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“DISMEMBERING THE HUMAN CHARACTER”: ADAM FERGUSON’S CONCEPTION OF CORRUPTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2019

Samuel Fleischacker
Samuel Fleischacker*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago
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Abstract:

This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.

Keywords

Adam FergusonAdam Smithcivic corruptioncivic republicanismself-interestfactionvirtueliberalism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Winter 2018 , pp. 54 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2019 

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References

1 Pocock, John, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

2 Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Oz-Salzberger, Fania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 67, my emphasis. Henceforth: EHCS.Google Scholar

3 Although Ferguson does imply that certain institutional structures help instill virtue. “Despotism is monarchy corrupted,” he says, “in which a court and a prince in appearance remain, but in which every subordinate rank is destroyed; in which the subject is told, that he has no rights; that he cannot possess any property, nor fill any station, independent of the momentary will of his prince” (71). Ensuring that there are subordinate ranks with real power, and some mechanism to ensure the rights of subjects to property and to office independently of the decrees of a monarch, thus seem to be important bulwarks against despotism. But Ferguson implies that these institutional protections will be effective only where subjects are not motivated primarily by fear of their sovereign—the subordinate ranks will otherwise readily become mere hollow forms, in effect carrying out whatever the sovereign says.

4 This is an Aristotelian thesis, of course, and Ferguson shares it with Adam Smith. Strikingly, even though they disagree about what problem most besets the poor in an advanced division of labor (see below, notes 22–23 and text thereto), they agree entirely that the problem arises from the practice of the poor—from what their active lives are like, as workers and/or consumers—and not from ideologies they may hold, or from the mere fact that they are looked down upon, or deprived of certain goods.

5 EHCS, 132; see also 203.

6 Ibid., 133; see also 226.

7 Ibid., 226; on selfishness and animality, see also 41, 246–47.

8 This quick movement from “caring for each” to “caring for all” is of course problematic; philosophers with individualistic moral theories, like Kant and Adam Smith, will see good reason to resist it. But Ferguson, unlike Smith, seems to have been a fairly straightforward utilitarian—“the rule by which men commonly judge of external actions is taken from the supposed influence of such actions on . . . public utility” (41)—and for a utilitarian, the inference goes through readily.

9 See Hirsch, Fred, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge, 1978).Google Scholar

10 EHCS, 73; see also 226, 237, 241.

11 Ibid., 155; see also 195–96.

12 Often seen as anticipating Marx, Ferguson for this reason in fact joined the liberal consensus of the Scottish thinkers of his time, differing only slightly in his policy recommendations from Hume and Smith. See EHCS, 237, 247, 251 and 258 on the importance of individual rights, and 209 and 247 on the importance of the rule of law. Ferguson also sings the praises of freedom and “independence,” as central to both the felicity and the honor of humankind, in many parts of the book. But see especially 260.

13 Smith and Madison were among the many contemporaries of Ferguson who were far more uneasy about “disputes of party.” Fania Oz-Salzberger comments incisively on how disturbing Ferguson’s German readers also found this aspect of his views, and how they tried to tone it down, interpreting him as if he were merely praising the freedom of expression: see Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 187–88. Iain McDaniel points out that Ferguson thought that happiness was more compatible with civil unrest than Smith did: McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 80.

14 His worry in the Wealth of Nations (WN) that it leads to soul- and mind-deadening work for the lowest ranks of society is in fact much the same as Ferguson’s complaint that it turns workshops into “engines, the parts of which are men” (EHCS, 174).

15 See note 12 above.

16 In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (henceforth: LJ), ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978): see LJ 538–39. Smith developed many of the ideas of WN in these lectures, and Ferguson may have heard some of them, or seen early drafts of WN that contained similar material. It is of course possible that Smith borrowed from Ferguson rather than the other way around, but Ferguson declares himself “not much conversant” with, nor much interested in, economic matters (EHCS, 140), so the influence, if any, presumably goes in the other direction. Ferguson’s Essay was first published in 1767 and went through several editions before WN came out in 1776, but Ferguson put in a sort of advance blurb for WN in his fourth edition (1773), remarking that “the public will probably soon be furnished with a theory of national economy, equal to what has ever appeared on any subject of science whatever,” and telling readers in a footnote that this great theory was going to be written by “Mr. Smith, the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiment [sic]” (p.140, footnote). Taken together with the various echoes of Smith in Ferguson’s discussions of commerce, this suggests that Ferguson had read and/or discussed WN with Smith, or had heard sections of Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence.

Smith himself thought that Ferguson had plagiarized parts of EHCS from an early draft of WN, a charge that Ferguson denied. See discussion in David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 74–75 n. 35, and Jack Weinstein, “The Two Adams: Ferguson and Smith on Sympathy and Sentiment,” in E. Heath and V. Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 90–91, and 195 n. 15. Weinstein adds several similarities between Ferguson and Smith that I do not touch on here. Both Kettler and Weinstein conclude, sensibly, that the question of whether Ferguson literally plagiarized Smith cannot and need not be answered. They were working on similar topics, in the same cultural milieu, and interacted personally a great deal. So it is unsurprising if some of their views, and even the way they phrase those views, overlap.

17 For instance, Ferguson describes the merchant in an advanced society as “liberal,” “faithful” and “enterprising” (EHCS, 138). On liberality, compare LJ, 333; on “faithfulness” (assuming that means “keeping promises”—what Smith calls “probity”) compare LJ, 333, 338, 487, 528, and 538–39; on being “enterprising,” see WN, 411.

