Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe's Future, by Iain McDaniel. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. xii, 276 pp. $45.00 US (doth). Along with his highly celebrated colleagues and friends Adam Smith and David Hume, Adam Ferguson was one of the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Possessed of talented, agile mind and taste for active life, he served as chaplain to the recently formed highland regiment, the Black Watch; and played key roles in many of the cause celebre of his day, including the militia issue and both the Douglas and Ossian affairs. He succeeded Hume, as head of the Advocate's Library, before being named Professor of Pneumatics, then moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He went on to become one of the most unique and prominent political and historical philosophers of the eighteenth century. Despite all this Ferguson has only recently begun to attract the scholarly attention he deserves. This book represents welcome addition to the literature, focusing on important but neglected aspects of Ferguson's thought. Given the study's main title, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, it should be said that this reviewer was struck by what it does not contain. There is little examination of Ferguson as person or the Scottish Enlightenment as broader intellectual and cultural movement. In important ways, this is less book about Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, than it is study in the history of ideas and late eighteenth-century political thought. This clarification will hopefully focus expectations and highlight its contributions to the field. Ferguson's standing as philosopher and social theorist has undergone rather dramatic rehabilitation in recent years. Yet, as this study shows, much of the precise content of his reforming politics, along with the broader character of his thought, has remained hidden from view, buried under an Enlightened narrative constructed predominantly around the contrasting theories of Hume and Smith. Ferguson's political ideas which resonated so deeply in the eighteenth century, failed to do so among subsequent generations and soon fell into obscurity, eclipsed by those of his more famous contemporaries. For instance, unable to accept some of his criticisms of the modem state and commercial society, many in the Victorian era dismissed Ferguson. In the book History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, celebrated literary scholar Sir Leslie Stephen depicted Ferguson as nothing more than a facile and dexterous declaimer (p. 215). Meanwhile Marx's Capital was, tellingly, one of the few works that cited him with approval (p. 474). Such contrasting responses were typical through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, and underscored the difficulty later generations had in translating his ideas, as well as the violence and misrepresentation they often suffered as result. McDaniel presents Ferguson's political thought by carefully reconstructing it within its eighteenth-century context. He does so by concentrating his analysis on one of the central preoccupations and great intellectual problems of the century: how to read and make sense of the history and politics of the later Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. …

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress. By Silvia Sebastiani. Translated by Jeremy Carden. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Edited by Anthony J. La Vopa, Suzanne Marchand, and Javed Majeed.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xiv+255. $90.00.Yiftah ElazarYiftah ElazarHebrew University of Jerusalem Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 2June 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686113 Views: 205Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The notion of an evolutionary process was not “imported” from biology into social theory. The idea of spontaneous processes producing an unintended outcome was commonplace in the social sciences long before Darwin (Scottish Enlightenment).

Scotland may well be a nation in waiting but the greatest contribution it has made to the history and development of social science in Britain occurred just after its loss of nationhood in the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and, as we shall discuss, was not unrelated to it, and this intellectual effervescence in the eighteenth century, known as the Scottish Enlightenment, first began with an Irishman, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), with pamphlets published in Dublin in 1725. Such cultural and political ambivalence only serves to encourage the tendency today to present the Enlightenment thinkers as part of the cultural heritage of an identifiable Scottish nation and evidence of its cultural viability, people who were thoroughly Scottish in their interests, concerns and identities, and part of Scotland’s ‘golden age’. The reawakened interest in Scottish social thought in the contemporary period — with a Centre for Scottish Thought and the Journal of Scottish Thought established at the University of Aberdeen in 2007 — reflects Scotland’s nation-in-waiting status. The cultural and political spaces which give interest to the history and development of Scottish thought in the present therefore intersect with the array of political and social structural factors that explain the emergence of this extraordinary period of scholarship in the eighteenth century to shape the focus of this chapter. This chapter therefore looks not only at the ‘spaces of production’ that influenced the growth of social thought in Scotland by its principal contributors, it examines the ‘spaces of reading’ in which much later these ideas were taken up, disseminated and incorporated into accounts of the history of social thought (see Livingstone, 2005, for the distinction between spaces of production and reading; see Brewer, 2013 for an application to understand some of the writings of C. Wright Mills).

