Politics & Power Quote by Adam Ferguson

Progress, Ferguson needles, is less a triumph of reason than a well-dressed accident. Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment, he aims his skepticism not at reformers alone but at the era's signature self-image: that “enlightened ages” steer history with clear-eyed plans. His line is a quiet demolition of that confidence. “Multitude” does double duty, suggesting both democratic energy and herd behavior; even when people congratulate themselves on being modern, they still “move” with “blindness to the future.” The sting is in the equalizing: enlightenment does not cancel human myopia, it just gives it better vocabulary.

The famous turn of phrase - “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” - is Ferguson’s scalpel. He’s separating agency from authorship. Individuals act, pursue interests, defend status, imitate neighbors; out of that churn emerge “establishments” (institutions, norms, even states) that look planned after the fact. The subtext is a warning to anyone who treats society like a machine with a master switch. Institutions are legible in retrospect because we narrate them into coherence, mistaking consequences for intentions.

Context matters: Ferguson watched commercial society, empire, and modern bureaucracy harden in Britain, and he worried that civic virtue would erode as complexity increased. His point isn’t fatalism; it’s humility. If outcomes routinely exceed designs, then politics should be less about grand blueprints and more about anticipating spillovers, resisting moral self-congratulation, and treating “progress” as something that can just as easily metastasize as it can improve.