Scottish Enlightenment: Ferguson’s Perspective on Civil Society and State

The idea of civil society feels almost intuitive today. We use it to describe NGOs, neighbourhood associations, the press, trade unions, and citizen movements that operate outside the government yet shape public life. But this everyday meaning is the product of a long intellectual journey. For centuries, thinkers did not separate “society” from “the state” at all. The decisive shift began as Europe’s feudal order broke apart, and one of the most original voices in that transformation was Adam Ferguson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. His analysis pulled together strands from earlier philosophers and gave civil society a far richer meaning, one tied to commerce, public spirit, and the constant risk of political decay.

From feudal order to a new social space 🔗

To understand why civil society became a distinct concept, we have to look at what came before it. Under feudalism, society was organised around fixed ranks: a class destined for military service, another bound to labour and cultivate land, and a nobility holding hereditary power. In Ferguson’s own account, the nobles formed a barrier against general despotism while acting as tyrants over their own districts, preventing any regular application of law. As monarchs gradually stripped the feudal lords of their powers and protected ordinary labourers and traders, they encouraged commercial activity and reshaped social life.

This breakdown of personal, land-based bonds created room for a new kind of association. People increasingly related to one another through exchange, contract, and shared political concerns rather than inherited obligation. The space where these relationships flourished came to be called civil society, and thinkers began to ask whether it was the same thing as the state or something separate from it.

Hobbes and Locke: the early foundations 🔗

Before Ferguson, the social contract theorists had already placed civil society at the centre of political thought. For both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, civil society was defined against the state of nature, the imagined condition in which humans lived without government or common authority.

Hobbes and the need for a strong state 🔗

Hobbes saw the state of nature as a brutal condition of conflict, where individuals were driven by fear rather than reason. According to the analysis of social contract theory, the sheer intolerability of this condition made rational people willing to submit to an absolute sovereign to escape it. For Hobbes, civil society could only exist if a powerful state held all lawmaking and executive authority in a single body. Society and a strong state were, in effect, inseparable.

Locke and the protection of individual freedom 🔗

Locke took a gentler view of human nature. He argued that the state of nature was a relatively free and tolerant condition, and that people possessed natural rights to life, liberty, and property before any government existed. In his framework, civil society arises first, and the state is then created to protect the freedoms people already enjoy. This is a crucial difference: where Hobbes made the state the precondition of society, Locke made government a limited instrument answerable to the people, who retain the right to resist a tyrant. One scholarly overview summarises the contrast neatly, noting that Hobbes held a strong state essential for civil society while Locke emphasised individual freedom.

Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment 🔗

Ferguson, who lived from 1723 to 1816, belonged to a remarkable cluster of Scottish intellectuals that included David Hume and Adam Smith. His most influential work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, was first published in 1767 and quickly established his reputation across Britain and Europe. He has even been described as one of the founders of modern sociology, because he treated society as something to be studied historically and empirically rather than merely imagined.

What set Ferguson apart was his refusal to start from an isolated individual in a fictional state of nature. He insisted that humans are social from the very beginning. He repeatedly returned to the classical idea, drawn from Aristotle, that man is a political animal who is by nature a member of a community. For Ferguson, the individual is always part of a larger whole, never a self-sufficient unit who decides to join society later.

Why Ferguson treated civil society and the state as one 🔗

This starting point explains a feature of Ferguson’s thought that students often find puzzling. Unlike later thinkers who sharply separated civil society from the state, Ferguson largely treated the two as identical. His concept of civil society descended from the older classical idea of a political community of free citizens in a city-state or modern state. A defining mark of this classical concept was precisely the absence of any distinction between state and society.

It was only later, when political economy began to redefine civil society as a sphere of free, self-interested individuals, and especially in nineteenth-century German philosophy, that the two were clearly pulled apart and even set against each other. Ferguson stood at the hinge between these two understandings. He still saw the political community and the social community as one thing, even as he analysed the commercial forces that would eventually drive them apart.