This article explores the ways in which Scottish Enlightenment writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Smith, David Hume and William Robertson used the concept of ‘resentment’ as a means of understanding and, hopefully, taming the Scottish past. It argues that historical narrative was crucial to the process of analyzing the role of the passions in human relations, and that while it drew on the developing social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, it also provided a distinctive and nuanced account of the various operations of resentment that more theoretical formulations could not adequately represent.

The historical importance of the American founders as revolutionaries and state builders and the significance of their ideas in constitutional interpretation and contemporary political debates ensure that their political thought is the subject of voluminous scholarship featuring hotly contested and continuously refined interpretations. During the first half of the 20th century, the Progressive interpretation dominated. Pioneered by James Allen Smith, the Progressive interpretation was given its most visible articulation by Charles Beard in his iconoclastic and still controversial study, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Beard 1986, cited under the Progressive and Neo-Progressive Interpretation). Although they were far from consistent, Progressives followed Beard in treating the founders’ political ideas largely as surface justifications for their immediate economic interests. During the 1950s, however, challenges to the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of Progressive scholarship released the grip of the economic interpretation of the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution and renewed interest in the ideas of the American founders’ political thought. Since the 1960s, scholars have engaged in an exhaustive debate over the intellectual origins and character of the founders’ political thought. During the 1970s and 1980s, this debate took form as a highly visible series of confrontations about whether the political thought of the American founders was best thought of as a species of classical republicanism or Lockean liberalism. Not long after this debate began, however, a consensus formed among most scholars that the political thought of the American founders was a synthesis of ancient and modern ideas. This catholic but also diffuse and loose-jointed agreement has informed almost all recent scholarship on the political thought of the founders. Scholars have made a strong case for the importance of ideas from ancient Greece and Rome, the Scottish Enlightenment, British common law, international law, Protestant Christianity, and modern liberalism in the founders’ political thought. Nevertheless, the conclusion that the founders’ political thought was a synthesis did not end debate but rather led to exchanges about which traditions were central and how the different idioms and traditions fit together. More recently, the study of the founders’ political thought has been advanced by ever more sophisticated analyses of the political thought of specific founders, by reinterpretations of the central purposes and original understandings of important documents (including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), by the publication of a number of books that reexamine events that are important in ascertaining the political thought of the American founders (including the formation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional Convention), and by the publication of numerous individual and collective biographies that feature interpretations of the political thought of one or several founders. It has also been advanced by new articulations of the Progressive interpretation and the construction of a new framework of interpretation: the unionist paradigm. As these developments have taken place, social history focusing on the lives of ordinary Americans has replaced intellectual and political history as the focus of most academic research in the early republic. This transformation has had an ambiguous relationship with the study of the founders’ political thought. On the one hand, it has turned many scholars away from the study of elite discourse and toward accounts of the lived experiences of women, slaves, free blacks, and ordinary farmers. On the other hand, it has transformed who we think of as founders, illuminated the inegalitarian and ascriptive ideologies that were used to subordinate oppressed groups, and redefined scholars’ understandings of the lines between public and private actions and personal and political beliefs.

Chapter One charts a genealogy of the sentimental mode, from the sentimental literary cultures of 18th century Europe through to the widespread success of popular melodrama in Europe and America. It draws connections between the sentimental novel, ‘Moral Sense’ philosophy of the 18th century ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, and 19th century melodrama, as discourses and traditions each bound up with questions relating to affect, the subject and society. While textual analysis of specific texts seeks to draw out the continuities and problematics of sentimentalism as a literary and theatrical genre, a focus remains on establishing the critical contours of the term’s cultural history. The section’s particular aim is to trace the term’s fall from grace while nevertheless establishing its full theoretical significance to film theory. It will also review influential literary scholarship on the cultural gendering of sentimentalism of the period, whether discerned in the ideological consolidation of bourgeois society, the continuance of sentimental narrative in theatrical melodrama and the novel (Stowe, Dickens) or in the various periodicals, guidebooks and assorted paraphernalia that make up a feminizing culture for theorists like Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins and Lauren Berlant.

