärung: “A Hotbed of Genius” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996). Contains
relevant chapters by Nicholas Phillipson on the Scottish Enlightenment, Fania Oz-
Salzberger on the Scottish Enlightenment in Germany, and Norbert Waszek on
AF’s translator Christian Garve, among others. In German.
o Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945). Still useful in general, but Chap 2
(“Adam Ferguson’s System of Moral Philosophy”) is particularly valuable as a
summary of AF’s approach to moral philosophy. Chap 6 (“Society”) also contains
some remarks on AF, and was first published as “Some Eighteenth-Century
Conceptions of Society,” The Sociological Review 31 (1939): 401–21. Available
at HT.
22
o Bruce Buchan, “The Empire of Political Thought: Civilization, Savagery and
Perceptions of Indigenous Government,” History of the Human Sciences 18:2
(2005): 1–22. Pp. 10–12 esp. concern AF’s savages. Adapted as Chap 1
(“Savagery, Civilization and Political Thought”), in Buchan, The Empire of
Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial
Government, Empires in Perspective (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and
Chatto, 2008), pp. 17–31, with pp. 29–31 on AF. (Pp. 79–81 of this monograph,
moreover, concern AF and the subject of war.)
o Stephen Copley, “The Philosopher and the Polite Reader in Commercial Society:
Hume, Ferguson and Smith,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
(Special Issue: “Transactions of the Seventh International Congress on the
Enlightenment, Budapest, 26 July–2 August 1987”), 265 (1989): 47–49.
o Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa
Yukichi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009). Reveals that the stadial
histories of AF and others deeply influenced Yukichi.
o Heinrich Cunow, Die Marxsche Geschichts- Gesellschafts- und Staatstheorie:
Grundzüge der Marxschen Soziologie (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1920), esp. pp. 110–16
(“Adam Fergusons Gesellschaftstheorie”). Available at HT and IA.
o Jules Delvaille, Essai sur l’Histoire de l’Idée de Progrès jusqu'à la Fin du 18e
Siècle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910). Chap 7, Sect 3 (pp. 473–87) is devoted to AF.
Available at HT and IA, and as a reprint by Olms in 1969.
o Massimiliano Demata, “Prejudiced Knowledge: Travel Literature in the
Edinburgh Review,” in British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review:
Bicentenary Essays, ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 82–101. Pp. 85–
86 and 88 reference AF.
o William Archibald Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to
Spencer (1920; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1936). Pp. 65–71 are devoted to AF.
Available at HT.
o John Ehrenber, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New
York Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 91–96 (“The Moral Foundations of Civil Society”).
o Yiftah Elazar, “Adam Ferguson on Modern Liberty and the Absurdity of
Democracy,” History of Political Thought 35:4 (2014): 768–87.
o Franco Ferrarotti, “Civil Society and State Structures in Creative Tension:
Ferguson, Hegel, Gramsci,” State, Culture, and Society 1:1 (1984): 3–25.
o Penny Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–
1830, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2008), pp. 166–70.
o Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France,
1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills,
Baskingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 291–316. The
lecture of 4 April 1979 largely concerns AF’s concept of civil society.
o Claude Gautier, L’invention de la société civile: lectures Anglo-écossaises:
Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). See
also the author’s 92-page introduction to his French-language edition of the Essay
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992).
23
o Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Norton,
1966–69). Vol. 2, The Science of Freedom, pp. 336–43, contains a section on AF,
arguing that he “undertook the scientific study of society for moral reasons” (p.
336).
o Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London:
Penguin, 1994), Chap 8, “Adam Ferguson.” Nearly identical to Gellner’s article,
“Adam Ferguson and the Surprising Robustness of Civil Society,” in Liberalism
in Modern Times: Essays in Honour of José G. Merquior, ed. Ernest Gellner and
César Cansino (Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 119–31.
o Marco Geuna, “Aspetti della critica di Adam Ferguson al contrattualismo,” in
Passioni, Interessi, Convenzioni: Discussioni Settecentesche su Virtù e Civiltà,
ed. Marco Geuna and Maria Luisa Pesante (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992), pp.
129–80. All the essays save one in this hefty collection concern Scottish
Enlightenment writers.
o Marco Geuna, “Il linguaggio del repubblicanesimo in Adam Ferguson,” Il
Pensiero politico 16 (1992): 143–59. A paper delivered at a 1990 conference on
political language at Lecce, edited by Eluggero Pii.
o Marco Geuna, “Richesse, Commerce et Corruption dans la Pensée d’Adam
Ferguson,” in Être Riche au Siècle de Voltaire, Actes du Colloque de Genève, 18–
19 Juin 1994, ed. Jacques Berchtold and Michel Porret (Geneva: Librairie Droz,
1996), pp. 81–95.
o Marco Geuna, “Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish
Enlightenment: The Case of Adam Ferguson,” in Republicanism: A Shared
European Heritage, Vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 177–95.
o Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and
English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2007), esp.
pp. 54–60 (“Adam Ferguson’s Enlightened Pessimism”).
o Gordon Graham, “Adam Ferguson as a Moral Philosopher,” Philosophy 88:4
(2013): 511–25.
o Gordon Graham, “Francis Hutcheson and Adam Ferguson on Sociability,”
History of Philosophy Quarterly 31:4 (2014): 317–29.
o Ronald Hamowy, “Progress and Commerce in Anglo-American Thought: The
Social Philosophy of Adam Ferguson,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political
Philosophy 14:1 (1986): 61–87. Argues that AF was an “unambiguous” supporter
of modern, commercial progress.
o Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Educational Theory and the Social Vision of the Scottish
Enlightenment,” Oxford Review of Education 37:5 (2011): 587–602. On pp. 597–
98, considers the brief remarks on education in AF’s Essay. (See also Craig
Smith’s article [2006], cited below.)
o F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Individualism and Economic
Order (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 1–32. Contrasts a largely
British model of spontaneous order, promulgated by AF and others, with the so-
called pseudo-individualism or collectivism of a largely French, Cartesian
rationalist school. This distinction, and the crucial place it allots to AF within the
24
history of ideas, continued to preoccupy Hayek. See esp. “Freedom, Reason, and
Tradition,” in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1960); and “The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design,” in Studies
in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1967), where he borrows the title phrase of this chapter from AF’s Essay, making
it widely known and influential in libertarian scholarship.
o Eugene Heath, “Carrying Matters Too Far? Mandeville and the Eighteenth-
Century Scots on the Evolution of Morals,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12:1
(2014): 95–119. Contains a discussion of “affinities” between Mandeville and AF
on pp. 99–102.
o Jack Hill, “Marx’s Reading of Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Progress,” Journal
of Scottish Philosophy 11:2 (2013): 167–190. Argues that “Marx misappropriated
Ferguson’s thought” by ignoring key ethical considerations in the latter’s
conception of progress.
o Lisa Hill, “Anticipations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Social Thought in
the Work of Adam Ferguson,” European Journal of Sociology/ Archives
Européens de Sociologie 37:1 (1996): 203–28. Situates AF’s “liberal-Stoicism”
between classical civic humanism and “modern” ideas of liberalism.
o Lisa Hill, “Adam Ferguson on the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” History of
Political Thought 18:4 (1997): 677–706. Identifies a Stoic, theological resolution
to the conflict between progress and decline in AF’s thought.
o Lisa Hill, “The Puzzle of Adam Ferguson’s Political Conservatism,” Eighteenth-
Century Scotland: The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies
Society, no. 15 (Spring 2001): 12–17.
o Lisa Hill, “Ideas of Corruption in the Eighteenth Century: The Competing
Conceptions of Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith,” in Corruption: Expanding the
Focus, ed. Manuhuia Barcham, Barry Hindess, and Peter Larmour (Canberra:
Australian National Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 105–23. This book is available online
as a pdf and an epub file. Some coverage of AF is also to be found in Bruce
Buchan and Lisa Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption
(Houndmills, Baskingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
o 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. Reprinted as Chap 3 in The Challenge to
Friendship in Modernity, ed. Preston King and Heather Devere (London and
Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 33–49.
o Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp.
119–22 and 124–25 in “Where the Montesquieu-Steuart Vision Went Wrong.”
o H. M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish
Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17:2 (1978): 19–40.
o Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and
Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), esp. pp. 233–47
on AF and the ideology of progress.
