Margaret Hodgen comments, in a chapter 'From Hierarchy to History', on the widespread use of "conjectural series" for historical explanation in the Early Modern period.
[14] The histoire raisonnée was a genre of historical writing developed in France in the 17th century, with concerns for the individual in social context, and the description of culture and customs as integral to history.
It grew out of humanist historiography with its close relationship to classical Roman and Greek models, but brought to the surface social matters, in particular as they could explain the motivations of individuals.
With Géraud de Cordemoy there came an interest in causality as playing a part in historical movement, as distinct from the humanist acceptance of personal fates being subject to Fortune.
Elements would have been recognised at the time as drawing on the Bible, and in classical literature Lucretius; it is now considered Smith was influenced by Montesquieu on law and government.
The theory on language and its typology over time has been seen as typical of Smith's historical approach; and even the foundation of his later well-known work on political economy.
[24] William Warburton had proposed a stadial conjectural history of writing in his Divine Legation of Moses, a work supporting biblical authority, around 1740.
[27] The invention of this type of theory (three or four stages) is attributed to a number of European writers from the 1750s onwards, such as Adam Smith, Turgot and Vico.
[28] In the Scottish context it appears in works from 1758 by David Dalrymple and Lord Kames; it has been argued that their source was the Edinburgh lectures of Smith on jurisprudence.
[34] Ferguson in this work attempted a rigorous identification of the hunter stage with the so-called barbarian or savage, and was very alive to the whole scheme as full of tensions within human possibility.
[35] He argued against the foundation story in the style of classical history, proposing instead that unintended consequences could have more to do with the "establishment" of a society than a self-conscious law-giver.
[39] Poovey states that this work makes apparent the relationship of conjectural history with the experimental moral philosophy of Thomas Reid and George Turnbull.
[40] Kames has been called the leader of Scottish conjectural history, and had objections he expressed in correspondence to both Rousseau and the approach of Montesquieu, as reducing the role of human nature, which he thought was not a constant but the goal of the investigation.
[26] In writing to Basel in search of a suitable opponent to Rousseau, Kames prompted a work from Isaak Iselin, Ueber die Geschichte der Menschheit (1764), which is also a conjectural history.
[47] His scheme of conjectural history includes the idea that the providential order allows the historian to write in the absence of a full factual basis.
[50][51] Dugald Stewart's formulation of conjectural history was published in 1794, in his Account of Adam Smith for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
[52] The question has been raised as to Stewart's intention then in describing the tradition in that way, and John Burrow has argued that he wished to dissociate Smith from political radicalism.
[54] Hawthorne writes instead of the historical/sociological insights of the Scots being lost in the British context, despite the "tension between a 'natural' account of civil society and a developing sense of the factual importance and moral difficulties of individualism" having become apparent, to utilitarianism and vaguer evolutionism.
An austere and sceptical approach centred on facts, as adopted by Richard Gough and James Douglas, was favoured in the second half of the century.
[58] On the other hand, the interpretations of the stadial theory were quite welcome, and while popularised by the Scottish school, did not seem innovative in the sense of a break with Early Modern historiography, and concerns with natural law and civic humanism.