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Ferguson: An Essay on the History of Civil Society

by Adam Ferguson

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1331203,759 (4.36)1
Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish - and European - Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary 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 virtues. Central to Ferguson's theory of citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation and military valour. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active, virtuous citizenship and apply it to the modern state.… (more)
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Review and listing of a copy from Classic Rare Books, London, England:

This work was the principal work of Adam Ferguson, professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson is today remembered for his 'Essay' rather than for his contributions to moral philosophy or Roman history: he was what we would now call an intellectual historian, tracing the gradual rise of the human mind from barbarism to political and social refinement. Debates between Reid, Dugald Stewart, Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and Ferguson himself reveal Scottish philosophy, in general, to be important sociologically. Ferguson's thought was part of a general eighteenth century movement, stimulated by the French, built upon English empirical traditions, and hostile to Cartesian speculation. Ferguson is sometimes considered the father of modern systematic sociology, and although he himself was soon forgotten amidst the anti empirical reactions of Heglian disciples, the influence of the philosophical group to which he belonged was attested to by such nineteenth-century political thinkers as Comte, Mill and Marx. His discussions of politics, economics, history, aesthetics, literature and ethnology were a synthesis of the thought of his time.' Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  JamesBoswell | Mar 18, 2012 |
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Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish - and European - Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary 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 virtues. Central to Ferguson's theory of citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation and military valour. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active, virtuous citizenship and apply it to the modern state.

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