Thoughts Springing from Ronald Meek's Take on the Scottish & French Stage Theorists of the Enlightenment: HICKS LECTURE OUTTAKE
Stage Theories After Steampower: Meek, Marx, Hicks, the Info‑Bio Tech-Attention Economy, & much much MOAR…
Stage Theories After Steampower: Meek, Marx, Hicks, the Info‑Bio Tech-Attention Economy, & much much MOAR…
Yet another outtake from my Hicks Lecture <>. Apropos of Ronald Meek and “stage theories”. (Largely) behind the paywall because it is, for now, unfinished and raw, and I want to option to revisit and revise it without it being widely distributed.
I. Ronald Meek & Stage Theories:
Joan Robinson’s “Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist” (1971) <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-joan-robinson-an-open-letter> was, originally, perhaps, going to be a private letter directed to—or rather against—Ronald Meek. Meek was never a Marxist proof-texter. But the version of Meek whom Joan Robinson decided she had to write against was one.
I know Ronald Meek overwhelmingly as the author of the brilliant 1971 article “Smith, Turgot, and the Four Stages Theory” <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-7303-0_2>. In that piece Meek does talk about his “revolutionary youth”. He does, however, focus on the stage theory of the Scottish and French Enlightenments, being "impressed in particular by John Millar, whose work was pervaded by a theory of history and society which seemed to me to be a kind of preview of the materialist conception of history upon which I had been brought up…” That is: a stage theory of history in which it is the transformation of the underlying mode of production that is the key and the principal driving factor. For the Scottish and French Enlightenments, it was hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce. For Marx (but more so for Engels!), it was feudal, bourgeois, and fully automated luxury communism—or agrarian, commercial-imperial, and steampower.
I find the Scottish and French Enlightenments’ theories to be noteworthy because they were much more sophisticated than your standard stage theory. There are a lot of stage theories that shrink until there are only two stages. Consider:
my friend Daron Acemoglu: extractive → inclusive institutions.
my friend Deirdre McCloskey: aristo-heroic → bourgeois virtues.
Our Great Uncle Karl Polanyi: embedded → disembedded.
Karl’s brother Michael: customary → mercenary + fiduciary institutions.
Walt Rostow’s non-communist manifesto at least preserves three stages: takeoff → drive to maturity → age of mass consumption. And Marx and Engels have four: ancient → feudal → bourgeois → socialist.
II. John Hicks’s Verion of Stage Theory
But, I argued in my Hicks Lecture <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/theories-of-economic-history-ii-stage>, John Hicks had a more sophisticated stage theory than even Marx and Engels, for he was express that it was contingent, not inevitable.
John Hicks’s major use of his stage theory was to draw this contingent bottom-line conclusion: Our current prosperity rests on a long run of unlikely luck. The market system spread far further than it had any right to—widening the division of labor and enabling large‑scale investment—but always as a fragile tendency, never an inevitability, dependent on patchy supporting institutions and limited in geography.
Hicks also argued that fixed‑capital industrialization—what he saw as the core engine of modern prosperity—needed more than the market system. It needed both unexpected scientific breakthroughs, and unusually deep financial institutions to induce investors to sink resources into assets they could not cash out when panic hit. He thought that the growth of such an inequality producing system was unlikely given the political tensons it would bring, for the system could not, by itself, generate broad wage gains until either the W. Arthur Lewis rural labor surplus had been exhausted or unions had grown strong enough to force rent‑sharing for at least a labor aristocracy.
We know more than Hicks did about how history is full of reversals. We now know more than Hicks did about the late Bronze Age collapse after -1200, when the Greeks forgot how to write; about the post‑Song retreat of China’s iron production; and about the post‑200 “Late‑Antiquity Pause” that left people in both Europe and China, by 750, staring back in awe and wonder at the ruins of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Han achievements and judging themselves unworthy descendants.
We thus have more good reasons than Hicks did to insist that the origins, evolution, and future of this whole process were, at bottom, a precarious political‑sociological matter.
