The Scottish Enlightenment: Moral Philosophy and Political Economy

The origins of the Scottish Enlightenment lie in the period immediately following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The rebellion highlighted the Scottish backwardness which troubled those thinkers who wished to guide Scotland's passage through the age of improvement; it illustrated the parochial opposition of a backward-looking section of the landed classes to the Union and threw into sharp relief the anachronistic class structure which prevailed in the Highlands.

The literati perceived eighteenth-century Scotland as a nation at a crossroads: one path, of social, political, and economic integration into English society, led to an age of progress and prosperity; the other path, of isolation and autarky, offered little but economic and cultural slumber. For this reason, the Scottish social theorists were centrally concerned with the concept of refinement . The progress of human society from "rude" to "refined" states figured in the writings of Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar—to name the most important representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet, for all their concern with overcoming backwardness, the Scottish social philosophers were intensely aware of the dilemma of development. Much as they desired the economic and social development of eighteenth-century Scotland, they were troubled by the potential dangers of commercializing social life—luxury, self-seeking, moral decay, and the decline of political virtue. Thus, as they constructed a political economy of Scottish development, these theorists also addressed the problem of moral behaviour in a society dominated by the "new economics." The preeminent Scottish theorists, David Hume and Adam Smith, attempted to construct all-embracing theories of social life to resolve the tension between the imperatives of economic development and the requisites of social ethics.

Rich Country-Poor Country: The Problem of Economic Development

Scottish concern with economic development predated the Union. During the 1690s, Scotland experienced commercial depression and grain famine. An acute sense prevailed of Scotland's economic backwardness relative to England, Holland, and France. Five years before Union, the failure of the much-publicized Darien scheme (organized by the Company of Scotland to establish a self-sustaining colonial trade) sparked a debate in political economy. The debate centred on whether Scottish development could be achieved through commercial (and political) union with England or, rather, through state-assisted autarky. In the event, the argument for Union prevailed. But not until midcentury did it produce visible benefits. Thus when David Hume published his major economic essays during the late 1750s, the issue of economic integration was still hotly disputed. Furthermore, during the 1750s and 1760s the economic and political nationalism fostered by Andrew Fletcher before the

Union enjoyed a significant revival. Fletcher had maintained that economic union could only harm the weaker partner. Scottish industry and agriculture would be swamped, he had claimed, by the products of the more prosperous English economy. Moreover, Scottish society would be infected by the corruption which plagued England. Fletcher had argued for state-directed clearance of the Highlands and for the use of forced labour in industry (to ensure low wages) to provide economic development without the deleterious effects of moral corruption and economic decay which would accompany the Union and any attempts to compete in world markets. Fletcher did not oppose the expansion of industry and commerce; he proposed, rather, to pursue these within a uniquely Scottish context in which a civic-minded landed aristocracy could counter the corruption which plagued England.^[24]

Hume's economic writings constituted the most important contemporary challenge to the brand of Scottish nationalism Fletcher had constructed out of the tradition of civic humanism. Hume attacked the view that Scotland would experience disadvantageous terms of trade with England resulting in an outflow of gold and silver and consequently depressing industry, trade, and agriculture. Hume's most sophisticated response to this view took the form of the automatic specie-flow mechanism, the germ of which he first advanced in his essay Of Money and elaborated in another, Of the Balance of Trade . According to Hume, a country's obsession with its balance of trade and its absolute level of gold and silver is entirely misguided—as is the fear that a rich nation will drain a poor one of its specie if the two enter into free trade.

In the essay Of Money, Hume conceded that a rich nation enjoys certain advantages such as "superior industry and skill" and "greater stocks." "But," he argued, "these advantages are compensated, in some measure, by the low price of labour in every country which has not an extensive commerce, and does not abound in gold and silver." For Hume, this lower price for labour is a result of the lower price level in a poor country, since prices are determined by the quantity of circulating money in relation to the volume of marketed goods. Industry will then move into the poor country in search of lower production costs. Hume extended this argument to international trade in the essay, Of the Balance of Trade, where he argued that for a nation to attempt to accumulate gold and silver is foolhardy. There is a

natural level of gold and silver in every country—a level which corresponds to the nation's relative degree of industry. That level may rise or fall, but it always settles at its natural level in much the same manner as does the level of water between two bodies of water. Suppose, Hume suggested, that four-fifths of all the money in Great Britain were annihilated in one night. Prices for British goods would fall so dramatically that Britain would soon recover her gold and silver by underselling all her competitors and reaping an enormous surplus in foreign trade. Likewise, were the money supply to be multiplied five times overnight, the opposite effect would obtain—British goods would be relatively overpriced, and gold and silver would leave the country until prices were restored to a level consistent with the degree of industry.^[25]

