The field of eighteenth-century Scottish studies has greatly benefited from a series of recent intellectual biographies of prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Jeffrey Smitten’s The Life of William Robertson (2017), James Harris’s Hume (2015), Robert Zaretsky’s Boswell’s Enlightenment (2015), Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith (2012), and Ian Simpson Ross’s The Life of Adam Smith (2010, 2nd ed.). Just as there were competing philosophical systems among the Scottish literati, this genre envelops a wide range of methodological approaches to the analysis of eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and exposés of the intellectual culture in which it appeared. Whereas the various types of intellectual biography necessarily draw from methods of intellectual history, this genre is not confined to the historical contextualisation of ideas. More nuanced ways of interpreting what the Scottish Enlightenment meant emerge from the field’s emphatic movement toward an interdisciplinary perspective of Enlightenment thought. The book under review in this Syndicate symposium is an example par excellence of this trend. For the purposes of this symposium, I shall attempt to sponsor further discussion through a series of questions that might arise from argumentative lines developed throughout this book. I hope that my arrangement of discussion questions in the contexts of a partial review alerts potential readers to the considerable value of this book while allowing the author and symposium contributors to discuss areas of research that did not appear in this intellectual biography of Adam Ferguson.

Jack Hill’s Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity (2017) provides a most welcomed contribution to the limited literature on a lesser-known Scottish Enlightenment thinker, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), by identifying his pedagogical “project” of “ethical integrity” and its contemporary utility as “a primer for the reader’s own quest for living a life which is emblematic of ethical integrity” (xi). Of these two distinct objectives, the first sheds new light on Ferguson’s moral philosophy with a focus on what Hill identifies as an overarching ambition to instruct “ethical integrity.” Coining a new term to define Ferguson’s philosophical system departs from the recent scholarship by Iain McDaniel’s Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (2013) and David Allan’s Adam Ferguson (2007). And yet, Hill develops convincing reasons why Ferguson’s “ethical integrity” merits serious attention, which will certainly enhance future studies on the subject. Akin to Ferguson’s fear in the late eighteenth century that “we were losing who we are and who we ought to be,” Hill identifies a modern ethical crisis “in the US and the West as a whole” (xiii). With clear caveats that Ferguson was a historical figure living in a historic age, Hill argues that Ferguson’s instruction of “ethical integrity” could be usefully applied in the twenty-first century. Hill achieves these distinct objectives through a skilful accounting of the life and philosophical writings of Ferguson and a probing analysis of how Ferguson’s “hallmarks” of “ethical integrity” might be taught and applied in modern contexts.

Beyond these intended objectives, it would be interesting to know more about the reception of Ferguson’s project of “ethical integrity” among his students at Edinburgh University, subscribers to his Principles, and among the Scottish literati. Ferguson’s former student and successor to the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), drew heavily from Ferguson’s lectures between 1785 and 1790 before launching his own version of Scottish common sense philosophy in 1792. Apart from Stewart, did Ferguson’s programme of “ethical integrity” inspire a following of intellectual disciples? If so, who were they and in what ways did they apply “ethical integrity” in public life? This line of questioning about the reception of Ferguson’s “ethical integrity” is not a criticism of Hill’s primary focus on its conception. But a more in-depth examination of how Ferguson’s notion of “ethical integrity” impacted the age in which he lived might strengthen or weaken the case for its modern application.

This book thoughtfully flows from the ways in which Ferguson’s upbringing (chapter 1) informed the source of his ethical integrity (chapter 2) on “knowledge of the self and society (chapter 3) [as] foundational for knowledge of the good (chapter 4), and hence for knowledge of applications of the good (chapters 5 & 6)” (52). In chapter 1, “Born in the Heart of Scotland,” Hill argues that Ferguson’s contributions to Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy symbolically reflected his inheritance of a “Highlander ethos.” Challenging John Brewer’s portrayal of Ferguson’s moral philosophy as removed from the influences of his youthful years in the Scottish Highlands, Hill illustrates the lifelong importance of Ferguson’s “hybrid” identity that harmonised colliding cultural conventions. Hill suggests that “Ferguson’s upbringing in a largely Gaelic-speaking Logierait and his role with Gaelic troops [as Chaplin to the Black Watch] consumed most of the initial thirty-two years of his life, the question is not ‘Did Ferguson have a Highlander identity?’ The question is, ‘How could someone with such a background so rapidly integrate into the urbane social circles of the Edinburgh literati?’” (5–6). Hill threads Ferguson’s lifetime attachment to this “Highlander ethos” as indispensible in the development of his project of ethical integrity as a resident of Edinburgh. The originality of this argumentative line is unmistakable in light of the considerable attention Hill devotes to situating the nuanced parts of Ferguson’s project within the established literature. In doing so, Hill does not shy away from challenging competing views on Ferguson.

Jack Hill’s recovery of Ferguson’s “Highlander ethos” is entertaining and instructive. Ferguson’s striking ability to thrive in culturally different environments animates an example of his “ethical integrity” as adaptable to new circumstances without being prescriptive about cultural expectations. Perhaps the environment in which he lived shaped his identity during different seasons of his life, which would explain the reactive nature of his philosophical writings in responding to timely concerns. Although Ferguson’s embrace of a “Highlander ethos” informed his worldview later in life, I am curious if his encounter with war and membership of Edinburgh literary and philosophical societies changed his belief system. Could a change in Ferguson’s religious convictions after the Jacobite Rising of 1745, for example, be interpreted as a transformation of his identity? Is there evidence that Ferguson resisted the corruption of his “Highlander ethos” during his residence in Edinburgh? Beyond being treated as a novelty, did the Scottish literati of Edinburgh challenge Ferguson’s identity in any way?

