The Scottish Enlightenment

Montesquieu made institutions socially caused (3.1.5). In the fifty years that followed, in a small, poor, rapidly changing country on the edge of Europe, a group of friends and colleagues took the further steps — and produced what is, by a considerable margin, the closest thing to sociology that existed before the word.

This lesson is the last in Topic 3.1, and it is the one where the destination becomes visible.

Edinburgh and Glasgow, roughly 1750 to 1790.

Within a few miles and a few decades: David Hume, philosopher and historian. Adam Smith, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, then author of two books that between them found modern economics and contain a theory of the social self. Adam Ferguson, professor and former army chaplain, who had been present at a battle. John Millar, professor of law at Glasgow and Smith's student, who wrote a sociology of stratification. William Robertson, historian and principal of Edinburgh University. Lord Kames, judge. James Hutton, who founded modern geology. Joseph Black, chemist. James Watt, whose engine was being developed at Glasgow.

They knew each other. They dined together in clubs — the Select Society, the Poker Club, the Oyster Club — and read each other's manuscripts.

And they were watching something. Scotland in their lifetimes was moving, visibly and fast, from an agrarian and partly clan-based society to a commercial one: the Union of 1707 opened trade with England and its colonies, Glasgow's merchants grew rich on tobacco and sugar, the Highlands were being violently reorganised after 1745, cities were growing, and the old order of ranks and obligations was dissolving in front of them.

They were, in other words, in the position 1.1.2 describes as ideal: inside a society changing fast enough to be visible. And they responded by asking not what a good society would be, but how societies come to be as they are.

Here is the intellectual problem they solved, and it is one you already have the vocabulary for.

Look at a language. Nobody designed it. No committee agreed the grammar. And yet it is a system of enormous complexity and regularity, which every child acquires and nobody could have invented.

Look at money, at markets, at customary law, at manners, at cities. The same pattern: highly ordered arrangements that are unmistakably human products and are equally unmistakably nobody's plan.

Contract theory could not explain this — it made society an agreement, which requires designers (3.1.5). Divine ordering could not explain it either, for anyone doing naturalistic enquiry.

Adam Ferguson stated the solution in 1767, in a sentence that is the single best pre-sociological formulation ever written:

"Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

That is emergence (1.3.2). It is unintended consequences (1.2.3). It is the answer to the question of how there can be structure without a designer — and it is the founding insight of the discipline, arriving a century before the discipline.

Adam Smith: the moral and the economic, together

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is remembered for one book and wrote two, and reading only one of them produces a serious misunderstanding.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). How do people acquire moral judgement? Smith's answer begins with sympathy — not pity, but the capacity to enter imaginatively into another's situation and feel something of what they feel. We approve of conduct when, imagining ourselves in the actor's place, we find we would feel as they do.

Then comes the move that belongs in Part 2. Since we cannot see ourselves, we learn to judge our own conduct by imagining how it appears to others — and, refining this, by constructing an internal impartial spectator: a disinterested observer, assembled from experience of others' judgements, whose approval we seek and whose disapproval we feel as guilt.

Read that against 2.3.2 and 2.3.3. Smith has, in 1759, described a self formed through imagined observation, and an internalised generalised audience serving as conscience. It is Cooley's looking-glass self and Mead's generalised other, arrived at from moral philosophy — and Smith is explicit that the mechanism requires society: a person raised in isolation, he writes, could no more think of their own character than of the beauty of their own face.

The Wealth of Nations (1776). The division of labour as the source of increasing productivity, illustrated by the pin factory: ten workers dividing eighteen operations produce vastly more than ten workers each making whole pins. Its cause is not design but a human "propensity to truck, barter and exchange"; its extent is limited by the extent of the market. And the coordination of a complex economy is achieved without direction — the famous passage about the butcher, the brewer and the baker, who supply our dinner not from benevolence but from regard to their own interest, and the "invisible hand" by which an individual pursuing private gain frequently promotes an end that was no part of their intention.

