Scottish Enlightenment

Scottish Enlightenment. A relatively new term, said to have been invented in 1909 when W. R. Scott described Francis Hutcheson as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment. It became fashionable in the 1960s when social scientists began exploring the history of their disciplines, and is now used generally and imprecisely to describe the intellectual, material, and moral culture of Scotland during the long 18th cent. It is a culture associated with the middling ranks of Scottish society, with the Scottish universities, and with the clubs, societies, and salons of Edinburgh. Ideologically it was a culture concerned with the defence of the revolution settlement, the Hanoverian succession, the Act of Union, and the presbyterian establishment. It was concerned with the civilizing functions of commerce and culture and with the problems of developing the institutions and manners appropriate to the preservation of a free commercial polity. Intellectually, the Scots owed important debts to the Dutch, the French, and the English as well as to their own intellectual traditions. Philosophers like Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and Reid were interested in the principles of human nature, the meaning of sociability, and the truths of natural religion. Their conclusions made possible the development of a remarkable theory of progress which was instrumental in shaping the political economy of Smith, the histories of Hume and Robertson, and the historical fiction of Scott. Scottish medical professors developed a model for explaining the physical constitution of man which was particularly sensitive to the nervous system and to environmental determinants of health. Joseph Black's research into the properties of heat made possible James Hutton's revolutionary theory of the earth. Poets like Ramsay, Ferguson, Burns, and Scott reactivated the resources of vernacular literature with the new aesthetics developed by the philosophes and historians. It is sometimes argued that the architecture and town-planning of the Adam family and the portraiture of Allan Ramsay and Sir Henry Raeburn needs to be viewed in the same way. Perhaps the most lasting monument to the Scottish Enlightenment is the New Town of Edinburgh, a vast project which would testify to the civilizing power of commerce by turning Edinburgh into a modern Athens. It bankrupted the city.

Nicholas Phillipson