Introduction

Abstract

This chapter invokes a double perspective in exploring Scottish culture since the Enlightenment: one focused on the consequences of that upsurge of Scottish innovation called the Enlightenment — and whose historical lineaments have been attributed by Paul Wood to Dugald Stewart's account of his eighteenth-century predecessors — and the other on the impact of the concept in Scottish cultural studies (and Scottish cultural politics) in the period since the 1960s. It asks whether there is continuity between the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and contemporary Scotland.