John Millar

Dzieła

• 1771The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Pochodzenie rozróżnienia stopni społecznych)

  Wyjaśnia władzę mężów, ojców, wodzów, królów i panów sposobem utrzymania i postępem własności, od łowców po narody handlowe; zaczyna się od historii położenia kobiet, a kończy krytyką niewolnictwa.

• 1787An Historical View of the English Government (Historyczny przegląd angielskiego ustroju)

  Historia ustroju angielskiego od osadnictwa saksońskiego do rewolucji 1688 roku, napisana jako wigowska odpowiedź na Hume’a: zmiany własności, handlu i obyczajów, a nie plany władców, wyjaśniają wzrost władzy królewskiej, parlamentu i wolności.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771; 3rd ed. as The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 1779)
• An Historical View of the English Government (1787; enlarged ed. in 4 vols, 1803)
• Letters of Crito (1796, anonymous, attributed)
• The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 4th ed. with John Craig’s “Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar” (1806)

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