On this analytic argument Hume constructed a compelling case for Scottish economic development through integration into world markets. His argument involved several interrelated propositions. First, he dismissed the view that a poor nation would inevitably suffer in its trade relations with a stronger and more advanced partner. To the contrary, he maintained that a poor nation enjoyed decisive advantages in lower production costs which would eventually lead to a balance of economic power between rich and poor nations. Second, Hume exposed as utterly misguided the traditional economic fixation with the nation's money supply. "The want of money," he wrote, "can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any country."^[26] Third, he claimed that the flow of specie into a country with advantageous terms of trade has a markedly stimulative effect on the economy: "Labour and industry gain life; the merchant becomes more enterprising, the manufacturers more diligent and skilful, and even the farmer follows his plough with greater alacrity and attention."^[27] These stimulative effects would prevail, however, only until the price level rose in proportion to the increase in the money supply. The fourth and last link in the chain of Hume's argument was the contention that these stimulative effects could be extended more or less indefinitely. An incease in the national output or an increase in the marketed share of the national output could moderate the rise in the level of domestic prices. This point allowed Hume to argue for a more extensive commercialization of Scottish economic life. For an inflow of specie would not boost prices of Scottish goods dramatically if "the sphere of circulation" were to be extended:

But after money enters into all contracts and sales, and is everywhere the measure of exchange, the same national cash has a much greater task to perform, all commodities are then in the market, the sphere of circulation is enlarged.^[28]

This analysis allowed Hume not only to defend the Union as economically beneficial but also to argue for encouraging habits of industry and commerce among the Scottish people. For it is commercial habits which ensure that an increased money supply results not in luxury and prodigality but rather in industry which will moderate the rise in prices. It is, therefore, "a change of customs and manners"—a social and cultural process of "refinement"—which is fundamental to sustained growth. The essence of this refinement is that "more commodities are produced by additional industry, the same commodities come more to market, after men depart from their ancient simplicity of manners."^[29] Hume's argument pointed, therefore, to the social and institutional presuppositions of economic development. Without a revolution in manners, habits, and customs, he argued, Scotland could not be certain of a future of prosperity and improvement.

Compelling though Hume's argument was, it was not without analytic defects. It pivoted on the assumption that costs of production would necessarily be lower in a poor country than in a rich one. This assumption was challenged by two important critics, James Oswald and Josiah Tucker. Oswald presented his argument to Hume in a lengthy letter written in October 1749, after he had seen Of Money and Of the Balance of Trade in manuscript. Oswald argued that production for extensive markets often enabled rich countries to hold down their unit costs of production. Furthermore, he claimed that rich countries were often able to prevent a dramatic rise in their wage costs by attracting new immigrants.^[30] Similar objections were expressed (and expanded upon) by Josiah Tucker, first in correspondence with Kames and subsequently in his Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects .

Tucker maintained that "the poorer Nation cannot rival the Manufacturers of a richer one at a third Place, or in a foreign Market." Nevertheless, he argued, a poor country could often produce competitively for its own domestic market (and use customs duties to this effect); it might well enjoy advantages in specific commodities. "There are," he wrote, "certain local Advantages resulting either from the Climate, the Soil, the Productions, the Situation, or even

the national Turn and peculiar Genius of one People preferably to those of another." Both rich and poor countries could profit through their mutual exchange; they could provide markets for each other's goods and set examples of industry that each would strive to emulate. "The respective Industry of Nation and Nation enables them to be so much the better Customers, to improve in a friendly Intercourse, and to be a mutual Benefit to each other." Thus, so long as every nation strives to promote industry and commerce, it is quite possible that "every Nation, poor as well as rich, may improve their Condition if they please."^[31]

Tucker's argument strongly affected Hume. It is unclear to what extent he came over to Tucker's position. Tucker himself felt confident that "though I cannot boast that I had the Honour of making the Gentlemen a declared Convert, yet I can say, and prove likewise, that in his Publications since our Correspondence, he has wrote, and reasoned, as if he was a Convert."^[32] Against Tucker's claim stands the fact that Hume never modified the argument presented in his essays Of Money and Of the Balance of Trade . In his favour, however, stands the fact that the emphasis of Hume's argument shifted somewhat in the essay Of the Jealousy of Trade, written in 1759, the year after the Hume-Tucker correspondence.

