'A bastard Gaelic man' : reconsidering the highland roots of Adam Ferguson

This thesis attacks the neglected and unresolved historiographical problem connecting Adam Ferguson’s work, in particular, his Essay on the History of Civil Society, to his early life experience. During the 1960s and 1970s, the issue of Ferguson’s Highland background first came to the fore. A knowledge of Gaelic marked Ferguson out from his colleagues, denoting his status as a Highlander. Michael Kugler’s 1994 study examined how Ferguson and his contemporaries constructed an idealised representation of Highland society. My investigation takes a novel approach by concentrating on matters relating to the concrete reality of the locale, language and vestigial shame-honour culture. These were imbibed by Ferguson during his childhood and early adult life. During these phases, Ferguson became conversant in the Gaelic language which acted as a conduit for the mores, history and legends of Highland communities. The elements of the shame-honour culture, the neural pathways generated by Gaelic, and Highland orality, all left their mark on him. Evidence of these component influences can be identified in his Essay, correspondence and other works. An analysis of Ferguson’s correspondence confirms his native-like control of the Gaelic sound system, indicating fluency from a young age. Ferguson experienced a traditional, communal way of life in transition. During his lifetime, there was an increasing drive to modernise the rural parts of Scotland. His insider-knowledge of two cultures, together with his familiarity of two naturally acquired grammatical systems, provided him with some unique intuitive perceptions. Ferguson’s works and his success as a university lecturer testify to his assimilation and integration into mainstream Scotto-British eighteenth-century intellectual culture. Nevertheless, his writing bears some hallmarks of alternating cultural loyalties and the occasional affirmation of his first culture. This thesis provides a new dimension to the understanding of Ferguson’s early enculturation, by inviting fresh explication of important passages of his writing