The agendas of cultural citizenship: a political-theoretical exercise

102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY attention to a small number of the topics treated in this collection (omitting names to save space). The most quoted work is the Treatise, especially Book I with its many ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is a fair question whether the minute analysis of the Treatise is worthwhile in view of Hume's vehement repudiation of it towards the end of his life, stamping it as what had been his philosophy. Most of the contributors, however, do turn occasionally to his later writings from the Philosophical Essays (1748) onwards. It is refreshing to find a contributor writing on Hume's rare excursions into aesthetics. He originally intended to complete his Treatise with a Book IV (to be entitled "On Criticism," the then current term), elevating aesthetic experience into one of the major parts of "human nature ." Following Hutcheson, Hume emphasizes that beauty is not the property of an object but a "passion" similar to the moral sense. Of its many forms he mentions articles of furniture , when we detect the fitness of their design (chairs, and so on) to their use; also instances when poetry pleases, eloquence persuades, and historiography instructs. One of the essayists confines himselfto a comparison of Hume and Wittgenstein. He quotes a relevant remark in Hume's second Enquiry, that it is not "for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians and to engage in disputes of words," repeated in one of his Essays, that it is "worthwhile to consider what is real and what is only verbal." Religion is not neglected. In his Natural History of Religion (in Four Dissertations, 1757) Hume presents religion as original in human nature and also, as on reason, resulting in belief in an invisible intelligent power. It is in the Dialogues that we are faced with shrouded uncertainties . One of the essayists attributes this confusion to our trying to identify which of the characters in the debate represents Hume. He contends that none of them singly does so: Hume puts fragments of himself into each of the debaters to ensure that all the pros and cons will be exposed. The intimate question whether or not Hume held religious convictions is not mentioned. After searching biographical information, I have concluded that he did. Finally, there are Hume's political ideas, treated by three of the contributors. The first deservedly corrects the common view that he was a Tory. He had a personal leaning toward conservatism but was not a party man. His ruling concern was social well-being, but he realized that a nation has a peculiar history, partly shaping and partly shaped by its geographical situation and mentality. The political constitution he sketched was a parliamentary coalition. The other two essays are on Hume's ideas about the unification of the widely scattered thirteen settlements of the colonists. On the details of this dit~cult problem he was vehemently opposed by Madison. 1 venture to add one of Hume's remarks about the British loss of the colonists: "I am American in my principles, and wish we could let them be alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper." Other remarks of his show that he was warmly on the side of the colonists. T. E. JESSOP University of Hull A. L. Donovan. Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Doctrines and Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1975. Pp. x + 343. $17.50. During the eighteenth century chemistry came into its own as a disciplineof science, and the work of Joseph Black played no small part in that story. In 1756 Black published "Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime, and other Alcaline Substances," a paper that truly began the chemical study of gases that was the key to the "chemical revolution" of the 1780s. Black's teacher, William Cullen, is not as well known a figure, yet many of his ideas were crucial for Black's later work, not just in chemical theory, but especially in terms of the nature of BOOK REVIEWS 103 chemistry itself as an independent discipline. The two men shared a close personal as well as intellectual friendship, and it is fitting that...

The origins of an object relations viewpoint common to three Scottish thinkers – Fairbairn, Macmurray and Suttie – are raised. The importance of the social for Scottish Psychiatry is described briefly. A recent argument by Gerson concerning the political implications of object relations thinking is reviewed. Gerson suggests this strand of thinking has its origins in the development of the welfare state. Social thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment is described briefly. It is argued that the origins of object relations theory lie in Scottish Enlightenment views of the social, not in welfare state thinking, which itself may have come from the same source.