In that essay Hume conceded that "the advantage of superior stocks and correspondence is so great, that it is not easily overcome."^[33] In a letter to Kames, he announced that he was pleased to see that Tucker prophesied continuing prosperity for England "but," he continued, "I still indulge myself in the hopes that we in Scotland possess also some advantages, which may enable us to share with them in wealth and industry."^[34] These advantages he now expressed in terms similar to the doctrine advanced by Tucker. "Nature," he wrote, "by giving a diversity of geniuses, climates, and soils, to different nations, has secured their mutual intercourse and commerce, as long as they all remain industrious and civilized."^[35] With this argument, Hume returned to his three central concerns: first, to justify a more extensive commercialization of the Scottish economy; second, to argue that free world trade based on an international division of labour was the most direct route to economic development for a poor country (and that for Scottish commerce this meant integration by specialization into English and world markets); third, to state the case for a transformation of the "customs and man-

ners" of the Scottish people to enable them to follow the promise of the age of improvement.

The result of the Hume-Tucker debate was thus to build a persuasive case for Scottish economic development through integration into the English market. Hume's argument represented the most sophisticated treatment of economic development before The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. In fact, in The Wealth of Nations Smith adapted Hume's view by arguing that, although a poor nation could not rival a rich nation in manufactures, it could compete in agriculture—a point to which we shall return in the next chapter. In many respects, Hume's economic writings dealt with the lesser problem which troubled Scottish intellectuals of his era. For, however much they favoured accelerated economic growth, eighteenth-century Scottish theorists worried equally about the moral implications of commercialization. How was ethical life to be preserved in the age of industry and refinement? In many respects, this was the central issue of debate in the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Moral Problem: Social Attraction in Commercial Society

The great problem of moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was that "of reconciling the old ethics with the new economics."^[36] This problem revolved around the dilemma of finding a unifying principle of social life in a commercial society characterized by competition and individual pursuit of self-interest. How were the atomic individuals of commercial society held together? What was to prevent a society characterized by economic individualism from flying asunder? How was virtue—a commitment to the priority of the body politic over the interests of the individual—to be maintained in an individualist social order? These were the questions which, in one way or another, preoccupied the social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This problem emerged most clearly in Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees . Subtitled "Private Vices, Public Benefits," The Fable argued that corruption, fraud, and deceit were economically beneficial. In The Fable, elimination of these three vices leads to a collapse of trade and industry. Just as theft makes work for the locksmith, so luxury and extravagance provide a stimulus to many trades. On the basis of this argument, Mandeville prided himself that he had

demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and kind Affections that are natural to Man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason

and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society; but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without exception.^[37]

Mandeville did not insist that all vices are beneficial to the public or that vice is automatically of public benefit. He argued that it required the "dextrous Management of a skilful Politician" to harness private vices in a fashion which would serve the public interest. Nevertheless, his basic proposition was clear: all public benefits derive from actions which are fundamentally vicious in character.

Mandeville's theory posed an enormous challenge to virtually all systems of moral philosophy. Especially threatened were those philosophies which sought to ground social life in a disposition towards benevolent treatment of others. Mandeville had written against Shaftesbury, for example, that men were not drawn together into society by "natural Affection to their Species or Love of Company" but only as a "Body Politick" under the rule of a government. Starting with a perspective similar to that of Hobbes, Mandeville drew out the conclusion that individuals accept the subordination inherent in civil society (that is, society based on government) only to satisfy their basic material needs. Society and government were, therefore, the outgrowth of selfish passions. It was to defend the principle of the natural sociability of men that Francis Hutcheson, friend of Hume and Kames, teacher of Adam Smith, "the personality most responsible for the new spirit of enlightenment in the Scottish universities," undertook to demolish the edifice of Mandeville's system.^[38]

Hutcheson wrote as an avowed disciple of Shaftesbury and opponent of Mandeville. The full title of his first published work, which appeared in 1725, reflects the confrontation between Mandeville's new economics and the old ethics; it reads An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in two treatises, in which the principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are explained and defended against the Author of the Fable of the Bees; and the Ideas of Moral Good and Evil are established according to the Sentiments of the Ancient Moralists: with an attempt to introduce a Mathematical Calculation in subjects of Morality .