And the part usually omitted. In Book V, Smith writes about what the division of labour does to the worker whose life is spent on a few simple operations:

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

This is not an aside. Smith regards it as the condition into which "the great body of the people must necessarily fall" in a commercial society unless government intervenes — and he argues for publicly supported education precisely on that ground.

Notice what that is. A theory of the deforming effects of specialised labour on the person, from the founder of political economy, seventy years before Marx. Anyone who presents Smith as an uncomplicated celebrant of markets has not read Book V, and 1.5.2's discipline applies: check the official version of a thinker against the text.

Adam Ferguson: the costs of the same process

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) is the most neglected major figure in this lesson and, for sociology, arguably the most important.

The Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) does three things.

It states the emergence principle — the sentence above — and applies it systematically. Institutions arise from the accumulated actions of people pursuing immediate purposes, and their form is not what anyone intended.

It insists on the priority of the social. Ferguson attacks the state-of-nature device directly: human beings are found in groups always and everywhere, and "the history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species." Society is not entered; it is the condition in which humans exist. That is a flat rejection of contract theory's starting point, made in 1767, and it aligns with everything in 2.3.1.

And it makes conflict constitutive. Ferguson argues that group solidarity and external opposition are bound together: the affections that unite a people are inseparable from their rivalry with others. Compare 2.2.5's in-group/out-group and 3.1.1's asabiyyah — Ferguson, who read Montesquieu closely, is making a structurally similar argument about cohesion and its sources.

Then the pessimism, which is what makes him unusual among Enlightenment writers.

Ferguson worried that commercial society, for all its wealth, was corrosive of the qualities that sustain a polity. The division of labour, extended to government and defence, separates citizens from public concerns; professional armies remove the obligation to defend one's own community; refinement produces private comfort and civic indifference. He feared a society of prosperous, specialised, politically inert individuals — and thought despotism the likely outcome.

Read alongside Smith's Book V, this gives the Scottish Enlightenment a genuinely double-sided account: commercial society produces unprecedented wealth and characteristic deformations of the person and the citizen. That double-sidedness is the shape of nearly all subsequent sociology of modernity — Marx on alienation, Durkheim on anomie, Weber on the iron cage, Simmel on the blasé attitude. Ferguson is where it starts.

John Millar (1735–1801), professor of civil law at Glasgow and a student of Smith's, published Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society in 1771. It is the most straightforwardly sociological book of the period, and it is barely taught.

Its subject is exactly Part 8's: how societies come to be divided into ranks, and what determines the authority of some over others.

Its method is materialist and comparative. Millar argues that the ranks and relations of authority in a society follow from its mode of subsistence — the way people make their living — together with property. Change how a society feeds itself and you change its property arrangements, its law, its family structure, its manners and its distribution of authority.

Its structure is a series of studies of authority relations: of husbands over wives, parents over children, chiefs over tribes, masters over servants and slaves, and sovereigns over subjects. Each is treated historically and comparatively rather than as a natural given.

And its most striking argument: Millar treats the position of women as an index of a society's development, arguing that it improves with commercial society and the refinement of manners, and analysing marriage, property and authority in the household as a social relation with causes. Contemporary scholarship has criticised the progressivist framing — the assumption that commercial societies are simply better for women does not survive examination — while recognising it as one of the first sustained attempts to treat gender relations as socially caused and historically variable rather than natural.

He was also, notably, an opponent of slavery and of the American slaveholders' claims to liberty, and a supporter of parliamentary reform.

Why he matters here. Millar is doing stratification theory: ranks as arising from economic organisation, authority relations as historically variable, gender and family as social rather than natural. Marx read the Scottish political economists closely, and the lineage from a materialist account of ranks to historical materialism is direct enough that Millar deserves the name of a predecessor rather than a curiosity.

The four stages theory

The framework underlying much of this work, and it must be understood with both its power and its damage.

