Off topic I know but just in case anyone is interested
Liberty & Property - Ellen Meiksins Wood
On the other side of the Channel, it was Scottish more than English political economists who developed something analogous to the French conception of progress, but they did so against the immediate background of English capitalism. The Scots, in fact, theorized English capitalism more effectively than did English theorists, no doubt because they were more conscious of its difference, its otherness, seen from the vantage point of the Scottish experience. The great Scottish intellectuals were very conscious of the contrast between English prosperity and Scottish poverty at the time of Union in 1707 and the hopes of economic improvement that had motivated many of its supporters. While the Scots more than the English wrote from an intellectual perspective with certain self-conscious affinities to the French, the example of England’s material wealth was ever present in their conceptions of history and human development. At the heart of Adam Smith’s political economy, like David Hume’s history of England, is the English model of progress.
The Scottish Enlightenment was no less interested than the French in the whole range of progress – advances in knowledge, culture, politics, morality – but the distinctive development of the English economy was always at the core. One of the classics of the anglophone literature on progress, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, is, for example, a very wide-ranging story of progress, with many different aspects, social, political, cultural, as well as economic. The critical turning-point is identified in Part II, ‘Of the History of Rude Nations’, where Ferguson draws a line between ‘Rude Nations prior to the Establishment of Property’ and ‘Rude Nations, under the Impressions of Property and Interest’. Beyond the invention of property that constitutes the dividing line between savagery and barbarism among ‘rude’ nations, the minimal condition for moving beyond rudeness to refinement is the division of labour; but it is the advent of commercial society that sets in train a distinctive capacity to sustain progress by directing the pursuit of individual self-interest to progressive development.
Commerce does, to be sure, endanger civic virtue, and political wisdom is required to preserve it; but the mechanisms of the market, and precisely those imperatives of competition that threaten virtue, are for Ferguson the only conceivable engine of self-sustaining progress. He does not attribute to the market quite the same role in integrating selfish motivations as does his friend Adam Smith, who eventually sought a solution in the disciplines of competition; and Ferguson still assigns to the political domain a greater role in preserving social bonds and moral order. But there is no mistaking his conviction, shared by Smith and Hume, that whatever may have been accomplished by the evolution of the human mind, it is commercial mechanisms and the enhancement of productivity for profit that set in motion progress as a self-sustaining process.The advance of scientific knowledge as the engine of progress seems, then, to be displaced by a different kind of historical mechanism, a self-sustaining economic growth that, in historical reality, existed at that time only in England. Much the same idea of progress appears in the work of Adam Smith, and it is here that we can see the implications of such an argument for conceptions of equality. It may be true that Smith shared Condorcet’s commitment to equality, as well as liberty and justice; but for the Scot the burden of progressive development falls unambiguously on the market. The desirable effects of equitable distribution are, above all, a consequence of market mechanisms. The natural outcome of economic growth will be not only to raise the living standards of the poor but also to rebalance the distribution between profit and wages, on the grounds that the greater the amount of ‘stock’ or capital, the lower the rate of profit in relation to wages.
Such a loss to the movement
Need to make it to the museum sometime.
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