History and the Four Stages
The Scottish Enlightenment was particularly distinguished by an interest in history, and the theory of the four stages of development of society is a distinctively eighteenthcentury Scottish view of historical development.
The theory postulates that there are four different types of society defined by the primary source of subsistence or income: hunting, pastoral (animal rearing), agricultural (cultivating the soil to grow crops), and commercial (engaged in internal and external trade, manufacturing, and so on). In the early- to mid-eighteenth century this classification of societies was anthropological rather than historical - the four were seen as different types of society existing alongside each other in different parts of the world. Corresponding to the different sources of income are different social systems and forms of the state, and different conceptions of property. So, for example, hunting societies can only support a low density of population, hence small social units, a limited notion of property, and so on. Smith made extensive use of this classification in his lectures on jurisprudence.John Locke had argued that “in the beginning all the world was America” (1988: 301), referring, of course, to native American hunter-gatherer societies. The next step was to link that insight to the fourfold typology to argue that the four types of society were successive stages of development - human societies had all started by hunting, before advancing (or not) via the pastoral and agricultural stages, with some, finally, reaching the commercial stage. Link this to the idea that government and law depend on the stage reached, and it could provide, at least in principle, a comprehensive framework for economic and social history. The theory of the four stages, as a theory of history, was developed mainly in Scotland. Good examples are John Dalrymple, Essay toward a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (1757; arguably the first mention in print of the four stages as stages of history) and Lord Kames’s Historical Law Tracts (1761). As a result Kames, Ferguson and others are seen as pioneers of sociology and of the social explanation of institutions and laws. The four stages are also developed in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762-63 [1978]) which were delivered in the early 1760s but not, of course, published at the time.
The analytical economic content of the stages in themselves is limited. The main economic interest attaches to the character and development of the final stage, that of commerce. Note here that the commercial stage differs from the rest in that it does not represent a new source of food, and that the evolution of commerce within the agricultural stage is a matter of degree.
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