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Notes
1 Pascal, “Property and Society”; Meek, “The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology”; Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage.
2 Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.
3 An informative account of this proto-Marxist reading of John Millar and of the ideological and intitutional context of its first formulations can be found in the – unfortunately unpublished – PhD dissertation by Paul B. Smith, ‘The Materialist Interpretation of John Millar’s Philosophic History: Towards a Critical Appraisal’, 1998. Smith challenges here the vague and uncritical equivalence between ‘materialism’ and any historical explanations in which economic factors play a crucial role – a prevalent conflation that allegedly can be found even in critical reevaluations of proto-Marxist readings of Millar like Knud Haakonssen’s.
4 A remarkable exception to this contextualist rule can be found in Bertrand Binoche’s Les trois sources des philosophies de l’histoire (1764–1798), whose original philosophic treatment of Millar as a philosopher constrained by specific speculative requirements is neglected in the usually anglocentric historiography dedicated to Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment.
5 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Pocock, “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform”; Ignatieff, “John Millar and Individualism”. Ignatieff’s study is a synthesis of several interpretative directions.
6 Forbes, “Scientific Whiggism.”
7 Moore and Silverthorne, “Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland”; Haakonssen, “John Millar and the Science of a Legislator.”
8 Bowles, “John Millar, the Four-Stage Theory, and Women’s Position in Society”; Berry, The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment.
9 Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women”; O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress. Palgrave, 2013.
10 Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow.
11 ‘Modern political liberty was not the result of a constitutional job, but of the advent of a society where ranks were based not on status, but on contracts’, Ignatieff, “John Millar and Individualism,” 324.
12 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 180.
13 Ibid., 111.
14 Olson, “Sex and Status in Scottish Enlightenment Social Science.”
15 Nor is it due directly to the incresead attention intellectual history has started to pay nowadays to questions such as gender roles, racial subjectivation, ‘othering’ etc. – althought one can sense some sensitivity to these matters here -, but also to the increasing acknowledgement of the centrality of the role of women as socio-historical agents in the Scottish Enlightenment narratives (socio-historical agents, but definiteley not political actors, as Mary Wollstonecraft will note later with grief.)
16 Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment, 121. See also an excellent development of the same point in Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference.
17 Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment, 133.
18 Ibid., 145.
19 Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment, 77.
20 See Lorraine Daston’s observation about the political roles of ‘nature’ and ‘history’ in the Enlightenment as being sometimes opposed to our image of their political potential: the former should be, according to our contemporary sensibility, a form of solid (and therefore conservative) legitimation, while the latter opens the realm of the social deconstruction and change. Daston, “Enlightenment Fears, Fears of Enlightenment.”
21 Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment, 74–5.
22 See, for instance, the substantial works of historians of Enlightenment anthropology like Giuliano Gliozzi or Michele Duchèt.
23 Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress, 34–5. The centrality of ‘special cases’ – albinos, feral children, monsters etc. – for the development of Enlightenment anthropology has been carefully explored in recent years in studies like Curran, “Rethinking Race History.” But the continual mutations, integrations, manipulations, classifications and reclassification of rules and exceptions, their mutual refashioning is in particular a constant chracteristic of Scottish Enlightenment anthropology, disciplined by the great narrative of conjectural history.
24 Millar, An Historical View of the English Government.
25 Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment, 176.
