The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. John Millar
portrait details the intellectual milieu of Glasgow, the teaching of law at the university, the great regard in which Millar was held, and his rare personal qualities. John Craig (1766–1840) was Millar’s nephew, and he studied under him at Glasgow in the late 1770s, acquiring a firsthand acquaintance with his uncle’s teaching methods. He was, along with Millar’s son-in-law James Mylne, the literary executor of Millar’s estate. The two also made a posthumous edition of the Historical View, which added two volumes of manuscripts (1803). Craig, a notable political theorist himself, wrote two works: Elements of Political Science (1814), in which he drew out further consequences of Smith’s and Millar’s political philosophy, and Remarks on Some Fundamental Doctrines in Political Economy (1821). Consequently, Craig was in a unique position to understand Millar’s life, his influences, and his doctrines and should be the first stopping point for Millar’s readers.17
Sources Used by Millar
Millar used a wide range of sources to make his stadial argument in the Ranks. I will briefly consider four of the types of sources on which he drew.
1. Because of the comparative historical nature of Millar’s project, travel narratives were important sources. He kept up with this expanding literature and added footnotes to the second and third editions as evidence became available from newly published reports. Many of the travel writers he drew on are now obscure, but by examining a few we can get a sense of the breadth of Millar’s reading.
Millar made extensive use of the Abbé Prevost’s enormous collection of travel reports, the Histoire Générale. Each volume of the Histoire Générale includes a number of different “books”; hence Millar’s citation procedure refers to the volume, the book within the volume, and normally a chapter within the book. He also made repeated use of another massive, popular work, the Modern Universal History, which collects ancient sources, histories, and travel narratives in its forty-plus volumes.
One of the best-known travel reports Millar drew on was William Dampier’s New Voyage (1697). Dampier is now primarily remembered for a 1703 expedition in which Alexander Selkirk found Dampier so unbearable as a captain that he asked to be marooned on Juan Fernández rather than stay onboard the ship. He lived on Juan Fernández until 1709 and became the model for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Another important seventeenth-century source was Jean Chardin’s Journal du voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales (1686), the most authoritative account of the Maghreb in the period and the basis for Gibbon’s discussions of North Africa.
Millar made numerous references to similarly credible eighteenth-century sources covering disparate parts of the world: Peter Kolb’s descriptions of southern Africa, the botanist Johann Georg Gmelin’s account of his scientific expedition to Siberia, and the widely read works of Charlevoix and Lafitau on America. Not all of Millar’s sources were so legitimate. Millar used the plagiarized edition of De Brosses’s Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australes (1756) (consulted by Bougainville and Cook on their voyages to the South Seas) that was translated and published by John Callendar under his own name in Edinburgh (1766–68). Millar also accepted such unauthorized or slimly authorized sources as the journalist John Hawkesworth’s compendium from the journals of various expeditions, including Cook’s first voyage (1773).
2. Like Smith, Millar drew on ancient ethnographies—above all, Tacitus’s Germania and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico—and Roman legal works. In good eighteenth-century fashion he illustrated his arguments with passages from classical literature to strengthen his point and show off his erudition. Millar also used the Hebrew bible as an ethnographic source for the early history of nomadic and pastoral law in a strikingly detached and “scientific” manner. He cast the comparative net even wider with Ossian, James Macpherson’s series of poems putatively translated from early Gaelic sources (but in fact only inspired by them). Millar seemed much less skeptical than Hume about the authenticity of Ossian.18
3. Millar drew on natural lawyers and legal historians—Heineccius, de Noodt, Bynkershoek—but more for their interpretation of Roman law than for their own substantial doctrines. He did not cite the natural lawyers commonly discussed in jurisprudence or moral philosophy: Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, and so on.
4. Millar cited many French authors—Montaigne, Mably, Fontenelle, and Du Bos among them—but, with the exception of Montaigne, for their history, not their philosophy. Throughout the Ranks he also made erudite use of French histories of medieval chivalry. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, he was clearly as comfortable with French as with British sources.
In the first and second editions Millar cited his illustrious Scottish contemporaries—Hume, Robertson, and Smith—but it is notable that the reference to Robertson and those to Hume’s History were eliminated from the third edition. This suggests that Millar had become more confident in his own interpretation of historical sources through teaching the historical sections of his “Government” course. Millar may also have developed a sense of himself as (along with Smith) belonging to the next generation of more rigorous “Scientific Whig” students of man. In keeping with the more sober tone of the preface to the third edition, a reference to Montesquieu’s Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains was deleted.
One further striking change that concerns Hume lies behind the reference “See Dr. Wallace, on the numbers of mankind” (note, <267>). The note in the first and second editions read “See Essay on the populousness of ancient nations, by Mr. Hume.” Hume and Wallace were involved in an amicable controversy concerning whether the ancient world was more or less populous than the modern world. Millar seems to have changed sides on this point by the time the third edition was published. This does not diminish Millar’s lifelong admiration of Hume and advocacy of the “true old Humean philosophy”;19 in fact, it reflects a Humean belief in changing standards of empirical adequacy of research.
This edition reproduces the fourth edition of Millar’s Ranks. A discussion of changes in the various editions can be found in appendix 1. Although the fourth edition was posthumous, it is in fact identical to the third edition, the final lifetime edition, except for the addition of Craig’s Preface.
Millar documented his arguments in the Ranks and provided many footnotes, whose contents range from accurate titles and page numbers to far more elusive references. I have tried to fill in the references wherever possible and provide notes wherever necessary. I have for the most part erred on the side of parsimony, adding notes to Millar’s text only when required for the ease of the reader. My additions to Millar’s notes are enclosed in a double set of square brackets.
The text has been corrected only when there are clear typographical errors or spelling mistakes, and all such errors have been corrected without comment. Page breaks in the fourth edition are indicated here by the use of angle brackets. For example, page 112 begins after<112>. In addition, the errata from the third edition have been incorporated and flagged with footnotes.
Thanks to Knud Haakonssen for answering many questions and helping to solve many puzzles in the notes; Wolfgang Haase for help with Millar’s references to ancient texts; Charles Wolfe for a great deal of research assistance and French translation help; Steve Scully, Joel Berson, and Theo Korzukhin for assistance with Latin translations; Charles Griswold and the philosophy department at Boston University; the staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University; and the staff at Liberty Fund.
THE ORIGIN OF
THE DISTINCTION OF RANKS