18 EHCS, 139. Compare Smith, Adam, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , ed. Skinner, A. and Campbell, R. H. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 456. Henceforth: WN.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 224; compare WN, II.iii.

20 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), I.i.1.5; p. 61. Henceforth: TMS.

21 Smith frequently condemns the treatment of the poor by their employers; he was indeed an important source for those who later regarded poverty itself as an injustice. See my Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

22 Ferguson wrote to Smith, a month after the publication of WN: “You have provoked . . . the church the universities, and the merchants, against all of whom I am willing to take your part; but you likewise provoked the militia, and there I must be against you.”—Letter of 18 April 1776, in E. Mossner and I. Ross, eds., Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 193–94.

Fania Oz-Salzberger says that Smith “abandon[ed] the notion of . . . a citizens’ militia” (Translating the Enlightenment, 119). This goes too far. At WN 786–88, Smith explicitly endorses the importance of a citizens’ militia for the sake of maintaining the virtue of courage in a population that might otherwise be deadened, morally, by their participation in an advanced division of labor. What Smith does not believe is that a militia can adequately defend a country against a modern standing army. Smith himself complained that his critics read this point about military tactics and then never attended to the later section about the continuing importance of militias: “When he Wrote his book,” he says in a letter, about a pamphlet criticizing him on the militia issue, “he had not read mine to the end. He fancies that because I insist that a Militia is in all cases inferior to a well regulated and well disciplined standing Army, that I disapprove of Militias altogether.” Smith emphatically rejects the latter charge (Mossner and Ross, Correspondence, 251). For an excellent discussion of Ferguson and Smith on militias, see John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), chap. 7.

23 Ferguson begins the paragraph I quote here with the words “In every commercial state . . . the exaltation of a few must depress the many.” He also says that “we think that the extreme meanness of some classes must arise chiefly from the defect of knowledge and of liberal education,”—exactly what Smith thinks in WN V.i.f—but denies that what “we think” is correct. When we think this, he says, “we forget how many circumstances . . . tend to corrupt the lowest orders of men,” adding that “[i]gnorance is the least of their failings.” So the passage as a whole reads as a critique of a “we,” writing on commercial societies, that is most prominently represented by Smith, and from which Ferguson himself dissents.

24 There should not be, in short, “one set of men [who] have an interest in the preservation of civil establishments, without the power to defend them, [while] the other [set] have this power, without either the inclination or the interest [to defend them]” (219). It’s worth noting that Ferguson was not a democrat: he classed democracy with mob rule. He simply wanted a non-professional aristocracy (which he thought, pace Smith, could be based on merit) to participate in government and the military: see Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 84–86, 99–101, 158–59, 215–16.

25 Ferguson lays out, as a foundational moral maxim for each person to follow, “That he himself, as an individual, is no more than a part of the whole that demands his regard” (EHCS, 41; see also 53, which urges us to inculcate in ourselves “that habit of the soul by which we consider ourselves as but a part of some beloved community”). Smith, by contrast, declares that “[t]he concern which we take in the fortune and happiness of individuals does not, in common cases, arise from that which we take in the fortune and happiness of society. . . . [O[ur regard for the individuals [does not] arise from our regard for the multitude: but . . . our regard for the multitude is compounded and made up of the particular regards which we feel for the different individuals of which it is composed” (TMS II.ii.3.10; 89–90).

26 These are the only two mentions of the word in the book; I am indebted for the second one to an online essay by Dan Klein: https://iea.org.uk/corruption-according-to-adam-smith/. Klein suggests that several other discussions in TMS also concern corruption. It is not clear that that is true, although they may concern related notions. They do not in any case use the word “corruption,” so I will set them aside. There are discussions of corruption as a product of dependency in LJ and WN. These raise very interesting issues, which lie, however, outside the scope of this essay. For discussion, see Spiros Tegos, “Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption,” in C. Berry, M. Paganelli, and C. Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

27 Compare Daniel Weinstock, “Corruption in Adversarial Systems: The Case of Democracy” (this volume), who argues that faction both enhances and corrupts democracy, bringing the views of Ferguson and Smith together, in a surprising way.

28 See for instance EHCS, 210, where he says that one crucial “object of policy [is] to secure the person and property of the subject.”

29 With Ferguson’s line about being born for candour and affection, we may pair the following line in Smith (from the 1790 edition of TMS, thus written after EHCS): “Nature . . . formed men for that mutual kindness, so necessary for their happiness” (TMS, 225).

30 See Smith, TMS, 83, 137. The conception of virtue at work here is (proto-)Kantian rather than Aristotelian. On an Aristotelian conception of virtue, where it consists in excellences that some people possess more than others and the superiority of the former is something to be celebrated, a zero-sum competition can break out over virtue just as it can over wealth. I am grateful to a comment by Elijah Millgram for showing me the need to comment on this point.

31 Rawls, John, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 59.Google Scholar

32 The advantages I am here attributing to public goods will appear most in local settings, not in connection with goods provided to millions of people, who perforce can have little or no direct say in how they are provided. Ferguson misses this point. I am grateful to Daniel Weinstock for raising it.

33 Private charities can supply schools, parks, hospitals, and so forth, but they do not inculcate in either those who lead them or those whom they serve a commitment to the citizenry as a whole: they instead have missions that reflect the ideologies or religious beliefs or taste of their founders.