25
o Malcolm Jack, Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate (New
York: AMS Press, 1989). Includes a chapter on AF (Chap 4), but the next chapter
(“Attitudes and Ambivalences”) includes much on AF as well.
o Tom Jones, “Language Origins and Poetic Encounters in Rousseau, Shaftesbury,
Smith and Ferguson,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42:4 (2006): 395–
411. Pp. 405–08 esp. concern AF.
o Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2003). AF is discussed in Chap 2, “The Discourse of Civil Society.”
o Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, “Adam Ferguson Returns: Liberalism
through a Glass Darkly,” Political Theory 26:2 (1998): 173–97.
o Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, “Agonistic Liberalism: Adam Ferguson on
Modern Commercial Society and the Limits of Classical Republicanism,” in
Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 51–87.
o Umaji Kaneko, Moralphilosophie Adam Fergusons (Lucka, S[axony]-A[nhalt],
Germany: R. Berger, [1903 or 1904]). A reprint of the author’s PhD dissertation
in philosophy from the University of Leipzig, evaluated by pioneering
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Available at HT.
o David Kettler, “The Political Vision of Adam Ferguson,” Studies in Burke and
His Time (now The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation) 9:1 (1967):
763–78.
o David Kettler, “History and Theory in the Work of Adam Ferguson: A
Reconsideration (1975),” unpublished report, first circulated at a seminar in 1975
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
Provides the background to Kettler (1977) and Kettler (1978), both cited below.
Available at http://bard.academia.edu/Davidkettler.
o David Kettler, “History and Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of
Modern History 48:4 (March 1976): 95–100.
o David Kettler, “History and Theory in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil
Society: A Reconsideration,” Political Theory 5:4 (1977): 437–60.
o David Kettler, “Ferguson’s Principles: Constitution in Permanence,” Studies in
Burke and His Time 19:3 (1978): 208–22.
o Henry Laurie, Scottish Philosophy in its National Development (Glasgow: J.
Maclehose, 1902). Chap 11 is devoted to AF. Available at HT and IA.
o Norman Levine, “The German Historical School of Law and the Origins of
Historical Materialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48:3 (1987): 431–51. Pg.
435 briefly relates Marx’s reading of AF.
o Norman Levine, Marx’s Rebellion Against Lenin (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 21–24 (on progress and four-
stage theory) and 103 (on AF’s “psychology of want”).
o Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 63–65 (“Adam Ferguson and the
Rude Republic of Virtue”).
o Zisai Lin, “On the Scottish Enlightenment Thinker Ferguson’s View of Human
Nature,” Zhejiang Social Sciences 10 (2012). In Chinese.
26
o Zisai Lin, “On Adam Ferguson’s Basic Rules of Morality and their Application,”
Philosophical Trends 9 (2013). In Chinese.
o Zisai Lin, “On Adam Ferguson’s Thought on Social Spontaneous Order,”
Zhejiang Academic Journal 1 (2014). In Chinese.
o James Livesey, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-
Century Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 172–74.
o Marcus Llanque, Politische Ideengeschichte –Ein Gewebe politischer Diskurse
(Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2008), esp. pp. 243–45.
o Joseph S. Lucas, “The Course of Empire and the Long Road to Civilization:
North American Indians and Scottish Enlightenment Historians,” Explorations in
Early American Culture 4 (2000): 166–90.
o P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of
New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1982). Discusses AF in relation to Native Americans and Asians, with an
emphasis on savagery.
o Gary L. McDowell, “Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson’s
Constitutionalism,” Review of Politics 45:4 (1983): 536–52.
o Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career
Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian
Governance (Akron, OH: Univ. of Akron Press, 2001). Argues for the influence
of AF and others on Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, and Mountstuart
Elphinstone, though in an impressionistic manner.
o Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1976). The savage as a social scientific problem, for AF among many
others.
o Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E.
Anderson, foreword by Isaiah Berlin (1936; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1972), esp. pp. 214–19. Styles AF a “Pre-Romantic” alongside Burke and against
the more rationalist Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson.
o Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimson, After Adam Smith: A Century of
Transformation in Politics and Political Economy (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), esp. pp. 42–45 on AF’s conceptions of civil society
and civilization (and the division of labor).
o Hiroshi Mizuta, “Two Adams in the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Smith and
Adam Ferguson on Progress,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 191
(1980): 812–19.
o Michael Valdez Moses, “Savage Nations: Native Americans and the Western,” in
The Philosophy of the Western, ed. Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, The
Philosophy of Popular Culture (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2010), pp.
261–90, esp. pp. 267–69.
o Tom Nairn, “From Civil Society to Civic Nationalism: Evolution of a Myth,” in
Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 73–89.
Ferguson is discussed on pp. 75–77.
o Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of
Development (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969). Reprinted by Transaction
Publishers in 2009 with a new title, Metaphor and History: The Western Idea of
27
Social Development, and a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz. Contains
scattered commentary on AF.
o Richard Olson, Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance
of Science in Western Culture, Vol. 2: From the Early Modern Age through the
Early Romantic Era, ca. 1640 to ca. 1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1990). Pp. 205–18 concern AF, including links with
Montesquieu and Marx.
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Civil Society in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Civil
Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudpta Kaviraj and Sunit Khilnani
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 58–83. Clear and useful account
of the critical fortunes of AF’s idea of civil society.
o Anthony Pagden, “The ‘Defense of Civilization’ in Eighteenth-Century Social
Theory,” History of the Human Sciences 1:1 (1988): 33–45.
o Frank Palmeri, State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural
History and Modern Social Discourse (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016),
esp. pp. 41–44.
o John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1970). Contains
scattered references to AF.
o Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Primitivists: Some
Reconsiderations,” ELH 12:3 (1945): 203–220. Argues that “Ferguson’s view [of
primitive peoples] in its broadest aspect is the view of the Scottish school as a
whole” (p. 208). The section on AF is reworked on pp. 84–86 of Pearce’s The
Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1953), also available as a revised
paperback reissue in 1965 with the title, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the
Indian and the American Mind.
o Francesco D. Perillo, “Adam Ferguson e la storia della società civile,” Studium 71
(1975): 405–20.
o Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in
Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), esp. pp. 179–84. AF
is featured as the author of “the best-known of all conjectural histories” (p. 179).
o Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, “Adam Ferguson’s Republicanism,” Politeja: Pismo
Wydziału Studiów Międzynarodowych i Politycznych Uniwersytetu
Jagiellońskiego 10:2 (2008): 67–83. Available at
https://www.academia.edu/5084116/Adam_Fergusons_Republicanism.
o Murray Pittock, “Historiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish
Enlightenment, ed. Broadie (2003), pp. 258–79, esp. pp. 273–75 (Ferguson and
Other Thinkers”). See also “Anthropology: The ‘Original’ of Human Nature” by
Aaron Garrett, esp. p. 80.
o J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp.
499–503. Stresses the tension between the ideologies of virtue and commerce in
AF’s thought. Its characterization of the Essay as “the most Machiavellian of the
Scottish disquisitions on this theme” (p. 499) proved highly influential.
o J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1999–2015). The second volume of this magisterial study of Gibbon’s
28
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, subtitled “Narratives of Civil
Government,” deals extensively with the Scottish Enlightenment, and Section VI
is entitled “Adam Ferguson: The Moderate as Machiavellian.”
o Peter Hanns Reill, “Narration and Structure in Late Eighteenth-Century Historical
Thought,” History and Theory 25:3 (1986): 286–98. Views Scottish conjectural
historians, esp. AF, as influenced by Buffon and other mid-century vitalist life-
scientists rather than an older, Newtonian mechanical natural philosophy.
o Jane Rendall, “The Progress of ‘Civilization’: Women, Gender, and Enlightened
Perspectives on Civil Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Civil Society and
Gender Justice: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Karen Hagemann,
Sonya Michel, and Gunilla Budde, European Civil Society (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 59–78, especially pp. 62–64 devoted to AF’s
Essay.
o Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the
Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from
the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), esp. pp. 199–202. Deems AF more
conservative than commonly believed.
o Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British
Literary Culture, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2012), esp. pp. 49–57 and 59. Argues that AF’s Essay “offer[ed] a
‘colony of children’ as a major new metaphor for history.”
o Warren J. Samuels, with the assistance of Marianne F. Johnson and William H.
Perry, Erasing the Invisible Hand: Essays on an Elusive and Misused Concept in
Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), esp. pp. 218–21.
o Louis Schneider, “Scottish Thought on Evolutionary Change: Adam Smith, Adam
Ferguson, and John Millar,” in Classical Theories of Social Change (Morristown,
NJ: General Learning Press, 1976), pp. 13–23. Pp. 17–20 are devoted to AF.
o Silvia Sebastiani, “Conjectural History vs. The Bible: Eighteenth-Century
Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,”
Cromohs: Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 6 (2001): 1–6,
http://www.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/15734/14623.
Reprinted in Lumen 21(2002): 213–31, available at
http://www.erudit.org/revue/lumen/2002/v21/n/1012276ar.html?vue=resume.
