ABSTRACT
If Smith appears torn internally in his assessments of civil society, Adam Ferguson’s work reveals a still more divided self.1 He seems to speak at once for modern commerce and in the voice of the “backward” Highlander who is immersed in an order of manly virtues, strong social connections, and active citizenship. Ferguson was born on the fringes of the Highlands and grew up among Highlanders. His command of Gaelic and loyalty to the Union earned him a post in 1745 as a chaplain to the Black Watch, a Highland military unit serving mostly in Europe. For Ferguson, Highlanders are more than an abstraction fitted into the “four-stages theory.” They are not simply a nearby other against which he, as an Enlightenment intellectual, constructs his self. Rather, the Highlands appear as a living presence in Ferguson’s thinking, especially in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Reflecting “[h]is birthplace . . . on the frontier between primitive and advanced societies,” Fania Oz-Salzberger suggests that “Scotland was the Essay’s hidden source of insight and urgency.”2 Or, as Duncan Forbes argues, the absence of any mention of the Highland clans should not obscure the Essay’s “Highland provenance” that “throws into relief the fundamental question which . . . was the real inspiration of the book: what happens to man in the progress of society?”3
