Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment

G ARRY Wills's study of the intellectual background to that most famous of all American political documents, the Declaration of Independence, is nothing short of revolutionary.' In what is surely the most ambitious effort to investigate the political philosophy underlying the Declaration since Carl Becker published his monograph in I922,2 Wills, with enormous ingenuity, has attempted a thorough reinterpretation of Jefferson's meaning as it emerges in the document. His thesis, simply put, is that there are really three Declarations: the Declaration as political document (the Declaration adopted by Congress); the Declaration as symbol of nationhood (the Declaration as a product of later reinterpretation); and the Declaration as philosophical treatise (the Declaration as written by Jefferson). The major emphasis of Wills's monograph, and that which provides the subtitle of his book, is on this third DeclarationJefferson's Declaration.3 The heart of his analysis the term is Wills's is his contention that, far from bearing the imprint of Lockean political theory, the Declaration, as Jefferson originally intended it, can be properly understood only if it is analyzed as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and that Jefferson's views on the nature of man and society derived not fromrJohn Locke's Two Treatises of Government but from the works of Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's system of moral philosophy particularly, Wills contends, contains the key to decoding the theory of the nature and proper functions of government embedded in the Declaration. To his central argument Wills attaches several others in defense of his theory of three Declarations: that the Declaration, to those who signed it, held none of the significance as a

The Scottish Enlightenment is celebrated for its many contributions to the natural sciences, the social sciences and the moral sciences. But for all this attention, one aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment has been almost entirely neglected: its educational theory. This paper aims to illuminate the relationship between the educational theory of the Scottish Enlightenment and the moral psychology and political theory of commerce, corruption and the civilising process that have long been recognised as distinguishing features of Scottish thought in the 18th century, giving special attention to the educational treatises of George Turnbull, David Fordyce and Henry Home, Lord Kames.

The term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ annoys some Scottish historians, because to them it seems to suggest that a state of unenlightenment prevailed in Scotland before the mideighteenth century, but ‘enlightenment’ when used by the historian of ideas is simply a technical term to describe certain aspects of eighteenth-century thought. The trouble is in defining precisely what aspects of eighteenth-century thought it is meant to describe. Different people study the eighteenth century Scottish thinkers for different reasons; for Professor Pocock, for example, they belong to the tradition of ‘civic humanism’ and constitute one of his Machiavellian moments. But they are more widely known nowadays for the modernity and sophistication of their social theory.

Recent scholarship on the role emotion and sympathy played in the Enlightenment’s mapping of historical progress invites a reconsideration of the women writers who are the subject of this book: Mary Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, including first- and second-generation Bluestockings and gothic and historical novelists, who are often placed outside a feminist literary tradition because of their endorsement of the feminine and refined emotions she critiques in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The mid-eighteenth-century explosion of literary, philosophical, and historical narratives that theorized what Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called “the progress of the female sex” not only made gender central to understandings of the civilizing process, but was also shaped by the work of these writers. A Feminine Enlightenment places this argument in conversation with recent work by J.G.A. Pocock and others on multiple Enlightenments, literary scholars on the Scottish Enlightenment, and feminist critics on women writers’ responses to Enlightenment.

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.

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).

Adam Smith and His Context: The Scottish Enlightenment

Introduction: Some insights from Western social theory

1. Introduction John Holmwood and John Scott 2. The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725-1915 John Brewer 3. Poverty Studies and Social Research Lucinda Platt 4. Absent or Forgotten? Recovering British Social Theory John Scott 5. Evolutionism and British Sociology Chris Renwick 6. Religion and British Sociology: the Power and Necessity of the Spiritual Stephen Turner 7. Sociology and Social Work: In Praise of Limestone Ian Shaw 8. The First Sociology 'Departments' Chris Husbands 9. British Sociology in the Inter-War Years Baudry Rocquin 10. Building a Textbook Tradition: Sociology in Britain, 1900-1968 John Scott 11. The International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction and British Sociology Jennifer Platt 12. Feminism in Sociology, Feminism as Sociology Mary Evans 13. Exiles in British Sociology Charles Turner 14. British Sociology in the Metropole and the Colonies, 1940s-1960s George Steinmetz 15. Between Humanities and Science: Sociology as a Third Culture John Eldridge 16. The History of British Sociology from the Perspective of its Archived Qualitative Sources: Ruminations and Reflections Mike Savage 17. The Sociology of Community Graham Crow 18. Sociology of Race, Racism, and Ethnicity: Trends, Debates, and Research Agendas John Solomos 19. Research Methodology in Sociology Geoff Payne 20. The Sociological Study of Religion: Arrival, Survival, Revival Grace Davie 21. Criminology, Deviance and Sociology Eamonn Carrabine 22. The Sociology of Work: From Industrial Sociology to Work, Employment, and the Economy Paul Edwards 23. Sociology, Cultural Studies, and the Cultural Turn Gregor McLennan 24. 'Class' in Britain Wendy Bottero 25. Sociology of the Body and the Relation between Sociology and Biology Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott 26. Sociology's Past and Futures: The Impact of External Structure, Policy and Financing John Holmwood