III. Meek’s Assessment of Scottish & French Enlightenment-Era Stage Theories
But let me turn to what Meek concluded about the very sophisticated Enlightenment-Era stage theory when he turned his full mind to it.
Two editorial projects—a new set of Smith’s Glasgow jurisprudence lecture notes discovered in Aberdeen, and Turgot’s early “sociological” manuscripts from his Sorbonne period—led Meek to his central belief that the four-stages theory was very important for Enlightenment-Era political economy, and that it was an inevitable next step from Montesquieu, made multiply and independently by Smith, Turgot, Kames, and others.
It has two core ideas: First, human societies naturally develop through four normally consecutive stages, each defined by a dominant mode of subsistence: (1) hunting (2) herding, (3) farming, and (4) commerce. Second, to each stage there corresponds a characteristic system of:
property rights,
form of civil government,
legal code,
state of manners and morals, and
social surplus structure.
Because the mode of subsistence drives everything else, the historian who grasps the succession of modes can explain the succession of institutions—and do so without resort to great men, divine providence, or pure contingency. As Adam Smith put it in his jurisprudence lectures:
Property and civil government very much depend on one another. The preservation of property and the inequality of possession first formed it, and the state of property must always vary with the form of government…
Meek reconstructs the emergence of the theory chronologically:
Turgot: two Sorbonne lectures in 1750 and the “Plan of Two Discourses on Universal History” (c.1751) already contain a fairly advanced three-stages theory with hints of a fourth.
Kames: the first appearance of the theory in print in Historical Law-Tracts (1758), where four stages suddenly appear in a footnote.
Quesnay and Mirabeau: in 1763, they give the most explicit statement in Rural Philosophy.
Then, in the late 1760s and 1770s: Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Robertson’s History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V (1769), Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), and Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774), with Adam Smith thinking and talking along the same lines (but not publishing) probably from as early as Turgot.
Meek finds what he sees as Turgot’s and Smith’s contemporaneous and independent formulations as ”one of the most remarkable coincidences in the whole history of social and economic thought.”
What explains the simultaneous emergence? Meek identifies three intellectual currents that converged in 1750:
The Pufendorf-Locke property tradition: Pufendorf had argued that things passed into proprietorship “not all at one time, but successively,” with different modes of property corresponding to different modes of subsistence. Locke’s chapter on property, with its North American illustrations, extended this. Hume, Hutcheson, and Kames carried it on.
Studies of North American Indian tribes: Charlevoix and Lafitau provided a contemporary empirical laboratory, not just showing a striking transatlantic contrast but also revealing resemblances between the North American Indians and the ancient Greeks and Romans. This comparative-functionalist insight was the empirical rock on which theory could be built.
The providential history tradition. Bossuet’s Histoire universelle had organized history around a succession of religious epochs. Turgot (and, more distantly, Smith) reacted against this tradition but were shaped by it: Turgot substituted socioeconomy for religion, secular developmental necessity for divine providence, and material “chains of causes” for God’s plan.
Meek closes by crediting Montesquieu as the “green light” that gave permission for a new science of society, while insisting that Turgot and Smith were “the real Newtons”.
And Meek never discusses Marx at all in this paper, save for the initial reference to his “revolutionary youth”.
IV. Stage Theories as of Marx’s Time
But Meeks’s paper does have a Marxist subtext. Meek’s organizing question is whether the four-stages theory constitutes “a, if not the, materialist conception of history,” and his answer is essentially yes, albeit with important qualifications.
The four-stages theory gave Marx:
The principle that the dominant mode of material life—what Smith and Turgot called “mode of subsistence” and Marx renamed “mode of production”—determines the superstructure.
The property-government nexus: civil government is not prior to property relations but derivative from them.
The concept of social surplus and its role in generating new social classes, towns, arts, and manufactures.
4. Stage logic itself: history as a succession of qualitatively distinct formations, each with its own internal coherence.
The “sociological” mode of explanation: individuals make history, but not as they please. The developmental laws of each stage work through agents who do not fully comprehend them.
Moreover, I read Meek’s paper as an attempt to build a firebase for an intellectual struggle against Marxists.