Hutcheson inherited from the third earl of Shaftesbury the ancient Greek concept of the cosmos as a balanced, ordered, and harmonious system. According to Shaftesbury, the universe is a delicately bal-

anced organism "in which a strict "oeconomy" obtains in the interrelationships between the parts which make up the whole. Just as order obtains in the physical universe, so it does in the moral world of social life. But the order of social life is a potentiality; to make it actual, men—or at least "gentlemen of fashion," for Shaftesbury's theory was thoroughly aristocratic—must understand the principles of social harmony and act according to the dictates of moral law. The understanding of moral duty requires aesthetic contemplation, considered reflection upon the beauty which prevails in nature and society. A mind "experienced in all the degrees and orders of Beauty" strives to "rise" from contemplation of the beauty of particular systems to comprehension of the beauty of the whole. Such a mind can direct the soul to its moral obligations since it "views communitys, friendships, relations, dutys; and considers by what Harmony of particular minds the general harmony is composed." Those "fine gentlemen" who appreciate the harmony of the cosmos also appreciate the need for a "balance of the passions." They seek to moderate selfish affections by public or benevolent sentiments, to make their behaviour aesthetically pleasing to others.^[39] Shaftesbury's view was thus rooted in the classical civic tradition which held that commitment to and participation in the body politic was the exclusive duty of independent landed gentlemen freed from the exigencies of labour.

Hutcheson built his moral philosophy directly upon Shaftesbury's critique of Mandeville. He added to it a response to the latter's strictly economic arguments. Not only did Hutcheson condemn the moral implications of Mandeville's theory, he also sought to show that the latter's economic arguments were fallacious. Central to Hutcheson's case was the claim that luxury trades or those trades which profit from crime or suffering are not necessary to economic well-being. Income not spent one way will, he claimed, be spent in another. "There may be an equal consumption of manufactures without these vices and the evils which flow from them," Hutcheson maintained.^[40]

Hutcheson felt confident that he had refuted the more blatantly pernicious aspects of Mandeville's system, but the problem of the basic springs of social action remained. Although vicious crime could be shown to be unnecessary to economic well-being, selfish interest might still prompt individuals to come together in society and

observe its rules. If so, public good might still be said to be the effect of selfish interest. Hutcheson accepted that every individual had a selfish interest in society. The solitary life would be a life without material comfort; only the cooperative activity of individuals in society makes possible that division of labour which increases the wealth available to all members of society. Hutcheson recognized this fact but harboured serious reservations about the commercialization of economic life. He believed that unbridled commercialism leads inevitably to corruption and decline, as had been the case, he believed, with the Roman republic. For this reason he adhered to the Harringtonian idea of an agrarian law which would place limits upon the accumulation of landed wealth; he looked to a virtuous, industrious, and enlightened gentry to counter the pernicious effects of commerce on the morals of individuals.^[41] Nevertheless, he continued to believe that society satisfied basic human needs—social as well as material. All humans have, Hutcheson claimed, "a natural impulse to society with their fellows." The impulse toward society comes from natural sociability. The human being is a social creature who craves compassion and friendship. Hutcheson went so far as to make the assertion—directed especially against Mandeville—that all people have an innate concern for the good of society. This concern flows from a distinctive "moral sense," the capacity for benevolence.

In Hutcheson's theory, people are endowed with both selfish and social passions. The central social passion is the "moral sense," or "benevolence" (although in his later writings Hutcheson added to the moral sense two more, a sense of honour and a public sense). In his Essay on the Passions, Hutcheson argued that in their action and reaction upon one another, these passions formed a balanced system. This balance of the passions was maintained by a sort of "Newtonian dynamics." Indeed, Hutcheson explicitly compared self-love to the inertial movement of the atoms of the universe and benevolence to the principle of gravitation which subjects inertial movement to strict order and regularity of operation. While self-love is the principle which moves the atoms of society, benevolence is the principle of the whole which acts to moderate, order, and control the selfish impulses. Self-love is not to be repressed but merely regulated, for social life depends upon the balance of these sets of passions. As Hutcheson wrote in his Inquiry, "Self-love is really as necessary to

the good of the whole as benevolence; as that attraction which causes the cohesion of the part, is as necessary to the regular state of the whole as gravitation."^[42]