The theory. Societies pass through four stages defined by their mode of subsistence: hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial. And — this is the analytical claim — each stage carries characteristic forms of property, law, government, family arrangement and manners. Where there is no accumulation there is little property and little law; settled agriculture produces landed property, inheritance and elaborate legal codes; commerce produces contract, movable wealth, and a different distribution of authority.

Why it is a genuine advance. It is a materialist theory of social development: the way a society produces its subsistence explains a great deal else about it. That proposition runs directly into Marx (4.1) and 1.3.6's material–ideal question, and it made social development a topic for causal explanation rather than narrative.

Why it did damage. It is also a stadial theory — a single sequence through which all societies pass — and it was immediately available as a ranking device. Societies could now be placed on a ladder, with commercial Europe at the top and every other arrangement classified as an earlier stage of the observers' own history. That framework travelled into nineteenth-century evolutionism (3.3.2), into the justification of colonial rule as tutelage, and into modernisation theory in the twentieth century (1.2.3, 11.1). Part 6 is largely a response to it.

And note the entanglement that a course committed to honesty has to state: this thought was produced in a city whose merchants were growing rich on tobacco and sugar produced by enslaved people. Smith and Millar both opposed slavery — Smith arguing it was economically inefficient as well as unjust — and their institutions and patrons were nonetheless embedded in an Atlantic economy built on it. Both facts belong in the account.

Go deeper

Why Scotland

A worthwhile sociological question about a sociological achievement.

A society in visible transition, as described above — the single most important condition (1.1.2).

Five universities in a small, poor country, with a professoriate that taught, published and argued in public, and a culture of dense club sociability that put philosophers, chemists, judges and engineers in the same rooms.

A specific position after 1707 — Scots retained their own legal system, church and universities while losing their parliament, which arguably concentrated intellectual energy on understanding society rather than governing it, and made comparison with England unavoidable and everyday.

And a distinctive legal tradition — Scots law, unlike English common law, was influenced by Roman civil law, which made the systematic comparison of legal systems natural. Millar was a professor of civil law.

None of this is destiny; other places had universities and change without producing this. But the combination is the kind of explanation Montesquieu would have recognised.

What the founders took

To close the Topic by naming the inheritance precisely:

Emergence and unintended consequences (Ferguson) — the single most important idea in this lesson, and load-bearing in Marx, Durkheim, Merton and Giddens.

The division of labour, both as source of productivity (Smith) and as source of deformation (Smith Book V, Ferguson) — which Durkheim takes as the subject of his first major book (4.2) and Marx as the source of alienation (4.1).

A materialist account of social development (the four stages, Millar) — the direct ancestor of historical materialism.

Sympathy and the impartial spectator (Smith) — the social self, arrived at early, and rediscovered by Cooley and Mead.

Stratification as socially caused (Millar) — Part 8's founding premise.

And a double-sided account of modernity — wealth and deformation together — which is the shape of the entire classical tradition.

Comte would name the discipline (3.3.1). The Scots had already, in substance, begun it.

"Smith was a champion of unregulated markets." He argued for public education precisely because he thought the division of labour degraded workers, distrusted merchants' combinations, and wrote a book on moral sentiments first. Read Book V.

"The invisible hand is Smith's central idea." The phrase appears rarely in his work. His central analytical ideas are the division of labour, the extent of the market, and — in the earlier book — sympathy and the impartial spectator.

"Ferguson was an optimist about progress." He is one of the earliest theorists of what commercial society costs: civic indifference, the separation of citizens from public affairs, and vulnerability to despotism.

"The four stages theory is just an early sociology of development." It is also the ancestor of a ranking device used to justify colonial rule. Both, always.

"The Scots were pre-sociologists in the sense of being crude." Millar's Distinction of Ranks is a work of stratification theory; Ferguson's emergence principle is stated more clearly than in most modern textbooks.

"Their thought was untouched by empire." Glasgow's wealth was tobacco and sugar. Smith and Millar opposed slavery; their institutions were embedded in the Atlantic economy. State both.