The following chapter, “Reading Ferguson as an Ethicist,” fleshes out sources of Ferguson’s “ethical integrity.” Of Ferguson’s philosophical writings, Hill identifies that his unpublished lecture notes, Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy (1766), Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769), Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792) best represented what “ethical integrity” meant and sought to achieve. By demonstrating Ferguson’s continuity of thought, Hill’s analysis of the differences between Analysis and Principles as bookends to Ferguson’s “project” is particularly remarkable and will certainly sponsor further study in the field. “Although he did not specifically articulate one unified, systematic account of his approach, . . . it is difficult not to make some connection between Ferguson’s affinities for a Highlander ethos and his methodological conviction about the scientific need to incorporate information from those deemed ‘primitive,’ ‘barbarian,’ or ‘savage’ by the Scottish literati of his day,” according to Hill (59). In chapter 3, “Elements of Human Nature,” Hill turns to Ferguson’s empirical treatment of the conjectural “progress” of the human condition in different “stages” of civil society. Hill argues that Ferguson’s view of progress balanced “two trajectories in constant tension: the sense in which humans as intelligent beings are destined to grow in perfection, and the sense in which they are vulnerable to precipitous decline and imperfection” (92). This fundamental belief in the contingent or conditional “progress” of human improvement or corruption of civil society famously distinguished Ferguson’s use of philosophical history from contemporary views on the inevitability of “progressive” human and societal movements. In light of these competing views, some scholars generally treat Ferguson as a counter-Enlightenment thinker in the historiography. According to Hill, Ferguson’s “most seminal” principle in depicting human nature was “expressed in twin dispositions (self-preservation and association), situated in modes of social life (family, clan, tribe, nation, empire), manifest in powers of choice (moral, aesthetic and rational), spurred by ambition (laws of progress), shaped by habits, honed by accessions of power and perfected in arts or callings” (99). This succinct portrayal of Ferguson’s complex comprehension of human nature in his Analysis, Essay, and Principles turns to a thorough contextualisation of “probity” (i.e., veracity of social, moral agents) as the “highest expression of ethical integrity” in the following chapter, “Elements of the Virtuous and Happy Life” (129). Ferguson’s principle of “probity” instructed the exercise of ethical conduct as a resource for navigating revolutionary changes to the commercial, social, and political landscape in which he lived. The question of the extent to which Ferguson’s view on human and societal “progress” was exceptional among the Scottish literati is worth discussing. How did British men of letters and participants in the Scottish Agricultural Revolution respond to Ferguson’s treatment of “progress”? It would also be interesting to discuss the early American reception of Ferguson’s view of civic virtue and its potential significance as a founding principle of the early republic. An examination of the ways in which Thomas Jefferson’s promotion of Yeomen farmers and views on a standing army resembled Ferguson’s philosophical writings would serve Hill’s argument.

In chapter 5, “The Commercial Arts and Ethical Integrity,” Hill explores how Ferguson responded to the consequences of the British commercial revolution by focusing on who we ought to be. Hill emphasises that “Ferguson was troubled that man, in the eighteenth century, was mistakenly reducing the modus operandi of the arts—ambition—to matters of rank, wealth or political power” (147). Ferguson countered the individualistic pursuit of financial gain by appealing to sources that encouraged patriotic civic virtue and fostered the natural inclination toward safeguarding civic welfare. Ferguson’s support of local militia in the Poker Club and well-documented criticisms of a standing army are very well understood in the literature. His response to the commercialisation of society and professionalization of the military, for Hill, registers with modern American concerns of income inequality and waging war for financial profit. With these considerations in mind, Hill entertains a solution in the same vein as Ferguson that “perhaps something akin to a re-introduction of a military draft, as a substitute for standing professional armed forces should be seriously considered in the public sector” (156). The sense of urgency in this proposal to encourage civic virtue and, in particular, who we ought to be as active members of a civil society is not merely a provocative tongue-in-cheek consideration of a bygone Enlightenment concept. Ferguson, of course, did not persuade the British government to abandon their standing army, and he did not live to witness the moral consequences of a large-scale military expansion throughout the British world during Pax Britannica. Nevertheless, I share Hill’s belief that Ferguson’s project of “ethical integrity” should be revisited in discussing viable solutions to an American loss of civic virtue. Perhaps establishing a programme for American civil service that drew from earlier precedents, such as the Corps of Engineers’ infrastructure projects that followed WWII, would be a good way to realise Ferguson’s project. If introduced as a relevant source, how might we counter the abuse of Ferguson’s support of a militia, which could be used as justification by fringe American factions to forcefully defend local interests at the cost of national unity?

The question of how revealed and natural religion factored into Ferguson’s project of ethical integrity is addressed in the sixth and final chapter, “Ethical Integrity and Religion.” Hill charts how Ferguson “developed a religious anthropology from below, rather than a revealed theology from above” (163). This view of religion is best understood as a humanistic deism in light of Ferguson’s criticisms of religious institutions, use of natural religion, and silence on preaching revealed religion after 1745. Although Ferguson acknowledged that evil factored into the natural order of life, Hill masterfully explains precisely why he rejected the doctrine of sin in the first full-scale explanation of Ferguson’s religiously unorthodox belief system. According to Hill, “the heart of Ferguson’s belief system concerns a moral anthropology … [that evaluates] whether or not man has the will to play his part as a mini-Designer—to learn from his mistakes, run and not be weary, and renew his strength in the process” (182). That Ferguson served as a ruling elder of the Church of Scotland, Hill argues, suggests his engagement with the ecclesiastical, secular, and social politics of Enlightened Edinburgh rather than an enduring commitment to the Kirk. This critical point is strengthened by Hill’s convincing portrayal of Ferguson as thriving in between cultural and religious worlds.

