The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment refers to a historical event in northern Britain between approximately 1740 and 1790 that found expression in a significant body of literature embedded in changing political and economic conditions; novel institutional developments such as clubs, societies and academies; and a concurrent efflorescence of associational relations and public communication comparable to what characterised the Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe. The intellectual achievement of eighteenth-century Scotland was so considerable that it not only impressed contemporaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant but is today still regarded as having been responsible for the remarkable distinction that Scotland attained among the countries that participated in the Enlightenment.

[Page 676]The vast intellectual literature containing the basic ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment was produced by different generations of authors over a 50-year period but found its most characteristic focus roughly in the third quarter of the century during which a whole series of famous titles were published by David Hume (1711–1776), William Robertson (1721–1793), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), John Millar (1735–1801), and others. While this literature as a whole represented virtually the full range of modern knowledge, from experimental natural science and medicine through philosophy to what Hume referred to as “the moral subjects” or “the science of man” and later after Condorcet came to be called “the social sciences,” it is interesting to note here that it is particularly the latter branch of this literature that has retained its relevance and significance. At times, it indeed seemed as though the larger part of this social theoretic literature had fallen into oblivion, yet a certain line of continuity can be observed, and somewhat unexpectedly, the second half of the twentieth century has inaugurated a veritable renaissance in Scottish Enlightenment studies.