Johnson’s “Tour of the Hebrides'' is two things. It is an entertaining account of his travels with Boswell to the Near Abroad that begins in Edinburgh, which Johnson thinks will be a familiar enough city to his readers so that it need not be described, and works its way to the remote islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, and then back again, revealing things about the places and the peoples that might seem a bit strange to his London readers. Second of all, in this mild guise, Johnson presents what is an analysis of the social structural differences between a backward place and a modern, affluent place, as Britain is, and how one can become the other. This is the self same project that was taken on by the Nineteenth Century sociologists who also wanted to explain how the modern world differed from the feudal or other pre-modern worlds, and so I think it would be correct to treat Johnson as one of the founders of sociology even if he is not given credit for being so because he is a literary man and so his most incisive social structural observations are not particularly abstracted as such, even as other contemporary proto-sociologists such as Thomas Malthus, are given their due because he originates of formulas to describe the whole of social life something sociologists never following up on this promise while economists have tried, however fruitless they are at making predictions. Moreover, Johnson makes his comparison between two societies that are very similar to one another. The two share an island, a language, a Protestant religion, even if Johnson says early on that Scotland has abandoned the more rigorous forms of Calvinism which had earlier inflamed it, as well as having been a single nation, at least officially, for some fifty years. His book is, therefore, much like Young’s “Travels in France'' where Young, some fifteen years later, will treat travel to the land across the Channel as something of a voyage of discovery, finding the natives to be somewhat backward by English standards, neither their farms nor roads up to his standards.
This English way of doing comparative studies is very different from the one employed by the French, who went very far abroad, to Polynesia, to engage in their comparisons, and found the peoples living there to have a kind of idyllic existence, practicing an equality unknown in Europe that was both social and very private, so that Polynesian women, according to Diderot, were said to offer their favors even on ugly men, which would be a true acceptance of the equality of all people, however far fetched it might seem to people who think sexual attraction is not that malleable a matter. The French had also gone far afield when Montesquieu places his reflections on government in the form of “The Persian Letters”, ones supposedly sent from a very foreign monarchy. So the French can rightly be thought to have originated not sociology, but anthropology, what with its fascination with pre-literate cultures as the basis for what all subsequent societies will be like, a tradition which continues at least until Margaret Mead, who also saw the sexual practices of Samoans as far more enlightened than those practiced by her fellow East Coast cosmopolitans except for those who got the wisdom of those not confined by the embellishments of modern life. This French sense of finding the basic structures of life that are found in and about preliterate societies to be the same ones that dominate all of modern life is also to be found in Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Straus, who thought that the naming of peoples in general to be no different than the hoisting of flags and nicknames to betoken army groups, as when one regiment calls itself “The Fighting Sixty Ninth” or another unit calls itself “The Rainbow Division”. Every group needs a name, though Levi Straus elides the question of whether it makes a difference that the modern names are self-consciously chosen just so as to provide an easy designation, while pre=literate names may evoke something deeper. Levi Strause himself asserted that cooking practices, whether to eat something raw or cooked, tells something deep about the society and not being just a custom of no great significance or simply a stage in overall cultural development.
We know from his novel “Rasselas” that Johnson was no believer in utopias of any sort, and so it is not surprising that he will not indulge in that metaphor when considering the state of Scotland. What he does instead is invoke an idea familiar in a culture drenched in the idea of decline as that was worked through in Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, that first volume of which was published in 1776, a year after Johnson’s trip north to investigate another different country, the young Gibbon having been a member of the distinguished literary club whose greatest figure was Johnson and also included Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick the actor, and Edmund Burke, the politician and aesthetician and political writer. Johnson’s idea is also the idea of ruin, these buildings whose decay has become part of a nation’s essence. Early on, Johnson identifies Aberdeen as a university town in decline, learning to find ever less refuge in a society known for it, Johnson blames the decline on Knox’s Reformation. Enthusiasm had wrecked the church. Johnson also wants to find out how Scotland is to be arrested in its decline.
It isn’t just churches and universities that are in ruins. Johnson passes on roads and through places that were visited by Macbeth, and so Scotland is an ancient place, a place with a history. Further proof of that is that the material culture of the place is backwards. The roads are difficult to traverse, an observation that Young makes about France to undercut the idea that France is a prosperous nation. Johnson goes further. He points out that the Scots use little glass in their windows and that they are difficult to open because they are not managed through a set of pulleys but, sometimes, by a pin stuck in a window frame to keep the lower frame open. This primitivism means that there is a lack of fresh air. Johnson is a bit embarrassed to make this observation, to comment on so ordinary or common a matter. He justifies himself by saying that such matters attest to the true strengths and weaknesses of a society. And so Johnson has opened a whole new area, that of everyday and common life, as objects for observation and comment.
Shoes, another sign of civilization, were imported by Cromwell, though it is still the case that many of the Highlanders go without them. Indeed, it is only since the Union of Scotland and Britain some sixty years before Johnson made his tour, that there came a general upswing in the fortunes of the Scots. Conquest allows the more advanced nation to bring its material and intellectual benefits to the people it has conquered. The most difficult developments, however, are intellectual in that the Scots are still intellectually lazy, making do with their practices rather than innovating so as to make their lives easier. This message of the development that results from conquest is one, remember, that comes before the Nineteenth Century doctrine of the white man’s burden, which is racist when it plays with the idea the black Africans are inherently inferior and so must be ruled over like children so as to impart to them some of the benefits of civilization. It is applied by Johnson to ancient people of similar racial stock. The argument is that the conquest of the less civilized by the more civilized results in new levels of development not out of the good will of the conqueror but because more enlightened ways of life are bound to take hold once the old order is removed. This is a kind of optimism that was shared by those in the Nineteenth Century who thought that an enlightened working class would transform their own societies once they took power. In opposition, however, to those Nineteenth Century theorists, Johnson follows the Conservative doctrine that goes back centuries in English thought and thinks that those in charge are the ones who have wisdom, never mind that the great Eighteenth Century sages, Hume and Smith, were Scots who stayed there.
Johnson thought that the way to improve Scotland economically was to import sheep. There was land enough to support roving bands of sheep and an export market close enough for them to be profitable. Johnson, as a literary person, just described what he would have done rather than objectify the process into a term as a generalization, and so call it “relative advantage”,which is what Adam Smith did in that same 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations” and so include it as part of the social scientific lexicon. But that is what Johnson was up to and so we should give him credit.