This book concludes with a thoughtful discussion about the ways in which Ferguson’s “Ethical Methods and Hallmarks of Integrity” might be applied in the United States “regarding what a person should wish for themselves, their friends, their country and mankind as a whole” (197–98). The earlier chapters lead the reader to recognise “Ferguson’s hallmark—that consciousness of existence entails facing ultimate questions openly and candidly—would resonate with the American moral narrative that ‘we’re all in this together’” (210). Without question, Hill “openly and candidly” reveals his personal views in prescribing a highly original interpretation of Ferguson’s project of ethical integrity and its relevance to the modern American crisis of losing who we are and who we ought to be. An impressive work of scholarship and intervention in contemporary debates on ethical conduct, Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity offers an important and instructive contribution to understanding the central ambition of Ferguson’s moral philosophy and why it still matters.

The idea of moral science has become, for some, oxymoronic in an age of what the author labels “scientism,” the rejection of any meaning beyond what can be empirically determined. In his book Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity, Jack Hill examines the life and moral theory of this lesser-known but important Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, and calls into question the validity of such a worldview. He encourages the reader to consider both the necessity of ethical inquiry and postulates a method for today’s ethicists to formulate their own foundation for understanding human activity and “the virtuous life.”

Hill’s subject, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Ferguson, has not received the kind of attention that other contemporaries such as Adam Smith and David Hume have in the literature of history and philosophy, however, as the author points out, Ferguson was, in his own time, an “academic rock star” whose lectures were very popular and were attended by large numbers of students as well as many lay visitors. His published works were widely read in Europe and in the Americas and his influence on the thoughts and ideas behind many subsequent philosophical and political movements has been little acknowledged. Ferguson’s long life and prodigious literary output allowed him a wide audience spanning generations and his rich personal history gave him a perspective missing from his more illustrious peers.

Hill begins his highly readable work with this history, placing the philosopher into the context of his birth on the very boundaries of the Scottish highlands, a place deemed by many of the literati in the more genteel South to be a close-by example of “rude” society in their own land. The son of a Church of Scotland minister father and a gentry-born mother, Ferguson grew up with both the Calvinist sensibilities of the predominantly Protestant Lowlands and the Gallic-speaking clan kinship ethic of the Highlands. This particular heritage allowed him to become, early in his career, chaplain to the Highland Black Watch regiment of the military, the only member of the Scottish literati to join the armed forces. With both religious training and martial experience, Ferguson the ethicist combined an understanding of the transcendent and the esprit de corps of the regiment to formulate his own understanding of moral philosophy which he later espoused in lectures and publications. As the author points out, the religious underpinning of Ferguson’s thought morphed and shifted away from the traditional Calvinist Christology to a more rationalized theism, never abandoning the concept of God, but perhaps shifting it toward a more nature-revealed creator. In this the Scottish philosopher opened the door to ethical enquiry that did not have to lean closely on a traditional Christian foundation.

Jack Hill posits Ferguson’s nonspecific theism as a basis for a moral philosophy adept at tackling the postmodern, and post-Christian consensus world and its concurrent need for a basis for ethical norms. Ferguson defined the chief virtue of the ethical person as “probity,” an unfamiliar word in the modern lexicon but one that was perhaps more widely understood in the eighteenth century. In giving his readers a definition of the word, the author has had to devote considerable space to fleshing out its meaning. While contemporary dictionaries define it with such synonyms as “honesty” and “veracity,” other sources confuse the matter by aligning its meaning with words that defy simple explanation such as “Fiddes.” It is difficult not to conclude that the word was chosen as a literary chameleon, a term that fits almost any praiseworthy attribute and that describing someone as a man or woman “of probity” was perhaps a means of avoiding the need to fight a duel. What is perhaps of greater value to the reader attempting to encapsulate Ferguson’s ideal of probity, is the goal of acting in concert with what one “ought to wish for himself, for his country, and for mankind.”

For the modern reader of Ferguson, Hill distils six principles for working toward ethical integrity. Firstly, observing one’s own mind and thoughts is vital to beginning the ethical journey; the old Greek philosophical adage “know thyself.” Once this inner subjectivity can be mined, the second principle is to ascertain his or her relation to others. This can only be done through observation of the world around us and the people we interact with, nearby or far away. Counter to Rousseau and Hobbes, Ferguson saw humankind as a social animal from the very beginning and no ethical enquiry could end without an examination of those with whom one shared society. Thirdly, the ethicist must avoid the bias of a purely local outlook. By examining the wider world and the rights and wrongs of other cultures, the enquirer avoids ethnocentrism and avoids trap of merely considering what is good for his or her own nation. Ferguson’s own sources for these accounts of the manners and mores of peoples around the world were, perhaps by modern standards, skewed toward a European gaze, nonetheless the author is correct in claiming his principle of seeking out the moral standards of other cultures to point the way toward a modern cross-cultural basis for determining ethics. For a forth step, the Scottish philosopher sought to examine the past and triangulate modern moral ideas with those of writers in earlier epochs. Could one see a link between the actions of those in ancient Rome and Greece and what the man of probity sought in the world of Commercial Britain? This leads to the fifth principle, a “canvassing of how others today and yesterday have in fact made moral judgements.” To do this, Ferguson utilized what Dugald Stewart called “conjectural history,” essentially estimating how history, in the absence of definite records, probably progressed. This tool was a staple of Scottish Enlightenment historians, and was characterized by the rejection of the “great man” principle. Using this idea, Ferguson claimed to be able to discern common moral values throughout history. Lastly, step six involved taking a step back and examining the wider picture of events and circumstances to give the moral enquirer a broad understanding of the context into which the ethical judgement should be made.

