1. Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd.; 2001, p. 5.
2. ‘Ferguson’s admirers in France included D’Holbach and Voltaire in his time, and later Comte; in Germany, Herder and such literary figures as Schiller and Jacobi, along with nineteenth century German social thought in general; and in his lifetime he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Berlin’. A.G. Smith, The Political Philosophy of Adam Ferguson Considered as a Response to Rousseau: Political Development and Progressive Development, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Yale University, p. 9. Along with the rest of the’ scottish School’ John Stuart Mill esteemed Ferguson highly, naming his father, James Mill, as the last in the line of succession of ‘this great school’ of Hume, Kames, Smith and Ferguson. Letter to A. Comte, January 28, 1843 in J.S. Mill, Collected of John Stuart Mill, J. Robson, F. Mineka, N. Dwight, J. Stillinger, and A. Robson, (eds), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963, Vol. 13, p. 566.
3. As was ‘the fate of most Scots’ after 1800. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth Century Germany, Oxford: University Press, 1995, p. 130. Even closer to his own time Ferguson’s ‘popular success was greatly overshadowed by that of his successor to the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair, Dugald Stewart‘. N. Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in Porter, R and Teich, M. (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 37.
4. John Robertson has recently urged a greater awareness of ‘potential fault lines within Scottish moral philosophy’, drawing special attention to the eccentricity of Ferguson’s work. ‘The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment’, in The Scottish Enlightenment, Essays in Reinterpretation, Paul Wood (ed), Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000, pp. 47–8.
5. Duncan Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to Ferguson, A, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Edited and With an Introduction by Duncan Forbes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967, p. xiii–iv. Here was a culture ‘in search of perfection, to place every branch of administration behind the counter, and come to employ, instead of the statesman and the warrior, the mere clerk and accountant’. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (hereafter cited as Essay), Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 214–16. Please note: The latter edition is used throughout this work.