John Millar

Agora

John Millar

1735–1801

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Millar saw a natural progress from rude to civilised manners: as societies move from hunting through herding and farming to commerce, property reshapes relations of authority – husbands over wives, fathers over children, masters over servants – and commerce tends to free women and labourers.

Placement

Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism · Northern Europe · Society & History, Politics & Law, Gender & Feminism

Scottish jurist and social theorist, professor of civil law at Glasgow and Adam Smith’s student: “The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks” (1771/1779) traced the authority of husbands, fathers, chiefs and masters to a society’s mode of subsistence and its progress through four stages.

Key ideas

Four stages: hunting, pasturage, agriculture, commerce
Rank and authority grow out of property and subsistence
The condition of women as a measure of society
Slavery as inhumane and unproductive

Teachers: Adam Smith

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Influence

Influenced by 3

Montesquieu

influenced by
Millar’s Historical View of the English Government (1787/1803) says ‘the great Montesquieu pointed out the road’, calling him the Bacon and Smith the Newton of this science. J. Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (1787; 4 vols., 1803), Liberty Fund ed. (2006); J. Craig, Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar (1806)
Evidence: AI draft
Montesquieu › 1689–1755
David Hume

influenced by
Millar, who met Hume at Lord Kames’ house and later taught his nephew, was by John Craig’s account ‘convinced of the truth’ of Hume’s metaphysical opinions. J. Craig, “Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar”, in J. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (4th ed., 1806)
Evidence: AI draft
David Hume › 1711–1776
Adam Smith studied with

studied with
Millar attended Smith’s lectures at Glasgow in the 1750s, became Professor of Civil Law there in 1761 and carried Smith’s historical account of society forward in his Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771). J. Craig, “Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar”, in J. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (4th ed., 1806)
Evidence: AI draft
Adam Smith › 1723–1790

Works

1771The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks
Explains the authority of husbands, fathers, chiefs, kings and masters by the mode of subsistence and the progress of property, from hunters to commercial nations; it opens with a history of the condition of women and ends with a critique of slavery.
1787An Historical View of the English Government
History of the English constitution from the Saxon settlement to the Revolution of 1688, written as a Whig answer to Hume: changes in property, commerce and manners, not the plans of rulers, explain the growth of royal power, of Parliament and of liberty.

Position

Millar is on the map as one of the founders of historical social theory in the Scottish Enlightenment. In “The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks” (1771, retitled in the third edition of 1779) he set out to explain the authority of husbands over wives, fathers over children, chiefs and kings over their people, and masters over servants from the circumstances of each society. “There is thus, in human society,” he wrote, “a natural progress from ignorance to knowledge, and from rude to civilized manners”, leading from hunting and gathering through pasturage and agriculture to manufactures and commerce. Property, “the great source of distinction among individuals”, grows with this progress, and with commerce and the arts the labouring people gain independence. His opening chapter on the rank and condition of women is an early history of gender relations: in commercial societies, he held, women become “neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex, but the friends and companions”, though in great opulence a taste for pleasure can again lower their standing. He condemned slavery as inhumane and harmful to industry and noted the irony of colonists who spoke of liberty while holding slaves. “An Historical View of the English Government” (1787) applied this method to English constitutional history as a Whig answer to Hume’s History of England. Millar called Montesquieu the “Lord Bacon” and Smith the “Newton” of this branch of philosophy.

Life & context

John Millar was born on 22 June 1735 at Kirk of Shotts in Lanarkshire, the son of a Church of Scotland minister. He entered the University of Glasgow in 1746, at the age of eleven, and heard Adam Smith’s lectures there after Smith arrived in 1751; his family had intended him for the church, but he chose the law. For about two years he lived in the household of Lord Kames as tutor to his son, and in this period he also came to know David Hume, who later entrusted him with the education of his nephew. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1760 and in 1761 became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Glasgow, where his lectures on law and government made him widely known. A Whig, he is held to be the author of the anonymous “Letters of Crito” (1796) against the war with revolutionary France. He died on 30 May 1801.