The decisive claim for Hutcheson's argument is that a force (benevolence) operates in the social world which orders and regulates human affairs, just as gravity or "attraction" regulates the phenomena of the natural universe. Hutcheson's moral philosophy stands or falls on the claim that "this universal benevolence toward all men we may compare to that principle of gravitation which perhaps extends to all bodies in the universe."^[43] Without such a principle of moral "attraction" the elementary parts of society—its atomic individuals—would operate in a world of chaos. No general principle could harmonize the disparate and self-seeking activities of individuals into an ordered social whole. Hutcheson believed that the evidence of human experience demonstrated the empirical reality of the principle of benevolence, just as Newton had deduced the principles of gravitation from the evidence of the regular orbits of the planets. But, ultimately, Hutcheson was forced to evoke a teleology of divine origin to support his claim. When we survey the universe, he suggested, "all the apparent Beauty produced is an evidence of the execution of a Benevolent design."^[44]

A quite different response to Mandeville was shaped by David Hume, who rejected Hutcheson's resort to teleological argument. As Hume wrote to Hutcheson in 1739, "I cannot agree to your sense of 'natural .' 'Tis founded on final causes, which is a consideration that appears to me pretty uncertain and unphilosophical." In this letter, Hume maintained that he sought to understand the mind as "an anatomist," not as a painter. The former examines the mind in an effort "to discover its most secret springs and principles" whereas the lat-ter attempts "to describe the grace and beauty of its actions."^[45] Moreover, Hume did not believe that it was necessary to counterpose a moral sense to Mandeville's economics. Instead, he believed that moral behaviour pivoted upon intellectual understanding of the processes of commercialization.

Hume did not share Hutcheson's qualms about commercial society. In fact, he believed that the advance of commerce, rather than contributing to corruption and degeneracy, could pave the way for morality, justice, and good government. Hume held that moral behaviour depended upon rational consideration and that commerce,

industry, and refinement stimulated the life of the mind. Thus, in his essay Of Refinement in the Arts, he maintains against the civic humanists that "refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life has no natural tendency to beget venality and corruption." On the contrary, refinement in the mechanical arts produces refinement in the liberal arts. "The same age which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers and ship-carpenters." An age of improvement in the arts and sciences banishes ignorance and allows individuals to "enjoy the privilege of rational creatures." The result is that they come to see the necessity for private property, law, and government. Thus, ages of improvement and refinement need not be ages of corruption. Indeed, moral and political progress are intimately connected to the development of commercial society.^[46]

The intellectual commerce in ideas which develops in an age of industry and improvement produces those advances in philosophy and ethics which provide the social and institutional framework for moral action and good government. Indeed, only the intellectual revolution which accompanies an age of progress supplies a solid footing for government and society. Mandeville may thus be right that society emerges out of selfish need, but the process of "humanization" which is associated with the growth of commercial society establishes a more powerful basis for society—human reason itself. This argument emerges clearly in the third book of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature .

In the Treatise Hume accepts that self-love is the origin of law and government. Nevertheless, since "the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another," competing and conflicting self-interested passions must "adjust themselves after such a manner as to concur in some system of conduct and behaviour."^[47] After individuals discover that unbridled selfishness incapacitates them for society, "they are naturally induc'd to lay themselves under the restraint of such rules, as may render their commerce more safe and commodious." As rules of social regulation are developed, they become customary and are passed on to future generations. Eventually people come to cherish the rules which hold society together. They develop a sense of sympathy for those who observe social norms. Moreover, they come to model their behaviour in such a way as to be worthy of the sympathy and approval of others. Through custom and educa-

tion, then, individuals develop a love of praise and a fear of blame. For Hume, moral principles are not innate or providentially inspired. They are practical rules developed in the course of living in society; morality refers to the norms and conventions which prevail there. These norms and conventions can be said to enter into the commonsense view of the world most individuals acquire. Morality is rooted, in other words, in the shared opinions which constitute the common assumptions, the inherited wisdom of individuals living in society. As Hume puts it in the Treatise, "the general opinion of mankind had some authority in all cases; but in this of morals 'tis perfectly infallible."^[48]

It is sympathy which constitutes the principle of attraction in society. But for Hume sympathy is not an innate propensity as it is for Hutcheson. Rather, it is a capacity derived from experience and modified as the customary rules of social life change. Sympathy has a rational dimension; it derives from the individual's understanding of the necessity for norms of conduct and behaviour. Thus, although "self-interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice," as society develops it becomes the case that "a sympathy with public interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue."^[49] In the course of experience, then, individuals come to recognize that rules of justice, especially those which regulate property rights, are useful to the order of society.