Questions AF’s authorship of the “History” entry in various editions of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, based on its advocacy of providence and Mosaic
chronology; it also questions, on p. 225 n. 42, AF’s authorship of the historical
chart (despite the fact it bears his name).
o Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of
Progress, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, trans. Jeremy
Carden (Houndmills, Baskingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013). A translation, with slight revisions, of Sebastiani’s I limiti del progresso:
Razza e genere nell’Illuminismo scozzese (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008). AF receives
extensive treatment.
29
o Silvia Sebastiani, “Barbarism and Republicanism,” in Scottish Philosophy in the
Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, ed. Aaron Garrett and
James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 323–60.
o John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 104–05 on how AF
redefined luxury and, together with Hume and Adam Smith, “delivered the
intellectual coup de grace to the more blatant political purposes to which the idea
of luxury had been put.”
o Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
Reprinted by Princeton Univ. Press in 1995. Contains scattered references to AF.
o Nagao Shinichi, “Scottish Newtonianism in Moral Sciences: Ferguson, Reid,
Smith, and Scottish Natural Scientists, Economic Science 58:2 (2010): 1–15.
Available at http://ir.nul.nagoya-u.ac.jp/jspui/handle/2237/14603.
o Bruce R. Sievers, Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Fate of the Commons
(Medford, MA: Tufts Univ. Press, 2010), esp. pp. 72–76.
o Allan Silver, “‘Two Different Sorts of Commerce’—Friendship and Strangership
in Civil Society,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on
a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 43–74.
o Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal
([New York]: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1971).
See esp. pp. 172–79 for “certain striking parallels and similarities between the
ideas of [Samuel Stanhope] Smith and those of Adam Ferguson.”
o Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and
Spontaneous Order (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
o Craig Smith, “Adam Ferguson and the Danger of Books,” Journal of Scottish
Philosophy (formerly Reid Studies) 4:2 (2006): 93–109. On AF’s empiricist
penchant for lived experience over bookish knowledge.
o Craig Smith, “The Scottish Enlightenment, Unintended Consequences and the
Science of Man,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7:1 (2009): 9–28. Largely
concerns AF.
o Craig Smith, “Adam Ferguson and Ethnocentrism in the Science of Man,” History
of the Human Sciences 26:1 (2013): 52–67.
o John Snell, “The Political Thought of Adam Ferguson,” The Municipal University
of Wichita Bulletin 21 (May 1950): 3–20.
o David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New
Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1990). Valuable study, with much on AF and the
Scots (Chap 7).
o Hideo Tanaka, What is the Scottish Enlightenment?: Principles of Modern Society
(Kyoto: Minervashobo, 2014). Chap 7 is on the contexts of AF’s Essay. In
Japanese.
o Jean Terrier and Peter Wagner, “Civil Society and the Problématique of Political
Modernity,” in The Languages of Civil Society, ed. Peter Wagner (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 9–27, esp. pp. 11–17 (“Adam Ferguson and
the Possibility of Civil Society”).
30
o Brandon P. Turner, “Adam Ferguson on ‘Action’ and the Possibility of Non-
Political Participation,” Polity 44:2 (2012): 212–33.
o John Varty, “Civil Society as Community of Citizens: Adam Ferguson’s
Alternative to Liberalism,” in Communitarianism and Citizenship, ed. Emilios A.
Christodoulidis (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 179–91.
o John Varty, “Adam Ferguson and Conservatism,” in Reflections on Conservatism,
ed. Dogancan Ozsel (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011),
pp. 124–45.
o Patrick Vieu, “L’homme introuvable: Fondements et limites du discours
anthropologique chez Adam Ferguson,” Archives de Philosophie 78:4 (2015):
631–48.
o Danga Vileisis, “Der unbekannte Beitrag Adam Fergusons zum materialistischen
Geschichtsverst ndnis von Karl Marx,” Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung n.s.
(2009): 7–60. According to Norman Levine, Marx’s Discourse with Hegel
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
Vileisis “in an excellent article that opened new horizons in the study of the
Young Marx, surmises that Marx purchased a copy of Ferguson’s [Essay] in Paris
in the summer of 1844” (p. 270).
o Norbert Waszek, Man’s Social Nature: A Topic of the Scottish Enlightenment in
its Historical Setting (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986). Chap 5 is on AF.
o Norbert Waszek, L’Écosse des Lumières: Hume, Smith, Ferguson (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2003). A brief survey, with an introduction and chapters
on contexts, science of man, history, political economy, and the impact of the
Scottish philosophical tradition.
o Norbert Waszek, “An Essay on the History of Civil Society, d’Adam Ferguson:
contextes et lignes de force,” Études Anglaises 64:3 (2011): 259–72. Includes
discussion of Hume, Buffon, and Montesquieu.
o María Isabel Wences Simon, En torno al origen del concepto moderno de
sociedad civil: Locke, Ferguson y Hegel (Madrid: Dykinson and Instituto de
Derechos Humanos Bartolomé de las Casas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,
1998). Pt 1, Chap 2 is devoted to AF (pp. 43–91).
o Maria Isabel Wences Simon, “¿Cívica o comercial? Paradojas de la idea de
sociedad civil en Ferguson,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales,
no. 196 (2006): 15–25. Available at
http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=42119602.
o María Isabel Wences Simon, “Adam Ferguson y la difícil articulación entre el
comercio y la virtud,” Polis 14 (2012): 431–43. Available at
https://polis.revues.org/5232.
o María Isabel Wences Simon, “Política y virtud en Adam Ferguson: Ocho
lecciones para los consejeros del príncipe y para los hombres de Estado,” in Los
vértigos de la política: Una revisión desde la Modernidad, ed. Julieta Marcone
and Sergio Ortiz Leroux (Mexico City: Ediciones Coyoacan, 2012), pp. 181–97.
o Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in
Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press,
2000), esp. pp. 186–87. Pp. 181–91 explore the significance of four-stages theory,
including AF’s, for contemporary racial ideology.
31
o Frederick G. Whelan, Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-Western
Societies: Sultans and Savages (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). See
throughout.
o Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature
of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1934), pp.
145–54. Available at HT, as is a 1965 reprint from Octagon Books at IA.
o Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), esp. pp. 25–26, 37–38, and 175–76,
on AF’s political outlook, including critique of Smith’s political outlook.
o Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the
Highlands, Language, Discourse, Society (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK:
Macmillan, 1988). Argues that “Ferguson is not a primitivist” (p. 43).
o Paul B. Wood, “The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment,”
History of Science 28:1 (1990): 89–123, esp. pp. 100–02, 112, and 114.
o Paul B. Wood, “The Science of Man,” in The Cultures of Natural History, ed. N.
Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996), pp. 197–210, esp. pp. 205–06.
Notes:
1. See also Kettler’s, Oz-Salzberger’s, and Smith’s chapters in Heath and Merolle
(2008) as well as Berry’s, Heath’s, Lisa Hill’s, Merolle’s, Raynor’s, and
Weinstein’s chapters in Heath and Merolle (2009), both cited above under Book-
Length Studies and Collections.
2. See also Broadie’s, Faure’s, Nicolai’s, and Waszek’s chapters in Prunier (2014),
cited above under Book-Length Studies and Collections.
3. For AF and the idea of friendship, see Hill and McCarthy (1999) and Silver
(1997), cited in this section, and Silver (1990), cited below under Division of
Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science.
Division of Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science o Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830,
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).
AF receives extensive coverage throughout, particularly for his thinking about the
division of labor. o Harry E. Barnes, “Sociology before Comte: A Summary of Doctrines and an
Introduction to the Literature,” American Journal of Sociology 23:2 (1917): 174–
247.
o Rob Beamish, Marx, Method, and the Division of Labor (Urbana and Chicago:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), esp. pp. 74–75.
o Ted Benton, “Adam Ferguson’s Critique of the ‘Enterprise’ Culture,” in The
Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate, ed. Paul Heelas and Paul
Morris (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 100–19. Nearly identical to
Benton’s article titled “Adam Ferguson and the Enterprise Culture,” in The
Enlightenment and Its Shadows, ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 101–20.
