ABSTRACT

Of all the experimental social theory in the third quarter of the century, it was that of Adam Ferguson, in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society, which provided the most challenging review of the relations between art and society, and some of the most strident assertions of the need for artistic change. Stronger claims for Ferguson have recently been made, but by social scientists rather than literary scholars, and where Ferguson’s name has appeared in aesthetic contexts, it has generally been with a cluster of mid-century primitivists of decidedly inferior stature, with the wider coherence and rhetorical force of his theory given little recognition. Rene Wellek’s comments, that Ferguson’s views on the arts were not only “rather meagre”, but “largely sociological”, have helped to render him, along with Smith and Millar, the victims of disciplinary demarcation. Ferguson’s response to the problem of imitation was iconoclastic in the extreme.