Liveblogging Wood's The Idea of America: Ferguson Was Noting Two Mistakes, Not One!
I have had many good things to say about Wood, so it's time for some criticism, directed at Wood's notion of historical causation. This is expounded upon in the chapter on conspiracy theories. Wood quotes with approval Adam Ferguson noting that "in striving to remove inconveniences, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate... and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." Wood rightly criticizes conspiracy theorizing for ignoring the fact that the emergence of a social outcome certainly does not mean anyone, let alone a whole group of people, designed that outcome. But he oddly ignores the first part of the famous dictum: "As... ideas [such as Ferguson's] evolved, laying the basis for the emergence of modern social science, attributing events to the conscious design of particular individuals became mo...