Public spirit and civic humanism 🔗

If society and state are one, then the health of the political order depends on the character of its citizens. This is where Ferguson’s commitment to civic humanism becomes central. He believed that the strength of a state rests not on its wealth but above all on the virtue of its citizens. Active participation in public life, the willingness to act for the common good rather than narrow self-interest, was for him essential to human flourishing.

His Essay has been read as a bold attempt to reclaim the tradition of active citizenship and apply it to the modern commercial state. Ferguson valued public spirit, political engagement, and even a certain readiness for struggle, because he thought these qualities kept a society alive. A people that withdrew entirely into private comfort, he feared, would slowly lose the capacity to govern themselves.

The dangers Ferguson warned about 🔗

Ferguson was not a simple celebrant of progress. He combined his analysis of commercial society with a sharp warning about how it could corrode the very virtues that sustained it.

The division of labour and a professional army 🔗

Ferguson was one of the first thinkers to study the division of labour seriously, and his ideas later influenced writers such as Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim on alienation and self-estrangement. He worried that intense specialisation would narrow people’s minds to a small corridor of knowledge and interest, weakening their sense of the whole community.

This anxiety extended to military life. When defence becomes the exclusive job of a professional or standing army, ordinary citizens lose their direct stake in the safety of the republic. Ferguson saw this as a serious threat. Where his friend Adam Smith thought economic stability reduced the need for a standing army, Ferguson was far more concerned about the dangers of despotism arising from a society that combined commercial softening with a professional military. A citizenry that no longer defended itself, he argued, was a citizenry primed for domination.

The slide towards despotism 🔗

Ferguson devoted serious attention to how free states decline. He feared that as wars grew rare and peace and comfort spread, qualities such as courage, heroism, and identification with one’s community would weaken. Once citizens grow politically passive and hand over both their public duties and their defence to specialists, the door opens to despotism. The same processes that produced refinement and prosperity could, if left unchecked, hollow out public spirit and end in tyranny.

Commerce, manufacturing and the question of refinement 🔗

For all these warnings, Ferguson did not reject commercial society. He recognised that commerce and manufacturing were powerful engines of human improvement, and his work marked a genuine shift towards understanding civil society as a space of economic activity, not just political membership. His real concern was balance.

He also offered one of his most famous insights here: that the forms of society are not the product of any single designer. In a celebrated passage, he described social institutions as arising from human action but not from human design, a view often called spontaneous order. Society, for Ferguson, evolves through the countless interactions of individuals over time, and its patterns are richer than any central planner could ever impose. The challenge for citizens is to enjoy the fruits of commerce without letting refinement dissolve the public virtues that hold a free community together.

Why Ferguson still matters 🔗

Ferguson’s framework remains useful for thinking about contemporary politics. The tension he identified, between private prosperity and active citizenship, runs through every modern democracy. When debates arise about voter apathy, the outsourcing of public functions, or the gap between economic growth and civic life, they echo questions Ferguson raised more than two and a half centuries ago. His insistence that the vitality of a political community depends on engaged, virtuous citizens is a reminder that institutions alone cannot keep a society free. The people who inhabit them must care enough to participate.

What do you think? Is Ferguson right that a society can grow wealthy and comfortable while quietly losing the public spirit it needs to stay free? And in an age where so many public functions are handled by professionals and specialists, how should ordinary citizens keep their stake in political life alive?

References

1. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004846977.0001.000/179:3.3
2. https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
3. https://www.academia.edu/7868984/Civil_Society_Conceptual_History_from_Hobbes_to_Marx
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_History_of_Civil_Society
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263846854_Civil_Society_-_Conceptual_History_from_Hobbes_to_Marx
6. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ferguson-an-essay-on-the-history-of-civil-society
7. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013.05.45/
8. https://fee.org/articles/adam-ferguson-and-the-spontaneous-order-of-society/