Hume believed that the forms of human intercourse which characterize commercial society provide the surest foundation for moral behaviour and justice. It is through the experience of those forms of interaction and communication appropriate to an exchange economy that individuals identify the behaviours which sustain the social bonds upon which they rely. Through the customs which characterize commercial society, then, they come to appreciate the necessity for property, law, and justice. They accept the need for—indeed, they will—those institutional arrangements which preserve the social order. They recognize the usefulness of the social conventions and institutions which they have created and approve of that which is useful to society. "Public utility" thus becomes the basis of moral decision. As Hume put it in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, "every-thing which contributes to the happiness of society recommends itself directly to our approbation and good will."^[50]

It is certainly true that Hume's argument is constructed within an

"essentially jurisprudential framework."^[51] That is to say, Hume's primary concern is to establish the conditions which make justice —particularly the legal rules governing ownership and transfer of property—possible in a commercial society. His central preoccupation is not, as it was for the civic humanists, to establish the conditions of public virtue. Yet it is misleading to suggest that Hume's position (or that of Smith, which we shall examine below) substitutes the coordinates of natural jurisprudence for those of civic humanism. After all, we have seen in chapter 2 that James Harrington's version of the humanist perspective shifted from specifying the social circumstances conducive to moral behaviour and civic virtue towards delineating the system of laws which could harness selfish passions to the common good. One distinctive feature of eighteenth-century Scottish social theory was that it continued this Harringtonian emphasis on the priority of law in establishing a healthy and stable commonwealth. With this emphasis, it made perfect sense to consider the classical republic in terms of law and jurisprudence, rather than in terms of the moral conditions of citizenship. Moreover, such an approach involved treating the classical civic tradition and the tradition of natural jurisprudence associated with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Carmichael as components of a common enquiry into the science of government. Indeed, we cannot understand the outlook of an influential Scottish theorist like Francis Hutcheson unless we recognize that Scottish writers addressed social development in terms of both the civic problem of corruption and the jurisprudential concern with the evolution of laws and forms of property.

Hume must be seen as operating within this Scottish context of social and political theorizing. Moreover, both his philosophical scepticism and his Ciceronian emphasis on the virtue of moderation would have led him to eschew a rigid attitude towards the classical debate over commerce, corruption, and citizenship. Proponent of commercialization that he was, Hume was deeply concerned that the increase in wealth brought about by economic development might increase the temptation for those in government to exploit public institutions for private advantage—a concern rooted in the civic tradition and its Commonwealth descendant. He was especially concerned with the growth of the public debt—a central issue taken up by the Country opposition of the eighteenth century. Hume worried that growth of the debt would erode the traditional social structure

by elevating above all others the holders of the debt, individuals "who have no connexions with the state, who can enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they chuse to reside." Fixed wealth, under such conditions, would no longer be passed from generation to generation. The result would be an end "to all ideas of nobility, gentry and family" and the erosion of "the middle power between king and people."^[52]

It was "the middling rank" upon whom Hume hung his hopes for the preservation and growth of liberty, a category which included the landed gentry. Commercialization did not imply a decline in the importance of the gentry; on the contrary, Hume insisted that there was no inherent conflict between the landed and trading classes and that commercial expansion contributed directly to agricultural improvement.^[53] It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves also that Hume's model of a "perfect commonwealth" drew directly on Harringtonian ideas and emphasized the integrity of local communities in which landed gentlemen exercised a significant influence in political affairs.^[54] Hume appears also to argue that one of the advantages of commercial progress is that it will allow larger sections of the population to achieve the material and moral prerequisites of citizenship (most important, economic independence). For this reason, John Robertson seems close to the mark when he argues that "the suggestion that commerce has the potential to universalize citizenship was sufficient to enable Hume to realign the civic ideal of political community with the individualism of his jurisprudential theory of government."^[55] Hume's resolution of the new economics with the old morality—his unique mix of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism—did not settle the Scottish debate over commerce and virtue. One of the most important challenges to Hume's position was framed by Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Pocock has rightly called "perhaps the most Machiavellian of the Scottish disquisitions" on the problem of virtue and corruption in commercial society."^[56]