Jack Hill asserts that these six steps in ethical enquiry are valuable tools in determining modern moral actions and maintaining ethical integrity in the midst of a world in which the reader is inundated with news and information, the veracity of which is difficult to ascertain at first glance. Starting with an understanding of one’s own thoughts, desires and aims and then moving onto an examination of those of others, the reader is urged to explore widely both geographically and historically to attempt to gain a view that goes beyond the latest Facebook post or opinion piece on a favourite news network. Only through pausing and looking at the big picture can the reader make the best ethical decisions.

If there is one area where this reviewer finds drawbacks in examining Ferguson, it is the subject’s choice to limit his own engagement with contemporary issues. While Ferguson was a widely-read academic, it is pertinent to note how little he interacted with the contemporary society in which he lived. With such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and socially transforming movements in Britain such as Slave Trade Abolition and Catholic Emancipation occurring within Ferguson’s writing career, it is all the more bewildering that such a social critic and student of history appeared not to discern momentous events when they occurred in his own time. While certainly eager to write on such subjects that took his attention, such as the Scottish militia, Ferguson wrote very little on the French Revolution and almost nothing on contemporary chattel slavery, both arguably monumental issues of his day. For the modern ethicist seeking to tackle great modern issues such as climate change, global poverty or the gun crime epidemic in the United States, Ferguson’s own example appears to condone inaction, despite Hill’s extrapolation of the subject’s ethics toward such practical actions as joining in “public demonstrations and protests.” While it is hard to imagine the elderly (by this time) professor marching in the streets of Edinburgh in support of Abolition, writing his opinions would not have been inconceivable. The modern scholar can only utilize “conjectural history” to posit that Ferguson shared his Abolitionist contemporaries’ abhorrence of the subjugation of Africans (as some have done in elevating Ferguson to company of anti-slavery writers) or confess that his own ethical enquiry did not result in considering the issue worthy of his commentary. As such the moral formulas of Ferguson, while useful for the modern ethicist cannot be their sole resource.

As a teacher of ethics in a modern American university, Jack Hill is in an ideal place to guide the reader of Adam Ferguson and his book opens up doors to long-forgotten treasures in the moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. In terms of laying a foundation for personal and communal ethics in the twenty-first century, Hill’s call to question the unthinking acceptance of scientism and materialism, and to rediscover the transcendent in our value systems, is vitally important. While other moral systems, such as Adam Smith’s sympathy principle with his call to consult the inner “impartial spectator” as an arbiter of the moral quality of our actions, have little to offer the narcissistic “me” generation, Ferguson’s rational basis for ethical enquiry is ideally suited for those wary of religion-based morality. Jack Hill had done a remarkable work in examining the voluminous and often dense works to distil his moral philosophical system. His book will be a valuable resource for both Enlightenment scholars and students of ethics.

In his time, Adam Ferguson was a widely celebrated teacher, philosopher and historian. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries however, his reputation has suffered from comparison with his more famous Scottish contemporaries. While the Scottish Enlightenment has come to be broadly associated with the idea of “modernity”—most famously for its writers’ contributions to socioeconomic thought, as they attempted to come to grips with the rise of commercial society and its implications for political life—Ferguson’s lifelong concern for the ethical and virtuous life has sometimes seemed disappointingly out of step with his colleagues’ supposedly more “modern” outlook. He has been praised for some of his proto-sociological insights (especially his early presentation of the concept of alienation), but at their core his writings are not as easily celebrated as those of his Scottish contemporaries for heralding post-Enlightenment social and political science—he was more circumspect about the potential benefits of commercial society than Hume or Smith, less enthusiastic about democratic politics than Millar, and less optimistic about the possibility of progress than Robertson.

Ferguson certainly stood out among the men of letters of late eighteenth-century Scotland: he was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander who had once held a commission in the famed Scottish “Black Watch” regiment, and a man whose imposing presence and taste for adventures inspired many a contemporary anecdote. His reputation, then as now, was also that of a conservative political thinker. He was a moderate Whig who valued civic participation more than democratic rights: because he voiced strong misgivings about the moral and political dangers inherent to Europe’s emerging commercial society, and because he was a vocal critic of both the American and French revolutions, he has sometimes been (unfairly) dismissed as an outmoded civic republican, increasingly out of tune with the rise of democratic politics.

Jack Hill’s book, however, eschews the weight of this scholarly history by approaching Ferguson from an entirely different perspective. Refreshingly, Hill is not interested in assessing Ferguson’s role in the development of social and political thought, and he is at pains to avoid reading him through the lens of specialised academic agenda—this would be, he aptly writes, “not only to summarily underestimate the significance of his writings, but also to risk misunderstanding what he was trying to achieve” (31). Rather, his study of Ferguson—“part biography and part philosophical enquiry” (ix)—is exciting and ambitious, precisely because it takes Ferguson seriously on his own terms, as a philosopher of ethics. From this starting point the book reconstructs Ferguson’s intellectual project, and offers an organic, holistic reassessment of his thought.

