Justice & Law Quote by Adam Ferguson

The line lands like a polite grenade: a warning that market societies can talk a big game about equal rights while quietly manufacturing inequality as a structural requirement. Ferguson’s phrasing is doing double duty. “Commercial state” isn’t just a place that trades; it’s a society reorganized around commerce, where status, security, even civic virtue get priced and ranked. Then he slips in the knife: “notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights.” Pretension suggests performance, not principle - equality as a legitimizing story the system tells about itself.

The real argument is in the mechanics: “the exaltation of a few must depress the many.” “Must” is the key word. Ferguson isn’t lamenting a moral failing that could be patched with better manners; he’s describing a logic of accumulation. If a small class is being “exalted” - elevated in wealth, influence, leisure, and political access - that elevation draws oxygen from somewhere. The many are “depressed” not only economically but socially: diminished bargaining power, narrowed horizons, reduced agency. It’s an early articulation of how formal rights can coexist with substantive domination.

Context matters. Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson watched Britain’s expanding empire and commercial boom reshape older civic ideals. His worry echoes a classical republican fear: that commerce breeds dependence and corrodes the citizen who can’t afford independence. The quote works because it refuses comforting contradictions. Rights on paper don’t negate power in practice; they can camouflage it.