Adam Ferguson'S Aesthetic Idea Of Community Spirit

Adam Ferguson argues that savage society necessarily gives way to the rise of civic and commercial society, but he admires savage militarism as the purest form of community spirit. To sustain that spirit in an uncongenial era, he treats it as an object of aesthetic appreciation, and as such it leads him into strange extremes: a wistful idealization of torture among savage peoples, a defense of military carnage in the classical world, and a hapless plan to establish a Scottish militia. But violent community spirit must not threaten property: he deplores it when it sparks popular uprisings.