Hill’s thesis is a deceptively simple one: Ferguson’s various works are best understood as forming the strands of an ambitious and complex ethical enquiry, whose practical insights remain relevant in the twenty-first century. He develops this argument alongside a detailed biographical account, in an effort to demonstrate that Ferguson’s brand of ethics was directly tied to his personal experience of the Scottish Highlands.

The book’s first chapter, therefore, offers a fascinating and richly detailed account of Ferguson’s bicultural background. While the evidence used by Hill to support his argument that Ferguson’s “hybrid” (7) cultural identity was a major influence in shaping his intellectual outlook remains largely circumstantial, he does convincingly argue that Ferguson’s Highlands identity was far from insignificant. The extent of its importance, however, remains in my view up for debate—Hill’s suggestion that previous accounts were based on “selective reading of the data” (4) could equally apply to his own analysis.

The following three chapters form the thematic core of the book, and are highly convincing in their presentation of Ferguson’s project as one fundamentally anchored in his moral philosophy. While scholars have long appreciated Ferguson’s comparative historical method as a remarkably non-ethnocentric form of early anthropology, and have usually analysed his praise for the moral qualities of “rude nations” in relation to his republican critique of the corrupting influence of commercial society, Hill recasts these approaches in his broad rereading of Ferguson’s writings. Ferguson’s project, he demonstrates, is best understood as a “full-blown ethical enquiry” (31), a coherent philosophical system whose unifying principle, and most distinctive feature, was the notion of human agency. Ferguson’s moral philosophy was a multidisciplinary endeavour that aimed to provide socially contextualised, practical tools for discovering “what man ought to wish for himself, for his country, for mankind” (Ferguson, cited at 32). Recast in this ethical perspective, Hill argues, Ferguson’s inquiry is best examined not through his famous Essay, but through a close analysis of his Principles of Moral and Political Science. Arguing that the Principles represent the culmination of Ferguson’s philosophical endeavours, Hill provides an illuminating account of his moral philosophy, including his depiction of human nature as centred on the principle of exertion, the grounding of moral life in social interaction, and the power of habit. One clear lesson here is that the Principles ought to attract much more scholarly interest than they usually have. But more broadly, there is much to learn from Hill’s wide-ranging analysis of Ferguson’s writings, and his rereading of Ferguson as an ethical philosopher is entirely convincing.

Moving on from his reconstruction of Ferguson’s ethical philosophy, in chapter 5 Hill applies his findings to Ferguson’s analysis of commercial society. He enriches previous scholarly discussions by replacing Ferguson’s critique of the “commercial arts” in a broader landscape, relating it to the political arts as well as aesthetic production and intellectual enquiry. In the later sections of the chapter (as well as in the book’s conclusion), Hill mines Ferguson’s ethical philosophy and critique of eighteenth-century society for lessons applicable to the twenty-first century. The shift may appear a little jarring to the historian reader, and some may wonder whether Hill’s efforts to demonstrate Ferguson’s relevance for twenty-first-century US politics will date his book unnecessarily quickly—but it remains that he certainly succeeds in illustrating the striking modernity of Ferguson’s concerns.

The last chapter focuses on Ferguson’s efforts to construct a religious thought compatible with his prescriptions for ethical life. As in the first chapter, Hill’s discussion of Ferguson’s naturalistic religion locates the relevant context for his enquiry in the details of Ferguson’s biography rather than in the broader intellectual environment of Moderate, enlightened Scotland. While Hill provides rich additional contextual layers that also rely on a broad use of primary sources, he understandably struggles to provide conclusive evidence for the nature of Ferguson’s faith, or lack thereof. Nevertheless, the chapter opens up fascinating (yet arguably, ultimately unanswerable) questions about the role of religion in Ferguson’s practical ethics.

The sum of these parts adds up to an important contribution that should be required reading for all Ferguson scholars. Even if some of Hill’s specific insights aren’t entirely novel, he performs an important shift in emphasis in how we should approach and understand Ferguson’s intellectual project as a whole. Most importantly, he shows that Ferguson’s moral philosophy stood at the core of his historical and political writings, and demonstrates that his Principles need to be thoroughly reexamined, not to mention benefit from a modern edition.

The few remarks below, some of which I have already hinted at, are certainly not intended to take away from Hill’s contribution—merely to share some of my thoughts as a starting point for discussion.

First, it seems to me that Hill’s methodology invites debate, because it cobbles together several different approaches and research questions. At its core the book is an account of Ferguson’s philosophy of ethics, but Hill’s approach to his subject is part intellectual biography, part history of philosophy, part practical ethics. Which could lead the reader to wonder—if this is intellectual history (or history of philosophy), why isn’t Hill exploring in more detail both Ferguson’s philosophical debt to his predecessors and colleagues, and his intellectual heritage? Hill appears to have limited interest in placing Ferguson’s view of human nature in relation to that of his Scottish and continental colleagues, who were often preoccupied with at least some of the same questions, particularly when it came to natural sociability. This leads him to sometimes questionable generalizations. To take but one example, it could be disputed whether such a thing as “classical stadial theory” (71) existed, and whether Ferguson’s refusal to adopt linear, teleological views of societal progress was truly original among his Scottish (or indeed European) colleagues. From the opposite perspective, at a few points Hill appears to suggest that Ferguson’s ethics did have an important intellectual heritage (notably when he writes that Ferguson “essentially initiated a shift in the trajectory of moral inquiry . . . a re-framing of ethics in terms of concrete moral experience rather than systematic reflection on theoretical questions,” xix). However, he doesn’t pursue this line of inquiry, preferring instead to locate the relevance of his topic in Ferguson’s philosophical insights, and in their potential for application in modern contexts. But if this is the case, it is not immediately clear why Ferguson’s philosophy cannot stand on its own, and what added value is gained from the biographical context in which it is embedded here.

