Editing Henry Home, Lord Kames (section)

==Writings==
Home wrote much about the importance of property to society. In his ''Essay Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities'', written just after the [[Jacobite rising of 1745]], he showed that the [[politics of Scotland]] were based not on loyalty to Kings, as the Jacobites had said, but on the royal land grants that lay at the base of feudalism, the system whereby the sovereign maintained "an immediate hold of the persons and property of his subjects".{{sfn|Home|1747|p=23–24}}{{sfn|Herman|2001|p=102}}

In ''Historical Law Tracts'' Home described a four-stage model of social evolution that became "a way of organizing the history of Western civilization".{{sfn|Herman|2001|p=100}} The first stage was that of the [[hunter-gatherer]], wherein families avoided each other as competitors for the same food. The second was that of the [[herder]] of domestic animals, which encouraged the formation of larger groups but did not result in what Home considered a true society. No laws were needed at these early stages except those given by the head of the family, clan, or tribe. [[Agriculture]] was the third stage, wherein new occupations such as "plowman, carpenter, blacksmith, stonemason"{{sfn|Herman|2001|p=98}} made "the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves",{{sfn|Home|1761|p=50}} and a new complexity of relationships, rights, and obligations required laws and law enforcers. A fourth stage evolved with the development of market towns and seaports, "commercial society", bringing yet more laws and complexity but also providing more benefit.{{sfn|Herman|2001|p=99}} Lord Kames could see these stages within Scotland itself, with the pastoral Highlands, the agricultural Lowlands, the "polite" commercial towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the Western Isles a remaining culture of rude huts where fishermen and gatherers of seaweed eked out their subsistence living.{{sfn|Herman|2001|p=109}}

Home was a [[polygenist]], he believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book ''Sketches of the History of Man'', in 1774, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.{{sfn|Jackson|Weidman|2004|p=39–41}}

The above studies created the genre of the story of civilization and defined the fields of [[anthropology]] and [[sociology]] and therefore the modern study of history for two hundred years.

In the popular book ''Elements of Criticism'' (1762) Home interrogated the notion of fixed or arbitrary rules of literary composition, and endeavoured to establish a new theory based on the principles of human nature. The late eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental writing was associated with his notion that "the genuine rules of criticism are all of them derived from the human heart."{{sfn|Home|1796|p=16}} Neil Rhodes has argued that Lord Kames played a significant role in the development of English as an academic discipline in the Scottish Universities.{{sfn|Crawford|1998|p=28}}