SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

Edinburgh Studies in Scottish Philosophy

Adam Ferguson’s Later WritingsNew Letters and an Essay on the French Revolution

Edited by Ian Stewart and Max Skjönsberg

Format

£95.00

In stock

About this book

A critically introduced and edited collection of new letters and an essay by the philosopher Adam Ferguson

  • Includes 36 new letters and one essay published for the first time and contextualised within Ferguson’s oeuvre
  • Helps to fill in large gaps in Ferguson’s biography
  • Presents new angles on major areas of study including the East India Company, the Regency Crisis, Scottish reactions to the French Revolution, and contemporary perceptions of Adam Smith’s Political Economy, among others
  • Reveals the political influence that the Moderates of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Ferguson, Hugh Blair (1718-1800), and Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805), attempted to exert on British foreign policy in the late 1790s


This volume will publish for the first time thirty-six, until now, unpublished letters, as well as a new essay on the French Revolution, by the moral philosopher, historian and man-of-letters Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). A major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson has been one of the principal beneficiaries of the refocus of scholarly attention beyond the towering figures of David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) and toward their larger intellectual network. Penned during the last decades of his life, these letters were all addressed to his close friend Sir John Macpherson. They concern major topics of the day such as Enlightenment, Empire, and the French Revolution, as well as various illuminating details about Ferguson’s final decades. They add considerably to our knowledge of the late Scottish Enlightenment.
Located in a recent acquisition at the British Library, these previously unnoticed letters add considerably to our knowledge of Ferguson, his ideas - philosophical, historical, and political - and his intellectual milieu from 1784 to 1815. A substantial introductory essay presents the main findings, while critical apparatus will assist specialists and students alike in understanding this key Enlightenment thinker.

Reviews

New writings by Adam Ferguson are made available for the first time in this significant edition. Important re-discovered letters (and one essay) shed fresh light on his original commentary on the French Revolution, and introduce his frequent correspondent Sir James Macpherson as a key player in late Scottish Enlightenment networks.

Three dozen new letters from Adam Ferguson to Sir John Macpherson highlight this volume of writings from the latter part of Ferguson's career. Filled with Ferguson's characteristic wit and charm, the letters constitute a valuable addition to our knowledge of the man and his circle.

Stewart & Skjönsberg have provided contemporary readers with an Adam Ferguson feast in a splendidly edited and introduced set of hitherto unpublished letters and an essay on the French Revolution, in addition to providing modern editions of Ferguson’s late works and correspondence. The politics of Scottish moral philosophy in the context of enlightenment and revolution need to be reassessed in the light of their outstanding scholarship.

The volume’s backbone and raison d’être remain the rediscovered manuscripts, which are usefully contextualized in a wide-ranging introduction. They depict a Ferguson who was not a backward-looking ancient republican but rather a well-informed participant in the great political upheavals that marked the late Enlightenment.
a welcomed addition to Scottish Enlightenment studies.
Table of contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Series Editor’s Introduction

Editorial Conventions

Part I

Editorial Introduction

New Letters of Adam Ferguson

Part II: Essays

‘Dr Ferguson’s Opinion [on the French Revolution]’ (1797?)

Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price,

intitled, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the

Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of

the War with America, &c.

(1776)

Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph Black,

M.D.

(1801)

Biographical Sketch: Or, Memoir of Lieutenant-Colonel

Patrick Ferguson

(1817)

Part III: Appendices

Appendix A: Further Correspondence in MSS EUR F/291/97

Appendix B: The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson and

Sir John Macpherson

Appendix C: Further Miscellaneous Anecdotes about

Ferguson from Hugh Cleghorn

Bibliography

Index

About the contributors

Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advances Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. He is an historian of European ideas. He researches theories of race and civilization as they were developed at the University of Edinburgh in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is co-editor of Adam Ferguson's Later Writings (EUP, 2023).

Max Skjönsberg

Max Skjönsberg is an Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida.

More in this series

See the series →