In the first of two chapters devoted to the ways in which philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment used ‘conjectural’ or ‘stadial’ history to re-think the development of human society, Aaron Garrett examines the epistemic problems which stimulated their enquiries. Confronting questions in legal history which could not be answered on the principles of positive or natural law, the jurist Lord Kames had recourse first to human nature then to contextual historical developments (such as the rise of commerce) to enable him to bridge gaps in the evidence with empirical and explanatory ‘conjectures’. Kames further drew on Hume’s discussion of time as a psychological experience of a succession of ideas, which carried the implication that the times of history might be experienced in multiple forms. This implication is clarified by a comparison with the strictly chronological conception of time adopted by Adam Anderson in his history of commerce, which fitted every development of note into the same unitary Biblical time scheme. The point of stadial history, by contrast, was to compare societies at different levels, or ‘stages’, of development according to their own time schemes. By pluralising time, the Scots made it possible to envisage multiple histories of human origins, religious belief and social development.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

The chapter explores conjectural history, stadial history, and anthropology in the Scottish Enlightenment. In the writings of Adam Smith, John Millar, David Hume, Lord Kames, and many others concepts that had been assumed to have no history — such as sentiment — were rethought against the background of a theory of historical stages and progress. Special attention is paid to the analogies between animals and humans, and to race.