While part of him welcomed the development of industrial society (he had views about the ‘stages’ of history), Ferguson was one of the first to point out that manufacturing ‘reduces the human being to a simple moving hand or foot, men become narrow-minded and specialised, they lose their notion of public good…we make a nation of helots and have no free citizens’. ‘Wages and liberty,’ he said, ‘are not synonyms.’73 For Ferguson, we can love progress too much.