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative

Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women's Stories of Migration in the New Millennium—Contributions to Transnational Feminism

During the twentieth century a series of ‘new histories’ constructed an alliance with the social sciences to revise and revitalize the practice of history in Europe and the United States. This essay analyzes the ways American historians have made use of social theory and compares that usage with the Annales school. For American historians, as for Europeans, social theory helped to stabilize an increasingly uncertain narrative of Western history by analysis of the structures beneath and forces within the course of political events. The story moves from the New History of the Progressive Era to the more structural 1950s alliance with the social sciences, to some of the newer histories that alliance spawned (social science history, histories of modernization, and the social‐cultural history of the dispossessed), and ends with the newest theoretical turn to postmodern literary and cultural theories aimed not at stabilizing, but destabilizing, the narrative of Western history.

Over the past century, theologians and ethicists have expressed unease with the growing problem of competition in human relationships. While most agree that competition dissolves relationships of fidelity and trust between people, many have argued on the basis of the political mythology of social contract theory that competition is a natural, albeit sad, fact of being human. This article examines and aligns three responses to the problem of competition in human relationships from Jean Vanier, Carl Rogers, and James Alison. In contrast to the view that human beings are naturally competitive, Vanier, Rogers, and Alison have each reinterpreted human being as depending on the cultivation of noncompetitive relationships that require interdependence in vulnerability, acceptance of others, and a vision of fully human life compatible with and modeled in the experience of disability. Vanier and Rogers developed their anthropologies in relation to the L’Arche communities and psychotherapy respectively, and did not concentrate specifically on traditional systematic theological topics. Alison, however, has focused on traditional theological topics, particularly redemption. This essay suggests that the noncompetitive anthropology developed in Vanier and Rogers helpfully complements the doctrine of redemption developed by Alison and so assists in changing the focus of Christian discussions of salvation from adversarial, forensic and competitive accounts of the Atonement to practice-oriented and social views of becoming human in belonging with others.

This chapter provides an overview of Cullen’s (Justice Q 11:527–558, 1994) social support theory. Different aspects of social support theory, from its definitional and measurement challenges, its broader contributions to criminological thinking, the bulk of research testing its main propositions at different levels of analysis, and its policy implications are discussed throughout the chapter. Overall, the current chapter reaffirms the theoretical, empirical, and policy value of social support theory. First, social support maintains theoretical relevance and provides promising directions to move the field forward. Social support theory highlights the prosocial facets of human relationships and the support provided by an individual’s social environment. Social support theory constitutes an integrative approach that builds on other mainstream criminological theories to better understand differences in criminal involvement at the individual level and differential crime rates across different ecological units. Thus, social support is deemed to reduce crime directly but also indirectly by affecting criminogenic factors such as social control, social learning, or strain and moderating their effect on crime. Second, different tests of social support theory have shown its empirical validity. However, tests of social support theory—using comprehensive measures of the construct—are still in short supply. More research on the different propositions of social support is needed. Third, social support has important policy implications. Social support theory focuses on individuals’ social environments and in prosocial human relationships, rather than individuals themselves. Thus, social support theory expands the set of policy targets beyond the individuals to their families, communities, and a broad set of government and non-government institutions and allows to think alternative crime reducing and security building policies.

This article argues for an interspecies methodology to challenge the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most historical narratives. It also seeks to qualify the entrenched dichotomy between wildness and domestication. To this end, I focus on the interaction between humans and “mithuns” (Bos frontalis), bulky bovines endemic in the mountain forests of the eastern Himalayas. In this large region—covering parts of India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and China—numerous societies attuned their cultural sensibilities and cosmological assumptions to the same animal. This remarkable feat of cultural convergence attests to the unwitting power that a semi-wild bovine exerted over generations of humans—a fact that environmental historians can incorporate into their analyses of interspecies agency. The significance of mithuns to humans had nothing to do with their livestock potential. They were sacred animals that humans needed to communicate with supernatural forces. The form that this communication took was ceremonial sacrifice. During the twentieth century, however, mithun–human relationships morphed into a new sacrality of place, ethnic identity, regional belonging, and political resistance. This transformation suggests the need for an “interspecies periodization” that takes human-nonhuman temporalities seriously. As most of these societies historically did not use script, written evidence is not plentiful. Therefore, Indigenous forms of knowledge production about the environmental past—embedded in songs, stories, dances, rituals, material remains, dress, and sculptural art—are of paramount importance. These shaped human behaviour towards mithuns in the past, and they continue to do so today.