Second—and this is the historian of political ideas talking—I was struck by the choices Hill makes in his contextualisation of Ferguson’s thought. He consistently prioritizes Ferguson’s Highlands background at the expense of other (sometimes more obviously relevant) contexts. One example that comes to mind would be Ferguson’s remarkably non-Eurocentric interest in other cultures. Hill attributes this almost entirely to Ferguson’s bicultural upbringing, yet one could object that he was hardly the only, or the first, Enlightenment philosopher to adopt such an approach—here his admiration for Montesquieu (which Hill acknowledges) could be, at the very least, a reinforcing influence. Similarly, Ferguson’s critique of the “commercial arts” is contextualised biographically, primarily in terms of his lifelong financial insecurity, rather than in relation to the huge increase in trade, especially global trade, experienced by Scotland and Europe in the eighteenth century, and which became the object of much philosophical and political debate among Ferguson’s contemporaries. More generally—and this is the other side of the coin to Hill’s admirable effort to understand Ferguson on his own terms—Ferguson’s originality seems to me to be occasionally overplayed, precisely because Hill underplays his roots in European philosophy as well as his implantation in the Lowlands intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Regardless of my occasional reservations, Hill undoubtedly succeeds in his attempt to recast Ferguson as a philosopher primarily occupied with ethical questions, and whose entire intellectual production should be reread in this light. It seems to me that Hill’s thoughtful, sensitive and profoundly sympathetic account manages to capture the very essence of Ferguson’s philosophical project—as well as provide tools to help his readers reflect on its continuing relevance. This is an occasionally flawed, yet deeply invigorating call to reexamine one of the Scottish Enlightenment’s most misunderstood figures.

Jack Hill’s Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity: The Man and His Prescriptions for the Moral Life is a welcome and refreshing account of an undervalued eighteenth-century figure whose life and work, like Hill’s book itself, challenges us to think about the Enlightenment we never had.1 In that Enlightenment, free markets operated peaceably and for the good of anybody willing to labor. There, the people were free, unified, and at peace. There, the people were just generically “the people,” and not the “other” people, instead. Similarly, the truth of science was assured in a Cartesian way. Knowledge was deemed useful insofar it referenced a subordinate—because nonhuman and inanimate—material world out there, a world that we knew within our deeper selves. God, nature, country, and commerce: they were all supposed to add up neatly and univocally, like so many concentric circles, at once circumscribing and securing the permanent arrival of so-called modern man.

In Hill’s more nuanced biographical and philosophical account of Ferguson, the soldier-scholar-diplomat-church leader (and in later life, country grazier) moved across class divisions, from “peerage to peasantry” (4). His father was “sprung from a family of laborers” (4). And, without the brand of “promised-land” nostalgia towards the “Highlands of Scotland” that so offended Marx in volume 1 of Capital, Ferguson found practicable value in the ethical possibilities of clan sensibility where it might mix with the modern kind for the greater good.2 Ferguson was therefore neither a Romantic nor an essentialist in his treatment of other people or other times. Towards an Enlightenment that was perhaps more complex and open than the one espoused by his more famous Scottish cohort, Ferguson affirmed and found social solidarity among what others would see as disparate classes. Moreover, those classes were not simply bifurcated in the traditional Marxist sense of existing in flat opposition. He acknowledged and wanted to keep vital the clan’s investment in collective happiness, their suspicion of luxury, as well as the Highlander’s other-than-exclusively-commercial attachment to land. Indeed, as chaplain to the 43rd regiment of Black Watch (1746–54), Ferguson communicated under fire with these so-called ruder sorts of folk in the mother tongue of Gaelic that they shared. His association with them had to do with lived experience, up-close and life-or-death kinds of encounters.

Thus, with characteristic insight, Hill points out the formative role Ferguson played in positing a distinctly non-Eurocentric approach to what we retrospectively call “anthropology.” (Kant later named the discipline itself.) Ferguson had no love for ethnic chauvinism, and denounced the eighteenth century’s excesses of wealth (one thinks of Glasgow’s Tobacco Lords). Indeed, as Hill repeats throughout the book—and not just in chapter 5, where an excessively commercial ethos gets its most direct critical treatment—Ferguson was “preoccupied with wealth and virtue” (xii). He was preoccupied with this division not just because the maldistribution of property and money would appear (for some, anyway) impolite, but also because capitalism at a certain point could bring the empire crashing down on rich and poor alike. To affirm a Marxist formulation that perhaps Hill would not, commercial society contains the seeds of its own destruction. I say Hill may not affirm Marx in this way only to point out his astute observation that, just because those seeds are there, there is no hardbound economic rule that says such self-destruction is guaranteed. For Ferguson, it was a matter of ethical contingency and not—contra a certain version of Marx—teleological-historical law.

What makes Ferguson so important among the other Scottish moderates in the eighteenth century is that the ethical contingency at work here was not limited to one class versus another. There were a lot of people other than “the people” who lived under British Imperial rule in the eighteenth century. They all stood to lose in one way or another if commercial society happened—probably violently—to fall into its grave. Indeed, if you tallied up the women and children who are very marginally a part of “the people,” and the servants and the slaves, as well as Ferguson’s beloved Gaels, most of the human beings under British rule were “other” in this way. In this sense, Ferguson’s ethics seem uniquely tuned in to a version of social being that supersedes and surrounds society in the more limited and so-called civilized sense. He knew and cared about otherness at this level and, or if you like, at this scale of diversity, because he was not a modern in the idealist sense, let alone of its ideologues. Singling out Ferguson’s appreciation for the Highlander’s disregard for the “superiority of rank in the possession of wealth” (77), Hill shows rare frankness in making sure that we understand the specific form of Enlightenment that Ferguson did have in mind.

