Since this is a book on the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment then the best place to begin is the idea of human sociality. This might be thought to be an unpromising place to start because who could ever doubt that humans are social beings. But this is too hasty. Once further questions are asked - in what sense are humans social? Does sociality rest on instinct or choice or what? - then the issue looks less cut and dried. Aside from picking up on these questions the Scots pursued another line of enquiry. In this they confronted an important factor in their intellectual legacy. The (natural) jurisprudential approach to social relations hypothesised as one of its key ingredients a non-‘social’ circumstance (the State of Nature). What we also find, therefore, in the Scots’ discussions of sociality is a critique of that hypothesis and its associated ideas. Indeed one of the historically important factors that make the Scots worth studying is that aspects of this critique prefigure Burke's well-known assault, without it, in their case, requiring them to revoke their membership of the Enlightenment family.

A: The Evidence

The title of the opening chapter of Ferguson's History of Civil Society is ‘Of the Question relating to the State of Nature’. Ferguson's aim is to criticise the assumptions and methods of those theorists who talk of a State of Nature. The theorists he has in mind, although they are not named, are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. They differ in their accounts but, more significantly for Ferguson, they share the same fatal weakness. They have each erected a ‘system’ based upon selecting ‘one or few particulars on which to establish a theory’ (ECS: 2). In adopting this approach Ferguson says they have deviated from the practice of the ‘natural historian’, who thinks the ‘facts’ should be collected and general tenets should be derived from ‘observations and experiments’. By contrast Hobbes and Rousseau resort to ‘hypothesis’ or ‘conjecture’ or ‘imagination’ or ‘poetry’. To these Ferguson juxtaposes respectively ‘reality’, ‘facts’, ‘reason’ and ‘science’, and it is the latter list that ‘must be admitted as the foundation of all our reasoning relative to man’ (2). We must, in other words, turn to evidence.