The Four Stages of Human History PDF

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The Four Stages of Human History...

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The Four Stages of Human History (Stadial History) -

The conjectural historians of the Scottish Enlightenment generally subscribed to a “four stages theory” of human history. This was originally proposed by Adam Smith in some public lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1750-1 and his Glasgow lectures of 1762/3. It also features in The Wealth of Nations (1776).

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Smith saw the various stages of our historical-social development as being characterized by our reliance upon specific modes of production. Not only relations between individuals, however, but also shared notions of property ownership, legal codes and political values and moral sensibilities were determined by changing material conditions.

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Smith argued that the trigger point for a society’s translation from one stage to another was driven by people’s struggle to meet their basic needs within unfavorable demographic contexts (i.e., population growth).

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In this sense, people are eventually forced to progress, being compelled to socially adapt and to innovate in order to stay alive - human progress towards ‘civilization’ is the unintended consequence of population growth + the struggle to meet basic material needs.

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Adam Smith, David Hume, John Millar and William Robertson were all particularly alert to the fact that people living in poverty have limited opportunities for cultivating benevolent human feelings.

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They held that poverty diminished people’s humanity. Smith contends that the miserable poverty of hunter-gatherer societies means that its members are “frequently reduced….to the necessity of directly destroying and sometimes abandoning their infants, their old people and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger or to be devoured by wild beasts”.

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By contrast he argues that, in addition to increasing affluence, the ever more complex division of labour in a commercial society advances human cooperation, peace and social stability, and that it promotes principles of mutual trust and impartiality as well as an ethic of tolerance and respect for strangers. In his 1769 book, The History of the reign of the Emperor Charles V : with a view of the progress of society in Europe from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century, William Robertson declares that “commerce tends to wear off prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.

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It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them … It disposes them to peace”.

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In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith applies Hume’s experimental method to the study of human sympathy so as to expose its psychological and social causes along with its functions. He also analyses the contents and operations of our

pro-social and anti-social passions. In his analysis of individuals operating with a ‘moral looking glass’, Smith anticipates some of the concepts that feature in twentieth century symbolic interactionism. -

In the Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith argues that a nation’s wealth is the result of the goods and services that it creates - its gross national product. He argues that ‘free trade’ operates as a progressive force in human history.

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He contends that a nation’s productive capacity rests on the division of labour and the accumulation of capital that it makes possible. With the famous example of the pin factory, he claims that huge efficiencies can be gained by breaking production down into many small tasks, each undertaken by specialist hands. He advocates a capitalist state and economy that is committed to maximizing individual consumer/citizen choice in both economic and political spheres.

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He also identifies some moral problems with the capitalism of his day: 1) impoverishment of the spirit of the workers and the work ethic more generally; 2) urban environments in which individuals experience themselves as anonymous; 3) price-fixing; 4) increasing numbers of idle rich and over-privileged individuals; 5) the separation of ownership from control as the scale and capital requirements of business firms increase

Adam Ferguson 1723-1816 -

In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Ferguson agrees with Smith that ‘the care of subsistence. is the principal spring of human actions’ and that these have had the unintended consequence of delivering people into new stages of society defined by contrasting forms of socio-economic organization.

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Likewise, he identifies the advent of a ‘polished’ commercial society as a progressive development in human civilization. His chief concern, however, is to chart the social structure associated with this more ‘polished’ stage of society, and particularly the threats it faced as a result of its negative features.

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On his account the pressures were of two sorts: First, commercialism wrought the danger of systemic inequality. Ferguson worried that commercial society encouraged a selfish individualism that eroded social solidarity and made people unwilling to work on behalf of the collective good. In this regard, Ferguson did not believe that commercialism necessarily brought peace, liberty and benevolence.

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The second threat concerned the risk of tyranny by despots able to manipulate the mob, for which reason Ferguson valued mixed government rather than simplistic versions of democracy. Harro Höpf contends that Ferguson worried that, especially following the Jacobite rebellion (1745-6 and the defeat of the Highland clansmen at the Battle of Culloden on April 16th, 1746, the prevailing view that commercial society

represented a more progressive stage of human history “could serve as implicit justification for the sufferings of rude and barbarous Highlanders”. -

Ferguson was born in the village of Logier it in Perthshire (Southern Highlands) and held that among the finer virtues of traditional society was that it courage and loyalty. He feared the potential for commercial society to make men week, dishonorable and unconcerned for their traditions and community...