Saying he was no idealist means that Ferguson had an idea about knowledge that was also modern in the way we are still waiting to be. Another important matter Hill puts on the table, though in a less prominent way than the ethical concerns, is Ferguson’s epistemology. The Scottish historian began from the Baconian principle of the “reality of things” (44). But Ferguson was also grounded in the idea that the mind “acts” on (and within) physical reality, and that reality as such is made meaningful in a way only human beings can make it (we should add, with the appropriate tools) (57). So you can be a realist—to use the latest philosophical terms—while at the same time affirming the productive power of thinking that is associated with the artisan. The level of complexity regarding class opposition holds here, too, on the question of knowledge. There is no need for the usual mind/body, reason/experience, or “organic”/”inorganic” (51) split that you come to expect with lesser Enlightenments than the one Hill offers apropos Ferguson. Ferguson was a self-proclaimed empiricist on the order of Bacon and Newton, and we might add—for reasons of Ferguson’s nonsectarian approach to religion that Hill so concisely delivers—Galileo, as well. Ferguson appreciated (and Hill clearly also appreciates) historical fact over the eighteenth century’s penchant for conjectural history. This is especially so when the facts in play happen to overturn narrow-minded social habit and self-satisfied institutional orthodoxy.

But if Ferguson was not exactly of the Enlightenment in its traditional vein, he was not a historical materialist in what became, after Marx, the usual sense of that term, either. Nor was Ferguson, anticipating Latour and the speculative realist school, a proto-actor-network theorist, or an object ontology philosopher, waiting for French theory to make it all clear. As Hill’s book title states, “ethical integrity” provides the critical draw to Ferguson, that is, the draw to both his life and his work: subjectivity, society, religion, and love, are the redeeming factors Hill draws out of Ferguson on human nature.

Thus, in Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity, you should not expect to find historical detail on the Highland Clearances, a genocidal application of class war (if you’ll allow the term) against the Celts that made Ferguson’s Highland sensibility so appealing to Marx; or a close reading of the Christian society documents used (along with the northward reaching arm of English law and Cumberland “The Butcher’s” army) to stamp out the life-affirming collectivist disposition of the Gaels; or a focus on the slave and other forms of revolt widely manifest by the empire’s myriad “turbulent populations.”

Ferguson did care and write about history as an example of these kinds of conflicts, as exemplified not only in the serious caution he famously expressed about commercial progress in the Essay on the History of Civil Society, but less famously, if more dramatically, in The History of the Progress and Termination of Rome. Hill states that the history of Rome is “largely untapped” by serious scholarship on Ferguson, and he’s right. But it might be time to do the tapping.

One of the reasons Hill’s book should be read widely is that it makes both a timely and convincing case that we should be reading more Ferguson, too. In contrast with the more widely known—and I would join Hill in suggesting, individualist, idealist, and overly sanguine—prescriptions of the likes of Adam Smith, for Ferguson, the Enlightenment is not only unfinished but is also situated in a precarious way. It is precariously situated, then as now, in a context that joins Ferguson to us insofar as the possibilities of modern progress and human happiness are positioned in a constructively problematic way. The problem, to say again, is that the “termination” and “perfection” of market fundamentalism are proximate to each other, and that this proximity may (or may not) eventuate in some serious unhappiness for us all.

Hill puts forth a set of what he calls the “hallmarks” of Ferguson’s ethics. They are considered as “hallmarks” because ethical practice as such ought to exist in actu, and are meaningful only insofar as it delivers measurably worthwhile outcomes. Hill does not look to Ferguson to provide rote moral commands, or to project the banal social fiction of Smith’s so-called impartial spectator. For Smith—though neither Hill nor I would say that Smith is making Mandeville’s case—ethical responsibility begins and ends with an interest that is primarily mine and transparent to me as I pursue and protect my own property. All the rest—the suffering of so many others, or better, the suffering of the many others that allows the few of us not to have to suffer like them—is rendered unavailable for ethical discussion. As long as those suffering others can someday, eventually—that is after I have got the spoils that are mine—pursue and protect their private property as I do, then humane ethical outcomes are best guided by Jupiter’s invisible hand. But if I read Ferguson right, you can’t ignore “the rest” entirely, or if you do, you risk your own peril, not just theirs. The dependence on “the servile classes” to make a nation’s wealth is liable to result in the making of a “nation of helots,” to cite one of the most popular and divergently interpreted of Ferguson’s many pithy lines.3

The helot nation raises these questions for me: isn’t the atomistic logic that bothers Ferguson most the same logic behind Adam Smith’s capitalist theosophy, as well as that behind Locke on the need for colonialist expansion? Isn’t the placing of private property law over human need itself what joins empire with the failure of empire, from Plymouth Rock to the Isthmus of Darien? The reduction of a person’s rights to property is why Ferguson took issue with Rousseau, calling the “social compact”—especially when examined in relation to the most extreme conditions of commercial society—a “mere fiction.”4 Isn’t that same “mere fiction,” according to Ferguson, the reason the Roman Empire entered its terminal phase? And, isn’t it how we—“we” beneficiaries of a system that is right now moving toward isolation and war in the name of so-called greatness—maybe facing termination, too?

For Ferguson, what I just called above, “the rest,” is not only a massively larger and different assemblage than “the people,” as I said, but it is also a more vibrant and intimately available constituency than the one that must reassure themselves (ourselves) that the they (and we) are still great. In Ferguson’s ethics—which we can hope are greater than we are alone—“the rest” are given humane consideration. This consideration of “the rest” is more pressing than you’re likely to hear about from a pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers who would not have recognized them fully because in the end we are they. We might simply interject here that Smith’s invisible hand provides the kind of historical erasure that history perhaps no longer allows. Against such a form of disappearance, Hill usefully emphasizes Ferguson’s affirmation of rude nations and so-called uncivilized states, as well as the moral legitimacy of the common and ordinary people who are too different to be just another version of us.

We might therefore ask the question: when is it legitimate to break the social compact, if not also, go against the law; and when might the lawbreaker do so precisely on ethical grounds? This will sound extreme, especially, given the strong favor in Scottish Enlightenment studies in the Western academy (the Chinese are just now reading Adam Smith, in depth) for the “Moderate literati” (emphasis mine) and for its accompanying political formation of the liberal state. Ferguson entertained the tension, under certain conditions, between law and need. Those conditions were, very explicitly for Ferguson, “the unequal distribution of property . . . so favorable to the rich . . . [, and] injur[ious] to the poor.”5 I wonder if his validation of the other’s suffering over and above the security of property could open up a productive path of discussion. Though Hill is right in distancing Ferguson from Hobbes, the minister’s notion of sociability—perhaps uniquely in his day—was never very far from what he called “the social war.” As the “multitudes of slaves from every quarter flocked to his [Cinna’s] standard” (HPT, 155), certain acts of Spartacan resistance do not come off at all times badly in the History of Rome. Indeed, “power,” Ferguson writes, “originates with the multitude.” Moreover, he continues, “they have a right to reclaim it wherever it is abused” (IMP, 69).

One of Ferguson’s more explicit examples of this conflict between law and need under conditions of extreme inequality comes in the form of a story. So it’s an aesthetic intervention, as well as an ethico-political one. Here, a starving orphan is “found almost naked, lying on the grave of his parent of whom he had been recently deprived.”6 There is a person passing by who is on his way “to discharge a debt.” But he uses the money for the orphan, instead. Ferguson then asks: “Will anyone reprobate this act of humanity, as interfering with a matter of more perfect obligation?” (PMP, 136). Reading further, Ferguson notes that “even the courts of law . . . can admit the extreme necessity of one person [the sufferer] to suspend the right of another [the creditor]” (PMP, 136). But before we congratulate him for telling a story where law and need seamlessly support one another, he remarks: “A person about to perish for want of food is allowed to save himself by recourse to the property of another; and the plea of humanity is held to be more sacred than that of an absolute and exclusive right. Why should not humanity therefore be enforced” (PMP, 136). This “enforce[ment]” of “humanity” against the law of property would have not appealed to Adam Smith. It would have entirely frustrated the adoption of Smithian political economy by the likes of Hayek’s necro-economics, where the law of property must dominate even the right to life itself.7 It is an “enforce[ment]” of “humanity” that perhaps has resonance with the “right of the multitude” to “reclaim [power] whenever it is abused” (IMP, 69).

Although Hill does not link this affirmation of “the rest” to Ferguson’s unique and important penchant for “martial virtue,” it is tempting to do so in connection with what might be called —at the risk of being oxymoronic—Enlightenment violence. Among so many other prospects, Ferguson helps us think about the serious destruction that lies beneath and must be used to sustain market fundamentalism; and not least, the prominence of grain riots and other modes of popular eighteenth-century revolt. It is tempting to nudge the “martial virtue” conversation ahead (or is it behind?) given Ferguson’s account of the “termination” of Rome. There, the masses of suffering others, accurately dubbed by him “the Proletariat,” come after the wealthy and governing classes in the form of civil war; and there, the too gleeful enterprise of Western political ascendancy comes tumbling tragically down.

As I dash out that string of grim indictments, Hill would be right to remind me that I must show a little Fergusonian restraint and not become gleeful about what might come in the wake of such a tragedy, which I must assure you, I am not. In homing in on the tension between commerce and virtue, or in simply raising the prospect of planetary plebian revolt, I am not simply saying that violence is the only thing that produces—or is produced by—capitalist economic systems. It would be worse if I were to suggest that Ferguson is saying that; and worse still to claim that Hill is saying this is what Ferguson says.

The push-pull between commerce and virtue is an open question if I read Ferguson (and Hill) correctly. Whether that question is any less open for us, and how Ferguson might help us figure that out, is perhaps beside the point of reading him in the eighteenth-century context. That said, of course, the enclosure acts were nasty practices for those who suddenly found themselves being put on the outside of the fence. The burning out of the peasants, and the canalization of surplus of labor driven into Glasgow and other manufacturing towns to keep wages sufficiently low, upset Marx and could hardly be thought about by Ferguson as ethically appealing events. The bad effects of commercial economy at its most self-evidently bad were more than just personally, individually, or subjectively, objectionable for Ferguson. Without ethical restraint, its repercussions could lead to the kind of longer-term social instability that the one philosopher referred to—more or less optimistically—as a class war, while the other—more or less pessimistically—worried about as the amassing of riotous plebes. In any case, this line of thinking is what makes Ferguson stand out for me among other Scottish Enlightenment figures, and what makes Hill’s book such an important one.