32
o Christopher J. Berry, “The Rise of the Human Sciences,” in Scottish Philosophy
in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, ed. Aaron
Garrett and James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 283–322.
o Robert Bierstedt, “Sociological Thought in the Eighteenth Century,” in A History
of Sociological Analysis, ed. Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (New York:
Basic Books, 1978), pp. 3–38. Scotland is covered on pp. 25–30, and AF gets his
own subsection on pp. 27–29.
o David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty and
the Temporal Walls of Capitalism, RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
(London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Disciplinary critique of economics via
an examination of AF (Chap 4, “Capitalism’s Wounds: Ferguson’s International
Political Economy”), among others. A subsection considers AF and war.
o Anthony Brewer, “Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Concept of Economic
Growth,” History of Political Economy 31:2 (1999): 237–54.
o John D. Brewer, “Adam Ferguson and the Theme of Exploitation,” British
Journal of Sociology 37:4 (1986): 461–78. Sees AF as a bridge between civic
humanism and modern sociology, with particular emphasis on Marx. A version of
this article, but without being so indicated, is available as “The Scottish
Enlightenment,” in Modern Theories of Exploitation, ed. Andrew Reeve, Sage
Modern Politics Series Vol. 14, Sponsored by the European Consortium for
Political Research (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987), pp. 6–29.
o John D. Brewer, “Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in
Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour,” in
The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, ed. David McCrone
Stephen Kendrick, and Pat Straw (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press with The
British Sociological Association, 1989), pp. 13–30.
o John D. Brewer, “The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought,
c.1725–1915,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain, ed. John
Holmwood and John Scott (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 3–29. Continues the strong biographical
revisionism initiated in Brewer (2007), cited above under Other Biographical and
Contextual Studies.
o Björn Eriksson, “The First Formulation of Sociology: A Discursive Innovation of
the 18th
Century,” European Journal of Sociology/ Archives Européens de
Sociologie (Special Issue: “Our Scottish Ancestors”) 34:2 (1993): 251–76.
o Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science:
Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1995).
Discussions of AF occur throughout the essays in this book, though in no
sustained manner.
o Marco Geuna, “Adam Ferguson ed il problema della divisione del lavoro: l’analisi
delle ‘nazioni commerciali’ nell’Essay on the History of Civil Society,” Annali
della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi 18 (1984): 243–71.
o Ronald Hamowy, “Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour,”
Economica 35:139 (1968): 249–59.
33
o Gary Hatfield, “Psychology as a Natural Science in the Eighteenth Century,”
Revue de synthèse 115:3–4 (1994): 375–91. Pp. 383–84, “Scottish Sciences of
Man and Mind,” highlights AF’s contribution.
o Lisa Hill, “Ferguson and Smith on ‘Human Nature,’ ‘Interest’ and the Role of
Beneficence in Market Society,” History of Economic Ideas (“Adam Smith
Special Issue”) 4:1–2 (1996): 353–99.
o Lisa Hill, “The Invisible Hand of Adam Ferguson,” The European Legacy 3:6
(1998): 42–64.
o Lisa Hill, “Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Conflict: The
Case of Adam Ferguson,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62:2 (2001): 281–99.
o Lisa Hill, “Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Karl Marx on the Division of
Labour,” Journal of Classical Sociology 7:3 (2007): 339–66.
o Lisa Hill, “Adam Ferguson’s Sociology of Emotions,” in Emotions and Social
Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, ed. David Lemmings and Ann
Brooks, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought (London and New
York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 119–37. Engages with the thought of Norbert Elias,
the sociology of emotions, and the recent “affective turn” across the human
sciences.
o Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of
Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1983), esp. the final three essays by Hont, Ignatieff, and Franco Venturi (on
Italian influence).
o Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias, Key Sociologists (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998). Pp. 23 and 52 speculate that in the early 1930s Elias was at the
very least indirectly influenced by AF’s notion of unintended consequences (via
Sumner’s Folkways). On Sumner and AF, see also Pickens (1987), cited below.
o Robert Layton, Order and Anarchy: Civil Society, Social Disorder and War
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), esp. pp. 24–34. Groups AF with
Locke (over and against Hobbes and Rousseau), and highlights their critiques of
the state of nature as relevant to modern anthropology.
o Donald G. MacRae, “Adam Ferguson,” in The Founding Fathers of Social
Science, ed. Timothy Raison (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 26–35. First published
as “Adam Ferguson: Sociologist,” New Society 24 (1966): 792–94.
o Lynn McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s Univ. Press, 1993), esp. pp. 218–19.
o Ronald L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and Other Essays: Studies in the
Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), pp. 34–
50 (“The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology”).
o Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792 (New York:
Twayne, 1993), esp. pp. 155–61 (“Adam Ferguson’s Natural History of Society”).
o Frank Palmeri, “Conjectural History and the Origins of Sociology,” Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture 37:1 (2008): 1–21. Makes a case for AF as
predecessor of Comte and Spencer.
o Roy Pascal, “Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the
Eighteenth Century,” Modern Quarterly 1:2 (Mar. 1938): 167–79. AF is covered
under his own heading on pp. 173–75.
34
o Donald K. Pickens, “Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Folkways,” Journal
of Thought 22:1 (1987): 39–44. On AF and his peers’ influence on American
social science polymath William Graham Sumner, specifically his Folkways: A
Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and
Morals (1906). Sumner’s book is available at HT and IA.
o John Pierce, “The Scottish Common Sense School and Individual Psychology,”
Journal of Individual Psychology 31:2 (1975): 137–49. Considers Scottish
common sense philosophy as precursor to Alfred Adler’s “individual
psychology.” Features AF extensively and includes a section devoted to him (pp.
140–44).
o Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social
Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95:6 (1990):
1474–1504. Argues that “the liberal foundations of sociological theory on
personal relations are articulated” by Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Hume, and AF.
(See also Hill and McCarthy [1999] and Silver [1997], both cited above under
Social and Political Thought.)
o Andrew Skinner, “A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?,” in Classical
and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Ronald M. Meek, ed. Ian
Bradley and Michael Howard (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 78–114.
o Hermann Strasser, The Normative Structure of Sociology: Conservative and
Emancipatory Themes in Social Thought, International Library of Sociology
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), esp. Chap 3, Sect 2 (“Adam
Ferguson and John Millar: Toward a Theory of Social Conflict”), pp. 52–63.
o Guang-Zhen Sun, The Division of Labour in Economics: A History, Routledge
Studies in the History of Economics (New York: Routledge, 2012), esp. pp. 122–
23 and 128–30.
o Alan Swingewood, “Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish
Enlightenment,” British Journal of Sociology 21:2 (1970): 164–80.
o Alan Swingewood, A Short History of Sociological Thought, 3rd
ed. (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000). AF is covered on pp. 6–10 of Chap 1, “The
Scottish Enlightenment and Modernity.”
o John Varty, “Civil or Commercial?: Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society,”
Democratization 4:1 (1997): 29–48. Reprinted in Civil Society: Democratic
Perspectives, ed. Robert Fine and Shirin Rai (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 1997). Emphasizes the role of economic factors in AF’s thinking about civil
society.
o R. M. Verburg, The Two Faces of Interest: The Problem of Order and the Origins
of Political Economy and Sociology as Distinctive Fields of Inquiry in the Scottish
Enlightenment, Tinbergen Institute Research Series (Amsterdam: Thesis
Publishers, 1991), esp. pp. 205–14 (“Adam Ferguson: The Shaping of
Sociology”). A reprint of the author’s 1991 doctoral dissertation from Erasmus
University Rotterdam.
o Norbert Waszek, “The Division of Labour: From the Scottish Enlightenment to
Hegel,” The Owl of Minerva 15:1 (1983): 51–75.
o María Isabel Wences Simon, “La relevancia sociológica de la Ilustración
escocesa,” Revista Internacional de Sociología 68:1 (2010): 37–56. Concerns AF,
35
Adam Smith, and John Millar. Available at
http://revintsociologia.revistas.csic.es/index.php/revintsociologia/article/viewArti
cle/173.
o Donald Winch, “Scottish Political Economy,” in The Cambridge History of
Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 443–64. Contains a sustained and
insightful contrast between AF and Adam Smith.
Notes:
1. For more on AF and psychology, see Kaneko (1904), cited above under Social
and Political Thought.
2. For more on AF and anthropology, see Slotkin (1965) and Launay (2010), cited
above under Selections in Anthologies.
3. For more on AF and sociology, see Schneider’s introduction to his edition of
Ferguson’s Essay (1980), cited above under Editions; and Jogland (1959),
Lehmann (1930), and Séris (1994), all cited above under Book-Length Studies
and Collections. Blaikie (2010), cited above under Other Biographical or
Contextual Studies, also contains a section comparing AF with modern
sociologist Michel Maffesoli, on pp. 39–45.
4. Pascal (1938), Meek (1967), and Skinner (1982), all cited in this section, form a
trio, with each building upon the former.
5. Pioneering studies of AF by German sociologists of the early twentieth century—
namely, Hemann Huth in 1907, August Oncken in 1909, and Theodore
Buddeberg in 1925—are cited in numerous sources mentioned in this
bibliography: particularly, in Oz-Salzberger’s monograph (1995) and in her
edition of AF’s Essay (1995), and in Merolle, Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson
(2006).
