Henry Home, Lord Kames, 1696-1782

Scottish jurist, legal historian and philosopher, godfather of the Scottish Enlightenment. 

Unlike many other Scottish philosophers, Henry Home (pronounced "Hume") was not an academic - indeed, Home did not even attend a university.  A son of modest Scottish gentry, Home was spottily educated and initially apprenticed by indenture to a writer (Scottish equivalent of a solicitor) at a law office in Edinburgh, before changing tack and embarking on a legal career as an advocate (Scottish barrister) under the sponsorship of the Dalrymple family.  Home was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723.  Never the most sparkling of orators, Home made his legal reputation by his quiet reasoning skill and particularly in his writing - beginning with his 1728 collection.  His legal career subsequently flourished.  Kames rose to senior examiner of the Faculty of Advocates and in 1737, became a curator of the Library of Advocates.  Henry Home was made "Lord Kames" (sometimes spelled "Kaims") in 1752 on becoming a judge (Lord Ordinary) in the Scottish Court of Session.  Kames was one of the judges that presided over the celebrated 1777 case of Joseph Knight, a West Indian slave brought by his master to Scotland, and handed down the decision that outlawed slavery in Scotland.

Despite his daily legal business, Henry Home (Lord Kames) mentored many of the leading lights of the early Scottish Enlightenment.   As arguably Scotland's most accomplished jurist, Kames was an outsized figure in Edinburgh, and his offices at the law courts and the library of advocates were a gravitational point for the aspiring young Edinburgh intellectuals of the mid-18th C.  Kames was a relative of David Hume - they first met in 1727, and Kames soon became Hume's mentor, helping guide the latter's writings and career. Kames was instrumental in securing Hume a position as librarian at the Library of Advocates after attempts to land an academic job failed.  Kames also persuaded and arranged for the unemployed young Adam Smith to undertake his famous freelance lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence in Edinburgh in the 1748-51, launching his academic career. John Millar was employed as tutor to Kames's son.   Other figures in Kames's orbit included Sir James Steuart, John Dalrymple, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell,  etc. Kames was the elder statesman of the "Select Society" of Edinburgh in the 1750s, the academy set up by the Enlightenment intelligentsia, that met weekly at the Library of Advocates, and transferred to the Poker Club later in the 1760s.  Kames maintained an active correspondence with most of the Enlightenment figures.   

David Hume called Kames the "best friend I ever possessed" but also "the most arrogant man in the world".  Although Kames was influential in forming Hume's empirical philosophy, he also felt Hume took it too far.  Kames anonymously published a 1751 Essays on Morality, disputing some of the more excessive points of Hume's theory of morals, religion and philosophy.  Kames's essay sparked much commentary and ended up giving Hume further publicity (the anonymous Kames would be referred to as "Sopho" in the subsequent controversy).  It culminated in an attempt by conservative ministers to get both "Sopho" and Hume proscribed and excommunicated by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Kirk in 1755-56 (the attempt failed).

Kames wrote several influential books.  For economists, his most notable performance is his conjectural history of civilization, positing the "four stage theory".  It was suggested already in Kames's 1732 Essays in Law, in his 1747 Essays in British antiquities, further elaborated in his 1758 Historical Law Tracts, and finally refined and articulated most extensively in his 1774 Sketches on Man.  Kames had entertained a larger projected history, but now in his seventies, limited himself to just the outlines of it.    

Starting from hints from Hobbes, Pufendorf and Montesquieu, Kames set out to construct legal history based on property rights.  Kames posited that the "desire for property" and "thirst for opulence" (rather than pursuit of pleasure per se) was the principal motivator of human behavior.  The lust for property naturally led to conflict between people, prompting communities to develop social norms and conventions to mediate and regulate property rights. Kames posited that law, culture and the moral order of society adapted to cement these norms into an institutional form.  Kames's principal innovation was to suggest that law was not static, that as changes in the underlying economic mode of subsistence brought up new types of property,  new norms would develop, leading to adaptive changes in social institutions.  Economic change causes social change, and thus change in law, culture and morals - in short, that the evolution of the economy drives the evolution of civilization.  Kames conjectured a historical pattern of civilization in four distinct stages - hunter-gatherer society, nomadic-pastoral society, agrarian society and finally commercial society.

Kames's four-stage theory was highly influential and picked up by nearly every member of the Scottish Enlightenment.  It can be seen as an inspiration behind David Hume's own theory of evolution of morals and religion (1739, 1757) and the institutional studies in his Essays (1741-42) and his History of England (1754-64).  Kames's four-stage theory is more explicitly articulated in Sir John Dalrymple's History of Feudal Property (1757), in William Robertson's History of Scotland (1759) and more clearly in his History of Charles V (1759); in Adam Smith's Lectures on jurisprudence (1762), and his Wealth of Nations (1776), in Adam Ferguson's History of Civil Society (1767), in John Millar's Origin of Distinction of Ranks (1771) and in James Dunbar's History of Mankind (1780).  It can also be found in Sir James Steuart's Inquiry (1767)

It has been posited (e.g. by Meek) that the four-stage theory was simultaneously and independently discovered elsewhere, notably in France by Jacques Turgot (c.1750) and in Naples by Antonio Genovesi, (in 1758).  But there is little doubt that it flourished most clearly in Scotland, and became a defining hallmark of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Although coming relatively late to print, Kames can and should be credited with coming up with it as early as the 1730s, and spreading it among the Edinburgh clique. 

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