Civil society history

Author: (English) Ferguson
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-07-01
Features: Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was one of the central figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. His Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of citizenship and apply it to the modern travel literature. Ferguson offers a complex model of historical advance which challenges both Hume's and Smith's embrace of modernity and the primitivism of Rousseau. Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of the emergence of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtue. Central to Ferguson's theory of Citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation, and military valor. His fascination with the theory of unintended consequences as a model of historical causality does not deter him from insisting on their replaceable value in individual, public-minded members of political society. FANIAOZ-SALZBERGER is a lecturer in the Department of History at Haifa University. From 1990 to 1993 she was a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her book Translating the Enlightenment was published in 1995 by Oxford University Press.