6. See also Milgate and Stimson (2009), cited above under Social and Political
Thought.
7. See also Pascal (1962), cited below under Connections with European Thought.
Militia, National Defense, and War o Bruce Buchan, “Civilisation, Sovereignty and War: The Scottish Enlightenment
and International Relations,” International Relations 20:2 (2006): 175–92. A
reworking of Buchan, “Enlightened Histories: Civilization, War and the Scottish
Enlightenment,” The European Legacy 10:2 (2005): 177–92.
o Rosalind Carr, “The Gentleman and the Soldier: Patriotic Masculinities in
Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 28:2 (2008):
102–21. Argues that Highland martial masculinity, including that advanced by
AF, destabilized dominant conceptions of polite, refined masculinity.
o Rosalind Carr, Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland, Scottish Historical Review Monographs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.
Press, 2014), esp. pp. 146–47 on AF’s Essay.
o Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in
British America, The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and
36
History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 197–
202.
o Lisa Hill, “Adam Smith on War (and Peace),” in British International Thinkers
from Hobbes to Namier, ed. Ian Hall and Lisa Hill (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 71–90, esp. 77–78.
o Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present,
trans. Alex Skinner (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2013), esp. pp. 31–37.
o David Thomas Konig, “The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic
Context for the Historical Meaning of ‘the Right of the People to Keep and Bear
Arms,’” Law and History Review 22:4 (2004): 119–59. Discusses the significance
of the Scots militia debate, including Ferguson’s contribution, for understanding
the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the USA.
o Iain McDaniel, “Honour and Pride in Adam Ferguson’s Conception of Modern
Patriotism,” in Human Nature as the Basis of Morality and Society in Early
Modern Europe, ed. Juhana Lemetti and Eva Piirimae (Helsinki: Philosophical
Society of Finland, 2007), p. 105–20.
o Iain McDaniel, “Unsocial Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment: Ferguson and
Kames on War, Sociability and the Foundations of Patriotism,” History of
European Ideas (Special Issue: “Sociability in Enlightenment Thought”) 41:5
(2015): 662–82. Explores the concept of patriotism based on conflict in the
thought of AF and Kames.
o John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1985). Argues that AF and his Moderate coterie promoted the
“spirit” of a militia rather than the institution itself, and that as a result of their
support for Ossian and the militia, they “well deserve to be counted with the
earliest inventors of the modern, kilt-ridden tradition of Scottishness” (p. 243).
o Philip Shaw, “Dead Soldiers: Suffering in British Military Art, 1783–1789,”
Romanticism 11:1 (2005): 55–69. Focusing on the famous 1787 gathering at AF’s
house, involving AF, Burns, a young Walter Scott, and others, it speculates on
AF’s imagined response to Henry William Bunbury’s 1783 print “Affliction,”
depicting a dead soldier and his grieving widow, orphan, and dog. Reworked as
Chap 1 in Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Farnham,
Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
o Richard B. Sher, “Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National
Defense,” Journal of Modern History 61:2 (1989): 240–68. Uses AF’s
unpublished lecture notes to develop the comparison between the two Adams.
o Richard B. Sher, “Poker Club (act. 1762–1784),” in Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004; online ed., May 2013).
o Craig Smith, “‘We have Mingled Politeness with the Use of the Sword’: Nature
and Civilisation in Adam Ferguson’s Philosophy of War,” The European Legacy
19:1 (2014): 1–15. Explores warfare between nations as a normative criterion for
the assessment of civilization.
o Mikko Tolonen, “The Gothic Origin of Modern Civility: Mandeville and the
Scots on Courage,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12.1 (2014): 51–69. P. 63
concerns AF.
37
Notes:
1. See Raynor’s edition of the militia pamphlet Sister Peg (1982), and Fagg and
Amoh, “Adam Ferguson’s Rules of War” (1991; reprinted as appendix I in
Merolle, Correspondence of Adam Ferguson [1995], vol. 2), cited above
under Editions. See also Battistelli (1990), cited above under Selections in
Anthologies, and Arbo (2011), cited above under Selections in Journals.
2. For more on AF and military matters, see pp. 126–28, 177–82 and 217–20 in
Hill (2006), McDaniel’s monograph (2013), and Raynor’s and McDaniel’s
chapters in Heath and Merolle (2008), cited above under Book-Length Studies
and Collections; Gilchrist (2003) and pp. 218–21 and 230–36 in Sher (1985),
both cited above under Other Biographical and Contextual Studies; Chap 2 in
Wells (1997), cited above under Theses and Dissertations; Buchan’s
monograph The Empire of Political Thought (2008), Broadie’s “Scotland’s
‘Science of Man’” (2015), and Kaldor (2003), cited above under Social and
Political Thought; Blaney and Inayatullah (2010), pp. 92–100, cited above
under Division of Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science;
and Gordon (1976), cited below under Literature and Rhetoric.
3. For explicit considerations of AF and gender, see esp. Rendall (2008) and
Sebastiani (2013), cited above under Social and Political Thought; and Oz-
Salzberger (1992), cited below under Connections with European Thought.
Effeminacy, moreover, is a perennial concern for AF, informing his thinking
not only on war but also on commerce and other matters.
American and French Revolutions o Yasuo Amoh, “Adam Ferguson and the American Revolution,” Kochi University
Review of Social Science, no. 37 (March 1990): 55–87. Originally published in
Japanese in 1989. The headings in this article are titled: I. Introduction, II.
Ferguson and Price, III. Ferguson as Secretary of the Carlisle Peace Commission,
IV. Ferguson and Smith. The appendix (pp. 81–87) is a transcription of
“Memorial respecting the measures to be pursued on the present immediate
prospect of a final separation of the American colonys from Great Britain”
(reprinted as appendix H in Merolle, Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, vol. 2,
cited above under Editions). Available at
https://ir.kochi-u.ac.jp/dspace/handle/10126/5721.
o Roy Branson, “James Madison and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 40:2 (1979): 235–50. Claims that “Madison had purchased [AF’s
Essay] for himself in 1775” (p. 237), and that he was esp. taken by its emphasis
on the “possible decline of commercial society” (p. 241).
o Dalphy I. Fagerstrom, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” The
William and Mary Quarterly (“Scotland and America Special Issue”) 3rd
ser., 11:2
(1954): 252–75. Still valuable.
o Jane B. Fagg, “An ‘Ingenious Literary Production’: Adam Ferguson and the
Carlisle Commission Manifesto,” Scotia 24 (2000): 1–14.
o Ronald Hamowy, “Two Whig Views of the American Revolution: Adam
Ferguson’s Response to Richard Price,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political
38
Philosophy 31:1 (2003): 3–35. (The entire issue is available online.) A slightly
modified version was later published as “Scottish Thought and the American
Revolution: Adam Ferguson’s Response to Richard Price,” in Liberty and
American Experience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 348–87.
o Andrew Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835
(Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1975). Pp. 51 and 80 briefly relate the fate of
AF’s books in America, including during the Revolutionary War.
o Emma Macleod, British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities,
The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long
Eighteenth Century (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). A
few scattered but useful remarks on AF, mainly in Chap 3, “Conservative Doubts,
c. 1774–1791: The Argument for Caution.”
o Emma Macleod, “Revolution,” in Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century,
Vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, ed. Aaron Garrett and James A. Harris
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 361–403. Despite its general title, this
essay focuses on AF’s thought and action regarding the American and French
Revolutions.
o Henry E. Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow: James
Maclehose and Sons, 1912), pp. 5–8. Makes no reference to AF’s views on the
French Revolution but does, in Chap 1, briefly discuss his dealings with
Christopher Wyvill, the leader of the Yorkshire Association for parliamentary
reform. (It also revealingly quotes from the 6-vol. edition of the “Wyvill Papers,”
available at ECCO.) Available at HT and IA.
o Peter C. Messer, Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in
Eighteenth-Century America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 2005).
Speculates on AF’s unintended influence on the Patriots, particularly his
historicist or relativistic republicanism.
o Anna Plassart, “‘Scientific Whigs’?: Scottish Historians on the French
Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 74:1 (2013), 93–114. Concludes that
AF and others “did not in fact encourage a ‘social’ interpretation of the French
Revolution” (p. 111), i.e., a view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois
revolution.
o Anna Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Ideas in
Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), Chap 6, “Adam Ferguson on
Democracy and Empire.”
o Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), esp. pp. 288–92, which, among other
things, asks “Was Jefferson using ‘political bands’ in the preamble to the
Declaration as Ferguson used ‘the bands of political union’...referring to the bands
of affection in the moral-sense terminology?” (pp. 290–91).
o Donald Winch, “Adam Smith’s Politique Coloniale,” Cahiers d’économie
politique 27:1 (1996): 39–55. Makes a brief but interesting comparison between
AF and Adam Smith. Available at http://www.persee.fr/doc/cep_0154-
8344_1996_num_27_1_1194. In English.
