Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature
Editors: Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 864 0: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 542 7
The writings of Adam Ferguson offer insights into history, society and politics, challenging us to reconsider our conceptions of human nature and to reflect on the moral demands of modernity. Surprisingly, no single collection of scholarly essays has been devoted to him. In this, the first of two related monographs, essays range across all of Ferguson’s works to investigate his engagement with contemporary events and his contributions to our understanding of history and human action.
Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. On these and on many other important contemporary subjects, the views he expressed helped shape public opinion. But his work here also extends back to Roman times, about which he drew comparisons with the society of his day. As shown in these essays, he not only offered his thoughts on and described history, he investigated the nature of history itself.
Sample pages
- Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature: Introduction
- Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature: Index
Readership
Scottish Enlightenment, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Philosophy
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Life and Works
1 Ferguson’s Epistolary Self – John D Brewer
2 Ferguson and Scottish History: Past and Present in An Essay on the History of Civil Society – David Allan
3 Ferguson’s Use of the Edinburgh University Library: 1764–1806 – Jane B Fagg
Part II: In History
4 Ferguson’s Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia – David Raynor
5 Ferguson’s Views on the American and French Revolutions – Yasuo Amoh
6 Political Education for Empire and Revolution – David Kettler
Part III: On History
7 Ferguson, Roman History and the Threat of Military Government in Modern Europe – Iain McDaniel
8 Ferguson’s ‘Appropriate Stile’ in Combining History and Science: The History of Historiography Revisited – Annette Meyer
Part IV: Human Nature, Action and Progress
9 Ferguson’s Politics of Action – Fania Oz-Salzberger
10 Ferguson and the Active Genius of Mankind – Craig Smith
11 Providence and Progress: The Religious Dimension in Ferguson’s Discussion of Civil Society – Jeng-Guo S Chen
Reviews
'The essays in this new collection are of a uniformly high quality, written by some of the very best contemporary students of Ferguson.'
– Gordon Graham, Journal of Scottish Philosophy
'The editors, Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, have done an admirable job in providing Scottish Enlightenment scholars with much valuable material on Ferguson's life and work.'
– Ronald Hamowy, Eighteenth-Century Scotland
'... supplies us with a number of fresh insights into the complex mind of the Edinburgh-based Scottish thinker ...'
– Doohwan Ahn, The European Legacy
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