“Enlightenment” in the title of this book is a bit misleading, if it suggests an early foretaste of David Hume and Adam Smith. Late in the book, however, Jackson Williams describes his subject as the “Antiquarian Enlightenment,” leading the reader to wonder if that might have been a more accurate title—but perhaps one the publisher found insufficiently sexy. The enlightenment under discussion is, in fact, the new awareness of archival sources and material culture that emerged in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Scotland, primarily among its “minority confessions” (Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Jacobites), which rejected the humanist histories of writers like George Buchanan, who had served the agenda of Protestant reformers and critics of divine-right monarchy.Jackson Williams’s Scottish rebels, priests, and scholars were engaged in the same kind of endeavour as their brethren in the Society of Antiquaries of London and precursors like John Evelyn. While there were some points of contact with England, these Scots were more connected to continental scholarship, with its new emphasis on archival sources, partly through the network of Scots colleges and abbeys in Europe. Unlike the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment we usually think of, they were not concentrated in Edinburgh but instead in the northeast of the country, centered on Aberdeen but also dependent on the great country houses of the region, which acted as hubs for culture and learning.Primary sources were deployed in rewriting conventional historical narrative like the Stuart dynastic myth of an unbroken line of 111 monarchs stretching back from James VII to the Dalriadic king Fergus mac Fearchar, a supposed contemporary of Alexander the Great. Mostly fanciful portraits of these kings were commissioned for the gallery of Holyroodhouse on the eve of the Revolution of 1688, an assertion of dynastic legitimacy just as their historicity was beginning to be challenged. Ironically it was a Jacobite, Father Thomas Innes, who exposed the fiction in his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain (1729). Innes’s target was not the Stuarts (for whom he established what he thought was a more reliable pedigree from the Pictish kings of the fifth century of the Common Era) but the humanist historians who used the Dalriadic myth as proof that Scottish monarchy had been elective and frequently challenged, the Scottish church governed historically by presbyters not bishops. Innes may have been a Jacobite polemicist and his royal genealogy as dubious as the one he exploded, but at least his methodology was more solid. Jackson Williams suggests the debunking of the Ancient Monarchy myth was “the single greatest shift in Scottish historical thought, in the eighteenth century or at any other time.” Archival research and “the minute analysis of texts” were also used to confirm the legitimacy of Robert III, which had been questioned by opponents of hereditary Stuart rule.When a group of second Enlightenment Scots met in Edinburgh to found the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, they acknowledged but largely discounted the first wave who had preceded them. Even so, the earlier generation’s “conception of historical scholarship was carried forward well into the nineteenth century and beyond, even when they themselves had been forgotten.” Some of the book’s chapters go into more detail about academic controversies than most general readers will care about, but Jackson Williams’ prose is lively and he uses case studies to document the flowering of a new evidence-based approach to history. In the process, he rescues a fascinating and important intellectual movement from neglect and the teleology of Whig historiography.

Adam Smith and His Context: The Scottish Enlightenment

In this paper I distinguish three epochs in the social history of modern intellectuals on the Central and Eastern European periphery. The first epoch, associated with bourgeois-driven modernization in Western Europe, began in the mid eighteenth century and lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany and some regions further east, where the propertied bourgeoisie was relatively weak, the educated middle class the so called cultural bourgeoisie or Bildungsbürgertum stepped in to act as a substitute bourgeoisie. This class experimented with an alternative modernization strategy, which it hoped would not only bridge the economic gap between their nation and the West but actually create a stronger propertied bourgeoisie.1 Men of ideas believed it was their historic mission to close the gap between the core and their own countries on the periphery. They pursued a capitalist modernization project without sufficiently well developed bourgeoisie in order to create a modern bourgeoisie. I call this the “first Bildungsbürgertum project” of Central and East European intelligentsia.