39
Notes:
1. For primary source material, see Amoh et al., Adam Ferguson and the
American Revolution (2015) and Appendices G, H, and I in Merolle,
Correspondence of Adam Ferguson (1995), vol. 2, both cited above under
Editions.
2. For secondary source material, see pp. xlvii–lvi and lxxxii–lxxxvii in Fagg’s
“Biographical Introduction,” in Merolle, Correspondence of Adam Ferguson
(1995), vol. 1, cited above under Editions; pp. 222–27 in Hill (2006) and
chapters by Amoh and by Kettler in Heath and Merolle (2008), cited above
under Book-Length Studies and Collections; Gilchrist (2003) and pp. 264–67
and 273–75 in Sher (1985), cited above under Other Biographical and
Contextual Studies; and Elazar (2014) and Varty (2011), cited above under
Social and Political Thought.
Religion o Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church
History 24:3 (1955): 257–72. Regarding the prominent American Unitarian
William Ellery Channing, claims that it was Ferguson’s Essay that “convinced
him of the social nature of moral improvement” (p. 262).
o Eugene Heath, “In the Garden of God: Religion and Vigour in the Frame of
Ferguson’s Thought,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 13:1 (2015): 55–74. Esp.
considers AF’s treatment of human sinfulness as well as his practical experience
within the Church of Scotland.
Notes:
1. For primary source material, see Arbo’s article on AF’s 1746 sermon (2011),
cited above under Selections in Journals. 2. For a searching examination of AF’s religious views, see Chap 3 of Hill (2006),
cited above under Book-Length Studies and Collections. See also: Arbo’s
monograph (2014), Chen’s chapter in Heath and Merolle (2008), pp. 171–78 in
Kettler’s monograph (1965), all cited above under Book-Length Studies and
Collections; various references to religion or church politics in Camic (1983) and
Sher (1985), and Fagg’s article on the ministry of AF, Sr. (1994), all cited above
under Other Biographical and Contextual Studies; and Maloyed’s dissertation
(2010), cited above under Theses and Dissertations. Sher (1985), pp. 40–44,
examines AF’s 1746 regimental sermon in detail.
Literature and Rhetoric o M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). This classic of Romanticism studies briefly
suggests Schiller’s and Thomas Carlyle’s debt to AF.
o Thomas Ahnert, “Clergymen as Polite Philosophers: Douglas and the Conflict
between Moderates and Orthodox in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Intellectual
History Review 18:3 (2008): 375–83. Features AF extensively.
40
o Katrin Berndt, “Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott’s
Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824),” Studies in
Eighteenth Century Culture 41 (2012): 115–35. See also p. 275 of Bruce
Beiderwell, “Scott’s Redgauntlet as a Romance of Power,” Studies in
Romanticism 28:2 (1989): 273–89.
o Thorne Compton, “Adam Ferguson and John Witherspoon in ‘Satan’s Seminary’:
Douglas, the Critics, and Moral Philosophy,” Studies in Scottish Literature 18
(1983): 166–76.
o Keith M. Costain, “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of
John Galt,” ELH 43:3 (1976): 342–65.
o Keith M. Costain, “The Community of Man: Galt and Eighteenth-Century
Scottish Realism,” Scottish Literary Journal 8:1 (May 1981): 10–29.
o Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Contains some useful commentary on AF, esp. on pp. 17, 122, and 153. The last
reference, e.g., concerns Victorian anthropologist John Ferguson McLennan’s
invocation of AF in his article on “Law,” for the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
o Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in
Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). Contains
scattered commentary on AF in relation to Ossian, from a Johnsonian point of
view.
o Christopher Darr, “Adam Ferguson’s Civil Society and the Rhetorical Functions
of (In)Civility in United States Senate Debate,” Communication Quarterly 59:5
(2011): 603–24.
o Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Cleric in the Age of Johnson
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Discusses the dispute over
Ossian that is treated in Sher (1991), in this section.
o JoEllen DeLucia, A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the
Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2015). Contains scattered references to AF,
esp. in Chap 4 in relation to Ann Radcliffe. An earlier version of this chapter is
available as “From the Female Gothic to a Feminist Theory of History: Ann
Radcliffe and the Scottish Enlightenment,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation 50:1 (2010): 101–15.
o Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge
Studies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2006), pp. 23–25 (“Ossian and Epic Primitivism”).
o Christopher J. Finlay, “Rhetoric and Citizenship in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on
the History of Civil Society,” History of Political Thought 27:1 (2006): 27–49.
o Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 37–54.
o Donald Foerster, “Mid-Eighteenth Century Scotch Criticism of Homer,” Studies
in Philology 40:3 (1943): 425–46.
o Donald M. Foerster, Homer in English Criticism: The Historical Approach in the
Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1947). Available at HT,
and as a reprint by Archon Books in 1969.
41
o Duncan Forbes, “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott,” Cambridge Journal 7
(Oct. 1953): 20–35. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The
Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw, Critical Essays on British Literature (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1996), pp. 83–97. Pioneering examination of the links between
Scott and AF.
o Erik Frykman, John Galt and the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Philosophy: Some
Notes on the Intellectual Background of Galt’s Scottish Stories, being The John
Galt Lecture for 1953, Papers of the Greenock Philosophical Society (Greenock,
UK: “Telegraph” Printing Works, 1954). To our knowledge, Frykman was the
first to observe that Galt’s works seriously reflect eighteenth-century Scottish
philosophy, esp. AF. On p. 11, he lists the following Fergusonian themes in Galt’s
fiction: man as a social being, historical causality, luxury, political institutions,
public opinion, war, and some ethical problems. Scattered references to AF are
also contained in Frykman’s monograph on Galt, John Galt’s Scottish Stories,
1820–1823 (Uppsala: Lundequistska bokhandeln, 1959).
o Peter D. Garside, “Scott and the ‘Philosophical’ Historians,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 36:3 (1975): 497–512.
o Paul Goetsch, “Linguistic Colonialism and Primitivism: The Discovery of Native
Languages and Oral Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Travel Books and Novels,”
Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 106 (1988): 338–59. Argues that
“Ferguson anticipates questions which were to fascinate the regional
novelists...Scott..., Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy” (p. 355).
o Milton A. Goldberg, Smollett and the Scottish School: Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Thought (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1959), esp. pp. 10–
14, 86–87, 114–15, 149–50, and 184, which argue for Smollett’s involvement
with the Scottish common sense school as typified by AF.
o R. C. Gordon, “Scott, Ferguson, and the Martial Spirit,” International Review of
Scottish Studies 6 (1976): 66–82. Available at
http://www.irss.uoguelph.ca/article/view/678.
o Neil R. Grobman, “Eighteenth-Century Scottish Philosophers on Oral Tradition,”
Journal of the Folklore Institute 10:3 (1973): 187–95.
o Neil R. Grobman, “Adam Ferguson’s Influence on Folklore Research: The
Analysis of Methodology and the Oral Epic,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 38:1
(1974): 11–22. Pioneering examination of AF as unacknowledged predecessor of
Edward B. Tylor, Franz Boas, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, and others.
o Regina Hewitt, “Introduction: Observations and Conjectures on John Galt’s Place
in Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-Era Studies,” in John Galt: Observations
and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, ed. Regina Hewitt
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2012), pp. 1–29. Makes the best case to date for AF as “the most important of all
conjecturalists to keep in mind when studying Galt” (p. 8).
o Richard J. Jones, Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment: Travels through France,
Italy, and Scotland (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2011). See esp. p. 76
for some interesting remarks on AF’s pamphlet, Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously
Considered.
42
o Yoon Sun Lee, “Giants in the North: Douglas, the Scottish Enlightenment, and
Scott’s Redgauntlet,” Studies in Romanticism 40:1 (2001): 109–21. Offers some
trenchant remarks on AF and nationalism.
o Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (London
and Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1986). Pp. 113–23 are devoted to AF’s aesthetics;
esp. intriguing is Meehan’s suggestion that the “many new aesthetic emphases [of
the Essay] found a full and worthy approximation in literary practice only in the
writings of William Wordsworth” (p. 113).
o Dafydd Moore, “James Macpherson and Adam Ferguson: An Enlightenment
Encounter,” Scottish Literary Journal 24:2 (1997): 5–23.
o Dafydd Moore, “Adam Ferguson, the Poems of Ossian, and the Imaginative Life
of the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of European Ideas 31:2 (2005): 277–88.
o Dafydd Moore, “James Macpherson and ‘Celtic Whiggism,’” Eighteenth-Century
Life 30:1 (2005): 1–24. Deems Macpherson a true scion of AF, partaking of the
aristocratic ideology of “noblesse oblige.”
o Frank Palmeri, Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665–1815 (Newark,
DE: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 142–52 (“Ferguson and Scott”).
o Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, Rhetoric and Society
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). Contains scattered references to AF, esp.
in the final chapter on Ossian.
o George Pottinger, Heirs of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh Reviewers and Writers
1800–1830 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1992). Claims, in passing, that
“Ferguson...was a seminal influence on Francis Jeffrey and the Reviewers” (p.
36), and that John Galt “had taken the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson,
especially his Essay on Civil Society, to heart” (211).
o Thomas Reinert, “Adam Ferguson’s Aesthetic Idea of Community Spirit,” SEL
48:3 (2008): 613–32.
o Margaret Mary Rubel, Savage and Barbarian: Historical Attitudes in the
Criticism of Homer and Ossian in Britain (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1978).
Contains much on AF’s historicization of Homer and Ossian.
o Paul Henderson Scott, Walter Scott and Scotland (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood, 1981). Argues that “even in incidentals, Scott tends to quote
Ferguson consciously or unconsciously” (p. 66).
o Paul Henderson Scott, John Galt, Scottish Writers Series (Edinburgh: Scottish
Academic Press, 1985), esp. pp. 34–36. Subsequently submitted as the author’s
1987 MLitt thesis from the University of Edinburgh, “The Development of Social
and Economic Theories in Selected Fiction of John Galt.”
o Richard B. Sher, “‘Those Scotch Imposters and their Cabal’: Ossian and the
Scottish Enlightenment,” in Man and Nature / L’homme et la nature: Proceedings
of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 1, ed. Roger L.
Emerson, Gilles Girard, and Roseann Runte (London, ON: Faculty of Education,
Univ. of Western Ontario, 1982), pp. 55–63. Available at
http://www.erudit.org/revue/man/1982/v1/n/1011791ar.html?vue=resume.
o Richard B. Sher, “Percy, Shaw, and the Ferguson ‘Cheat’: National Prejudice in
the Ossian Wars,” in Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 207–45. Relates how the ugliness of Anglo-
43
Scottish hostility transformed a seemingly minor incident into a major cultural
confrontation.
o Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the
Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1988), esp. pp. 157–59.
o Norbert Waszek, “Adam Ferguson on the Dilemma of the Modern Poet,”
Chapman (Special Issue: “On Tom Scott and Ann Scott-Moncrieff”) 9:4-5
(1987): 55–60. This issue is also identified as no. 47–48, and the magazine is also
called Chapman Magazine and Chapman: Scotland’s Quality Literary Magazine.
o Lois Whitney, “English Primitivistic Theories of Epic Origins,” Modern
Philology 21:4 (1924): 337–78. Despite the title (typical of the times), this article
is concerned almost exclusively with contemporary Scottish thinkers, including
AF.
o Rachel Zuckert, “Kames’s Naturalist Aesthetics and the Case of Tragedy,”
Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7:2 (2009): 147–62. Uses the comment on
Shakespeare’s Othello, in AF’s Essay, to rethink Kamesian aesthetics.
Notes:
1. See also Dix’s introductory essay “Ferguson’s Aesthetics” in Merolle,
Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson (2006), cited above under Editions. On Ossian,
see pp. lxviii–lxxii in Fagg’s “Biographical Introduction,” in Merolle,
Correspondence of Adam Ferguson (1995), vol. 1, cited above under Editions.
2. For more on AF and Sir Walter Scott, see Bradwell (1993), Fielding (1990),
Philip (1982), and Sabbah (2003), cited above under Theses and Dissertations.
3. For studies of AF and German imaginative literature, see Connections with
European Thought, below. For links between AF and Jacobi’s novel Woldemar in
particular, see von Hofe (1957), Pascal (1947), and Waszek (2015).
Connections with European Thought o Claus Altmayer, Aufklärung als Popularphilosophie: Bürgerliches Individuum
und Öffentlichkeit bei Christian Garve (St. Ingbert, Germany: W.J. Röhrig, 1992),
esp. pp. 219–33 (“Die schottische Sozialphilosophie”).
o Tatiana Artemieva, “Adam Ferguson’s Philosophy in Russia,” in Scotland and
Russia in the Enlightenment: Proceedings of the International Conference, 1-3
September 2000, Edinburgh (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Centre for History of
Ideas, 2001), pp. 9–19. Concerns other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers’ influence
in Russia, but concludes with AF’s influence on Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (and,
briefly, Mikhail Nikitich Muraviev). In English, though most of the book is in
Russian.
o John Alan Baum, Montesquieu and Social Theory (Oxford: Pergamon Press,
1979), esp. pp. 113–17. Based on the author’s 1976 University of London
doctoral dissertation, it is dismissive toward AF.
o Dushan Bresky, “Schiller’s Debt to Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson,”
Comparative Literature 13:3 (1961): 239–53. Considers AF’s influence on
Schiller’s early plays.
44
o Alexander Broadie, Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with
France (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012). Chap 6 (“Civil Society and the Virtues of
Citizenship”), pp. 160–211, concerns AF and Montesquieu.
o Victor Cousin, Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale au dix-huitième siècle,
professé a la Faculté de lettres en 1819 et 1820, Vol. 2: École écossaise, ed.
Arsène Danton and Etienne Vacherot (Paris: Librairie de Ladrange, 1840). Pp.
282–357, which comprise the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lessons, constitute the
most comprehensive contemporary treatment of AF. Available at GB, HT, and
IA.
o Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–
1807, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). Contains
much on AF, and also good on Garve.
o Robert Van Dusen, Christian Garve and English Belles-Lettres (Bern: Herbert
Lang, 1970). Although AF is mentioned very briefly, this work deals with
Garve’s extensive engagement with English-language literature and literary
theory. Thus, it is essential for a more rounded appreciation of Garve.
o Edward S. Flajole, S.J., “Lessing’s Retrieval of Lost Truths,” PMLA 74:1 (1959):
52–66. Concerns AF’s influence on Lessing.
o F. T. H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics (1750–1800) (London:
Edward Arnold, 1939), esp. pp. 42–48, 55–57. Still worth consulting.
o Peter France, “Primitivism and Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Scots,”
Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985): 64–79. Reckons that “Ferguson is often
led into something approaching Rousseau’s eloquence, though his writing rarely
has the nostalgic fervour of the Citizen of Geneva” (p. 73). Reprinted as Chap 11
(“Enlightened Primitivism”) in the author’s Politeness and its Discontents:
Problems in French Classical Culture, Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
o Armin Paul Frank, Auch eine kopernikanische Wende?: Übersetzungebegriffe
französisch, englisch, deutsch: 1740er bis 1830er Jahre (Göttingen, Germany: V
& R unipress, 2015), pp. 132–34 (“Kulturmorphologie: Ferguson und Herder”).
o David H. De Grood, Dialectics and Revolution, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: B. R.
Grüner, 1978–84). Vol. 2 (1979), on Hegel, intermittently speculates on AF’s
influence.
o Lisa Hill, “Did Adam Ferguson Inspire Friedrich Schiller’s Philosophy of Play?:
An Exercise in Tracking the Itinerary of an Idea,” in Cultural Transfer through
Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of
Translation, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 315–37.
o Ulrich Im Hof, Isaak Iselin und die Spätaufklärung (Bern: Francke, 1967).
Contains a little coverage of AF.
o Harold von Hofe, “Jacobi, Wieland, and the New World,” Monatshefte 49:4
(1957): 187–92. AF and Jacobi are discussed on p. 190.
o Girolamo Imbruglia, “Scottish Enlightenment in Naples: History and Political
Languages of Reform,’” in The Enlightenment in Scotland: National and
International Perspectives, ed. Jean-François Dunyach and Ann Thomson,
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
2015), pp. 153–79. Builds on Robertson (2005), in this section, concerning AF’s
45
influence on Francesco Antonio Grimaldi and, to a lesser extent, Francesco Mario
Pagano.
o Paul Janet, Histoire de la science politique dans ses rapports avec la morale, 2nd
ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique de Ladrange, 1872 [orig. 1858]). Vol.
2, pp. 546–56 discusses “Ferguson, excellent moraliste, et publicist original” (p.
546) in a chapter titled “École de Montesquieu.” Various editions are available at
HT and IA.
o Leonie Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde: Christian
Garve (1742–1798), Reflexionen zur Fachgeschichte (Marburg: N.G. Elwert,
1998), esp. pp. 431–35.
o Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A
Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy, foreword by Lewis White
Beck (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1987). Contains some
coverage of AF, though with the peculiar claim that Thomas Reid was his most
important teacher.
o R. A. Leigh, “Rousseau and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Contributions to
Political Economy 5:1 (1986): 1–21.
o Christiane Liermann, Rosminis politische Philosophie der zivilen Gesellschaft
(Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004).
o Sheila Mason, “Ferguson and Montesquieu: Tacit Reproaches?,” British Journal
for Eighteenth-Century Studies 11:2 (1988): 193–203.
o Iain McDaniel, “Enlightened History and the Decline of Nations: Ferguson,
Raynal, and the Contested Legacies of the Dutch Republic,” History of European
Ideas 36:2 (2010): 203–16. Compares AF’s Essay with Raynal’s Histoire des
deux Indes.
o Iain McDaniel, “Philosophical History and the Science of Man in Scotland: Adam
Ferguson’s Response to Rousseau,” Modern Intellectual History 10:3 (2013):
543–68.
o James A. McNeely, “Historical Relativism in Wieland’s Concept of the Ideal
State,” Modern Language Quarterly 22:3 (1961): 269–82. See esp. pp. 274–75.
o Nicholas Miller, “Schlüsselkategorie Rousseaus: die Familie,” in Rousseau und
die Moderne, ed. Iwan D’Aprile and Stefanie Stockhorst (Göttingen: Wallstein,
2013), pp. 72–82. Rousseau’s writings on the family are explored alongside those
of AF, Smith, and Hume.
o James Moore, “Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Montesquieu
and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), pp.
179–95. Contains a section on “Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson,” pp. 184–86.
o H. V. S. Ogden, “The State of Nature and the Decline of Lockian Political Theory
in England, 1760–1800,” American Historical Review 46:1 (1940): 21–44.
Groups AF alongside other early English-language critics of the antithesis of
nature and art in Rousseau’s Second Discourse.
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Rejection of Conflict: Adam Ferguson’s German
Readers,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Special Issue:
“Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment, Bristol,
21–27 July 1991”), 305 (1992): 1775–79.
46
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “From Male Citizen to Neuter Mensch: The Emasculation
of Adam Ferguson’s Civil Discourse by the German Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-
Century Scotland: The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies
Society, no. 7 (Spring 1993): 5–8.
o Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Adam Ferguson’s Histories in Germany: English Liberty,
Scottish Vigour, and German Rigour,” in British and German Historiography,
1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and
Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 49–66.
o Roy Pascal, “The Novels of F. H. Jacobi and Goethe’s Early Classicism,”
Publications of the English Goethe Society 16 (1947): 54–89. Jacobi’s invocation
of AF in his novel Woldemar is discussed on pp. 79–80.
o Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press,
1953). Pp. 217–32 (Chap 7, “The Idea of History”) discuss AF’s influence on
Herder, among other influences, Scottish and otherwise. See also the author’s
earlier, more comprehensive treatment of the Scottish historians, in “Herder and
the Scottish Historical School,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 14
(1938–39): 23–42.
o Roy Pascal, “‘Bildung’ and the Division of Labour,” in German Studies:
Presented to Walter Horace Bruford on his Retirement by his Pupils, Colleagues,
and Friends (London: George G. Harrap, 1962), pp. 14–28.
o Deric Regin, Freedom and Dignity: The Historical and Philosophical Thought of
Schiller (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), pp. 11–15.
o John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–
1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), esp. pp. 397–403 on the
influence of AF on Neapolitans Francesco Antonio Grimaldi, Giuseppe Maria
Galanti, and Francesco Mario Pagano.
o Richard 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. David Wootton (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 368–402. Largely concerns AF in relation to Montesquieu.
o Fulvio Tessitore, Nuovi contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo
(Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2002), pp. 55–71 (“Francesco Antonio
Grimaldi e l’ineguaglianza”). This essay was originally published as “F. A.
Grimaldi tra Rousseau e Ferguson,” in G. Cotroneo et al., Filosofi e
l’uguaglianza: [atti del XXX Congresso nazionale della Società filosofica
italiana], 2 vols. (Messina: Sicania, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 185–204.
o James H. Warner, “The Reaction in Eighteenth-Century England to Rousseau’s
Two Discours,” PMLA 48:2 (1933): 471–87.
o Norbert Waszek, “Bibliography of the Scottish Enlightenment in Germany,”
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 230 (1985): 283–303. AF gets his
own heading on pp. 291–92.
o Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil
Society” (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).
Contains much on AF.
o Norbert Waszek, “Der junge Hegel und die ‘querelle des anciens et des
modernes’: Ferguson, Garve, Hegel,” in Idealismus mit Folgen: Die
47
Epochenschwelle um 1800 in Kunst und Geisteswissenschaften: Festschrift zum
65. Geburtstag von Otto Pöggeler, ed. Hans-Jürgen Gawoll and Christoph Jamme
(Munich: W. Fink, 1994), pp. 37–46.
o Norbert Waszek, “Aux sources de la ‘Querelle’ dans les Lettres sur l’Éducation
esthétique de l’Homme de Schiller: Ferguson and Garve,” in Crise et conscience
du temps: Des Lumières à Auschwitz, ed. Jean-Marie Paul (Nancy, France:
Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1998), pp. 111–29.
o Norbert Waszek, “La ‘tendance à la sociabilité (Trieb der Geselligkeit) chez
Christian Garve,” Revue germanique internationale 18 (2002): 71–85. Much
attention is paid to AF, whom Garve translated into German.
o Norbert Waszek, “The Scottish Enlightenment in Germany, and Its Translator,
Christian Garve (1742–98),” in Scotland in Europe, ed. Tom Hubbard and R.D.S.
Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 55–72.
o Norbert Waszek, “La référence à Adam Ferguson dans le Woldemar de Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi,” Etudes germaniques 70:1 (2015): 97–112. Abstract in English
and German. This issue is also referred to as no. 277.
o Alick West, “Adam Ferguson,” in Festschrift zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von
Georg Lukács, ed. Frank Benseler (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), pp.
249–58. Argues that Lukács “ranks [AF] with those courageous thinkers of the
18th
century whose works reveals the contradictions of capitalism” (p. 248). (In
English, as are a few other chapters.)
o Benno von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1959), pp. 77–82 on
Ferguson’s influence on Schiller. In German.
o William Witte, “Scottish Influence on Schiller,” in Schiller and Burns, and Other
Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), pp. 29–37. Claims that Schiller’s teacher,
Jakob Friedrich von Abel, was particularly influenced by AF (p. 34). Also, the
author’s earlier monograph, Schiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), briefly
mentions AF as part of the legacy of Shaftesbury.
Notes:
1. For more on AF and Montesquieu, see Binoche’s chapter in Prunier (2014) and
the first two chapters of McDaniel’s monograph (2013), cited above under Book-
Length Studies and Collections, as well as Hirschman (1977), Olson (1990), and
Waszek (2011), cited above under Social and Political Thought.
2. For more on AF and Rousseau, see Binoche’s chapter in Prunier (2014) and
throughout McDaniel’s monograph (2013), cited above under Book-Length
Studies and Collections; Meer (2016), cited above under Other Biographical and
Contextual Studies; McLean (1989) and Smith (1980), cited above under Theses
and Dissertations; and Hill (2009), Jones (2006), and Layton (2006), cited above
under Social and Political Thought.
3. For more on AF and Christian Garve, begin with the extensive coverage of him in
Oz-Salzberger’s monograph (1995), esp. in Chap 8, cited above under Book-
Length Studies and Collections. See also: Garve’s edition of AF’s Institutes of
Moral Philosophy, cited above under Editions; Oz-Salzberger’s article on Garve
in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (2003) and Tonelli’s article on him in
48
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), both cited above under Modern
Dictionary and Encyclopedia Articles; and Waszek’s chapter in Brühlmeier
(1996), cited above under Social and Political Thought.
4. For more on AF and Schiller, see Abrams (1971), cited above under Literature
and Rhetoric.
5. For more on AF and Hegel, see Hill (2009), cited above under Dictionary and
Encyclopedia Entries; Ferrarotti (1984) and Simon (1998), cited above under
Social and Political Thought; and Waszek (1983), cited above under Division of
Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science.
6. For more on AF and his contemporary German reception and influence in general,
see Oz-Salzberger’s monograph (1995), cited above under Book-Length Studies
and Collections.
7. For more on AF and Italy, see Venturi’s essay in Hont and Ignatieff (1983), cited
above under Division of Labor, Political Economy, and Origins of Social Science.
Please send comments, corrections, and information about relevant past, new, and forthcoming
publications to the editors, [email protected] and [email protected].
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