Why it matters

It supplies the answer to how order exists without a designer. Ferguson's sentence is the origin of every later account of emergent structure, and 1.3.2's whole argument rests on it.

It gives the double-sided account of modernity that classical sociology inherits. Smith and Ferguson together say: this new order produces unprecedented wealth, and it deforms the people in it. Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel are all elaborating one or both halves.

It shows stratification being theorised materially before Marx, which corrects a common foreshortening of the discipline's history.

And it completes Topic 3.1's argument. Systematic thinking about society was conducted in Warring States China, ancient India, classical Greece, fourteenth-century North Africa, and eighteenth-century Scotland — each addressing recognisable sociological problems with recognisable methods. What happens next, in the nineteenth century, is not the birth of the thinking. It is the birth of a discipline — with a name, a claim to scientific status, and a specific set of upheavals it was invented to explain.

Those upheavals are Topic 3.2.

The Scottish Enlightenment — Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Millar, Robertson and others in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1750–90 — theorised a society they could watch changing.

Ferguson's principle: institutions are "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design" — the founding statement of emergence and unintended consequences. He also rejected the state-of-nature device (humans are always found in groups), treated cohesion and external opposition as bound together, and warned that commercial society corrodes civic capacity.

Smith wrote two books. Moral Sentiments: sympathy and the impartial spectator — a self formed through imagined observation, anticipating Cooley and Mead. Wealth of Nations: the division of labour, the extent of the market, coordination without direction — and Book V's account of the mental degradation of the specialised worker, with public education proposed as the remedy.

Millar's Distinction of Ranks (1771) is stratification theory: ranks arising from mode of subsistence and property; authority relations in household, workplace and state treated as historically variable; the position of women analysed as socially caused.

The four stages theory (hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial) is a genuine materialist account of development — ancestor of historical materialism — and a stadial ladder that became a ranking device used to justify colonial rule.

Why Scotland: a society in visible transition, five universities, dense club sociability, a post-1707 position that made comparison unavoidable, and a Roman-influenced legal tradition. And an economy entangled with Atlantic slavery, which Smith and Millar opposed and their institutions profited from.

Emergence (Ferguson's formulation) — order arising as the result of human action but not of human design.

Unintended consequences — outcomes of action neither intended nor foreseen, treated as a principal source of institutions.

Sympathy — Smith's capacity to enter imaginatively into another's situation, the basis of moral judgement.

Impartial spectator — the internalised disinterested observer by whose imagined judgement we assess our own conduct.

Division of labour — the specialisation of tasks; source of productivity (Smith) and of deformation (Smith Book V, Ferguson).

Extent of the market — Smith's principle that specialisation is limited by the size of the market it serves.

Civil society (Ferguson's sense) — organised political society as such, not the sphere distinct from the state.

Mode of subsistence — the way a society produces its living; in Millar and the stadial theory, the determinant of ranks, property and law.

Four stages theory — the developmental sequence hunting → pastoral → agricultural → commercial.

Stadial theory — any account of societies passing through a fixed sequence of stages; analytically productive and readily used as a ranking device.

Distinction of ranks — Millar's term for what would later be called social stratification.

One — find an unintended establishment. Identify one arrangement in your society that is clearly a human product and clearly nobody's design — a queueing convention, a market, a dialect, an unwritten workplace rule. Reconstruct how it could have arisen from people pursuing immediate purposes.

Two — read Smith against his reputation. Find the Book V passage on the division of labour (it is short and freely available) and compare it with how Smith is usually described. This is 1.5.2's debunking, applied to a thinker.

Three — apply Millar. Take two societies, or one society at two dates, with different modes of subsistence. Compare their property arrangements, family forms and authority relations. You are running the eighteenth century's research design.

Four — spot a stadial claim. Find one current statement that places societies on a single developmental ladder — "developing," "modernising," "behind." Ask what sits at the top, and who put it there (2.3.4's exercise, on a larger scale).