Book reviewed in this article:The Hessian Mercenary State. Ideas, Institutions and Reforms under Frederick II 1760–1785. By Charles W. Ingrao.Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775. By A. Roger Ekirch.Enlightened Absolutism (1760–1790). A Documentary Sourcebook. Edited by A. Lentin.Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth‐Century Scotland. By John Dwyer.The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth‐Century Ideas of History and Fiction. By Ian Haywood.The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order. By Ronald Hamowy, foreword by Ian Ross.The People's Armies. By Richard Cobb. translated by Marianne Elliott.England in the War of the Spanish Succession. A Study of the English View and Conduct of Grand Strategy 1701–1713. By John B. Hattendorf.Emergence of a Bureaucracy: the Florentine Patricians 1530–1790. By R. Burr Litchfield.The Printed Word and the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster 1700–1900. By J. R. R. Adams.Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Regime France. By Nina Ratner Gelbart.The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales 1642–1780. By Geraint H. Jenkins.Spinners and Weavers of Auffay. By Gay L. Gullickson.The Gorgeous Mask: Dudlin 1700–1850. Edited by David Dickson.The Eighteenth‐Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone 1737–1777. By Mollie Sands.Scotland and England, 1286–1815. Edited by Roger A. Mason.Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Peter Sabor.The Maritime Powers 1721–1740. A Study of Anglo‐Dutch Relations in the Age of Walpole. By Hugh Dunthorne.Revolution in Brussels 1787–1793. By Janet Polasky.The Recruiting Officer. By George Farquhar. Edited by Peter Dixon.Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. Edited by Ian Dyck.Thomas Paine. By A. J. Ayer.The Collapse of the Anglo‐French Alliance 1727–1731. By Jeremy Black.The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke. Edited by Iain Hampshire‐Monk.The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin. Edited by Peter Marshall.Political Ideas and Institutions in the Dutch Republic. By Herbert H. Rowen and Andrew Lossky.The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830. By Gerald Newman.Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution. Edited by Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy.Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown and Public Opinion. By James E. Bradley.Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung: Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte. By Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl.The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century. Edited by Robert Ginsberg.Closer to Home: Writers and Places in England, 1780–1830. By Roger Sale.The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832. By Jon P. Klancher.Blake's Vision of the Poetry of Milton: Illustrations to Six Poems. By Bette Charlene Werner.From Fiction to the Novel. By Geoffrey Day.Jane Austen and the State. By Mary Evans.Mr Collins Considered: Approaches to Jane Austen. By Ivor Morris.Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, Volume VI. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham and Neal Johnson.Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Culture, Volume 16. Edited for ASECS by 0 M Brack, Jr.Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 6. Edited by Colin Duckworth and Homer Le Grand.Satire and the Transformation of Genre. By Leon Guilhamet.Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth‐Century Satire. By David Nokes.Soame Jenyns. By Ronald Rompkey. Edited by B. H. Davis.Eliza Haywood. By Mary Anne Schofield. Edited by B. H. Davis.Restoration Comedy in Performance. By J. L. Styan.Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. By Edward Burns.An Island in thed Moon. By William Blake. Edited by Michael Phillips.Blake's Heroic Argument. By David Fuller.Crititcal Paths: Blake nad the Argument of method. By Dan Miller, Mark Bracher and Donald Ault.John Dryden and His World. By James Anderson Winn.Purity and Defilemetn in Gulliver's Travels. By Charles H. Hinnant.The Tatler. Edited by Donald F. Bond.Self‐Imitation in the Eighteenth‐Century Novel. By Marie‐Paule Laden.The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth‐Century Familiar Letter. By Bruce Redford.The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. By Leopold Damrosch, Jr.The Attraction of the Contrary. Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment. By Walter E. Rex.Eavesdropping in Marivaux. By William H. Trapnell.Women of Sensibility or Reason. By P. L.‐M. Fein.Rousseau. Confessions. By Peter France.Die ‘Denkbücher’ Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis. By Peter‐Paul Schneider.Johann Gottfired Herder and seine zeitgenössischen Kritiker. By Hans‐Jürgen Gaycken.Sir David Wilkie of Scotland (1785–1841). By William J. Chiego, H. A. D. Miles, David Blayney Brown, Sir Ivor Batchelor, Lindsau Errington, Arthur S. Marks.The English Satirical Print 1660–1832. Michael Duffy.Essays on Handel and Italian Opera. Reinhard Strohm.North German Opera in the Age of Goethe. By Thomas Bauman.Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early‐Nineteenth Centuries. Edited by Peter le Hurry, James Day.

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.