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The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the most fruitful intellectual movements in eighteenth-century Europe. David Hume, Adam Smith, and about a dozen other significant thinkers revolutionized modern ideas of human cognition and sentiment, as well as political and economic philosophy. “At a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief nobility . . . , speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of,” wrote David Hume in 1757, “is it not strange . . . that, in these circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe?”

Scotland’s Unique Edge

Centered chiefly in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, socializing in circles such as the Select Society and the Poker Club, Scottish thinkers created not merely a school of thought but a complex hub of debate and inquiry into history, science, moral, and political philosophy. This hub of accomplishment, dubbed “a hotbed of genius” by Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, can be partially understood against the background of Scotland’s unique historical circumstances.

Scotland joined England in a Union of Parliaments in 1707, giving up a long tradition of independence. At first, post-Union discontent peaked into several Jacobite uprisings in support of exile Stuart contenders to the British throne, most significantly the failed attempt at power seizure led by Charles Edward Stuart. His defeat in Culloden in 1745 terminated the era of struggle, but even earlier, many Scots, especially Lowlanders, preferred to remain partners to England and share its economic prosperity and imperial ambitions. The traditional Highlands clan society was a waning world of ancient valor and communal values that became the object of cultural nostalgia and a theoretical challenge for philosophers of modernization.

Scottish thinkers thus faced the problem of an identity for Scotland within the assimilated structure. They witnessed the consequences of modern commerce and industry, which were transforming landscape and society. By mid-century, parts of Scotland experienced unprecedented growth in manufacture and trade. The Church of Scotland lost its grip on the imagination of a new generation. Educated Scots looked to London for cultural inspiration, but others, notably Hume and Smith, reached toward the new Enlightenment discourse being created in Paris and elsewhere. At home, they favored the philosophy of political liberty loosely associated with Whiggism, the political outgrowth of the Glorious Revolution (1688), rather than the continental-style absolute monarchy linked with the Stuarts. Fascinated by progress, the Scottish Enlightenment displayed a powerful future orientation.

Major Thinkers And Ideas

Roughly between 1739, the publication date of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, and the 1790s, a generation of thinkers set out to create a new understanding of modernity based on good laws, peaceful commerce, and social refinement. Inspired by its unique crossroads between English civility and Gaelic tradition, and drawing on its long-standing contacts with the European continent, Scotland created a distinct voice within the European Enlightenment.

Influenced by earlier theorists of natural law, such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, by travel and ethnographic literature, and by the French philosophers Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Scottish thinkers saw human history as divided into socioeconomic stages of development leading from primitive man to refined modernity. Scotland’s entry into a union with England could be seen in the context of civil and economic advance. The Highlands presented these sophisticated Lowlands thinkers with a handy model of traditional society, a mirror image to urban and urbane modernity.

Sharing the French spirit of rational investigation, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers focused more closely on aspects of economic modernity and on a new and sophisticated grasp of interplay between individual interests, market forces, and forms of government. Put concisely, the unique Scottish contribution to European Enlightenment discourse is most visible in investigations into sentiment and “common sense” and in the innovative philosophy of political economy associated mainly with Hume and Smith.

Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, is considered a founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment. His analysis of human virtue and benevolence led him to oppose the Thomas Hobbes theory of human nature by stipulating a realm of “moral sense” that underlies men’s ethical judgments. Pleasure, he wrote, is effected by virtue, and “that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest numbers.”

Hume set out to challenge Hutcheson by applying Isaac Newton’s scientific method to epistemology, moral philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and history. His “science of man” was purportedly based on experience and observation alone. The Treatise broached a new philosophical skepticism and a pioneering discussion of causation, induction, and human knowledge, which creatively provoked Immanuel Kant and inspired many other philosophers of the mind. The Essays, Moral and Political (1741–1742 with later additions), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) based morality on human psychology, particularly on sentiments, drawing on man’s love of pleasure and aversion to pain. Hume’s History of Great Britain (1754–1762) set an agenda for the Scottish inquiry into the rise of modernity in general. His political theory advocated trust in modern monarchies, when able to safeguard rule of law, civil liberty, and freedom of trade. Hume’s essays “Of Superstition and Religion” and “Of Miracles,” and the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), offered a powerful philosophical basis for both skepticism and atheism.

Thomas Reid was the most important voice of the “common sense” school that also included James Beattie, George Campbell, and Dugald Stewart. Opposing Hume’s empiricism, these thinkers identified principles of cognition common to all mankind and exempt of rational proof. Reid’s inquiries into sensation, language, and free will are of interest to philosophers today.

An important group of thinkers turned to the history of mankind or of social groupings. Among them were Henry Home, Lord Kames, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar. They attempted to create categories for understanding the material, social, and economic progress and “division of ranks.” Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has recently aroused renewed interest as a republican-minded exploration of man’s primeval communal nature as a standing challenge to civilized, commercial modern society.

Adam Smith’s engagement with the Scottish subject matter resulted in two important works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which analyzed the independence of men’s moral judgments, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), which established the modern science of political economy. Following Hume and differing from Ferguson, Smith stipulated a market-based society based on modern manufacture and trade, vouchsafed by strong laws and civil refinement.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers enjoyed a particularly close-knit version of the famed eighteenth-century sociability. Intricately interconnected through correspondence and intellectual interplay, many of them gathered in such Edinburgh groupings as the Select Society and the Poker Club (intended to poke interest in a cherished but failed cause, the establishment of a Scottish militia). These circles included prominent scientists, including William Cullen and Joseph Black, and literati such as James Boswell and James MacPherson.

The Scottish Enlightenment’s impact on future generations of philosophers was profound and lasting. Francois-Marie Voltaire lauded his Scottish contemporaries. Ferguson was influential among German Enlightenment philosophers and romanticists, culminating in Georg W. F. Hegel. Smith made his impact on continental political economy throughout the nineteenth century. Since his initial stamp on Kant, Hume’s impact on Western philosophy has been constant. Significantly, since the 1970s, interest in the Scottish Enlightenment has grown among political thinkers and social commentators, fascinated by parallels between its early-modern tension fields and our late-modern concerns.

Bibliography:

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Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Haakonssen, Knud. The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed., rev. by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1975.
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Reid,Thomas. An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense, edited by Derek R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
Robertson, John. “The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment.” In The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Re-interpretation, edited by Paul Wood, 37–62. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000.
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Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
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