Ferguson's position was not a wholesale rejection of commercial society. He had no doubt that social division of labour increased the wealth of a nation. He also accepted that as an individual pursues his own commercial gain "he augments the wealth of his country." Indeed, for this reason he took an essentially laissez-faire position on trade, arguing that "private interest is a better patron of commerce

and plenty, than the refinements of state." However economically beneficial it might be, commercial society had adverse social and political effects. Ferguson saw social development as a contradictory process: "Every age hath its consolations, as well as its sufferings." In the case of modern civil society—the commercial society in which exchange turns "the hunter and the warrior into a tradesman and a merchant"—the suffering has to do with the damage done by commerce to the moral fabric which sustains the political order.^[57]

The central problem of commercial society is that economic competition and the pursuit of profit become the model for all human intercourse. All social relations tend to be reduced to those which characterize the cash nexus. Individuals become little more than objects in the path of selfish action. Ferguson wrote of commercial society:

It is here indeed, if ever, that man is sometimes found a detached and a solitary being: he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow-creatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the profits they bring.^[58]

The great danger associated with commercializing all social relations is that the principles of profit-seeking can come to dominate the political system. It is when individuals approach political affairs with an eye to their private advancement that we are confronted with a full-fledged process of corruption. The decline of civic virtue—a dedication to the interests of society above those of the individual—signals the decay of the moral and political substructure of society. Thus, although commercial society is always fraught with the dangers of corruption,

The case, however, is not desperate, till we have formed our system of politics, as well as manners; till we have sold our freedom for titles, equipage and distinctions; till we see no merit but prosperity and power, no disgrace but poverty and neglect.^[59]

According to Ferguson, corruption was not an inevitable consequence of commercial society. It was inevitable only if the ruling class failed to recognize the dangers posed by "the spirit which reigns in a commercial state" and failed to erect safeguards which would prevent this spirit from infiltrating the "system of politics, as well as manners." In a very real sense, the Essay was written to counsel the Scottish political elite regarding the commitment to civic

virtue which was necessary if the age of commerce and improvement were not to destroy the civic virtues which sustained the political order. Ferguson bemoaned the fact that "in too many nations of Europe, the individual is everything, and the public is nothing." And he reminded his readers that "to the ancient Greek, or the Roman, the individual was nothing and the public everything."^[60] He thus appealed to the landed classes to play the role of enlightened and public-spirited gentlemen who would preserve in the political realm the virtues which could counter the corrupting influence of the commercial spirit.

For Ferguson the principles operative in the political sphere can and should counter those which prevail in economic relations. It is the duty of the political actors, virtuous men of affairs, to design and promote political arrangements which offset the corrupting influence of commerce. The statesman, the public-minded leader, ought to strive to construct a framework of laws based not on his particular selfish interests but on his understanding of the general interest of society. These laws must then operate to "weaken the desire of riches, and to preserve in the breast of the citizen, that moderation and equity which ought to regulate his conduct."^[61] Ferguson's argument thus presupposes civic activism. The direction of society is not simply the unforeseen outcome of interacting selfish interests operating in a system of exchange relations. The interventions of public-spirited individuals do matter in the overall social scheme. For Ferguson, one of the most important means to maintain political virtue was through military engagement; for this reason, he supported the Scottish campaign for a citizens' militia. The social division of labour is not to be extended to the military sphere; if military activity becomes a specialized professional function, then the citizenry will never know the experience of risking death to preserve the commonwealth—an experience which forces citizens to rise above narrow particularity and to become one with the general Will.^[62]

Although he does not repudiate commercial society, Ferguson rejects the Humean identification of commerce with the development of social ethics. He sees commercial society as a thoroughly contradictory phenomenon. The benefits of wealth are offset by the damage it does to virtue. Only a conscious use of law and government to prevent the infiltration of the commercial spirit into the moral fabric of society can preserve justice and virtue.

The Scottish Enlightenment produced, therefore, several responses to the problem of reconciling the new economics with the old ethics. In the case of Hutcheson, a superior moral sense was to moderate and direct the selfish passions which are central to a commercial society. For Hume, commercial society was the best framework to elaborate rules of social conduct which would preserve the social and political order. In Ferguson's system, public-minded civic action was to immunize political fife against the corrupting influence of the commercial spirit of an exchange economy; the exchange economy was thus a necessary evil—necessary to economic growth but evil when its principles and imperatives came to dominate the body politic. It was in the context of these previous approaches that Adam Smith penned his answer to the question of the relation between economic activity and moral conduct. His answer culminated in his celebrated work, The Wealth of Nations . And that work was the end product of an ingenious attempt to resolve the central problem which preoccupied all thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment.