<i>The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 David Allan The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. By John Robertson. Pp. xii, 453. ISBN: 0 521 84787 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. £55.00. This important and thought-provoking book is strongly recommended, not only to the Enlightenment specialists who might be expected to read it but also to those scholars who are interested in the kinds of perspectives opened up by the techniques of comparative history. For John Robertson’s major new study makes an intriguing, and, in the end, persuasive case for the existence of illuminating parallels between the Scottish and the Neapolitan Enlightenments – phenomena which occurred in two ‘historically subordinate or “provincial” kingdoms on the margins of Europe, which between them produced some of the most original thinking about man and society of the entire period from 1680 to 1790’ (p. 9). Crucially, however, it is emphatically not Robertson’s contention that the two situations were particularly similar. Indeed, that would clearly be a [End Page 165] difficult point to establish, as well as unhelpful to the precise argument whose merits Robertson wishes us to consider. By the end of the period covered in this book, after all, one was patently becoming a commercial and industrial society. It also had a strongly Protestant culture and an (absentee) parliamentary monarchy, and was characterised by unusual levels of freedom of thought and expression that facilitated the emergence of a large body of challenging work by a mixed community of tenured academics, virtuosi landowners, learned lawyers and liberal clergymen. The other, by contrast, was a backward and overwhelmingly agrarian society presided over by an entrenched Catholic church, a feudal nobility and an (absentee) Spanish monarchy. Here early Enlightenment thinkers like Paolo Mattia Doria, constrained by official restrictions, were obliged to work ‘in manuscript, for the eyes of sympathetic ministers only’ (p. 379). Meanwhile, Pietro Giannone, the historian, suffered exile, imprisonment by the Duke of Savoy and the confiscation of his writings on account of their heterodoxy. Nor is it suggested that the Scottish and Neapolitan intelligentsias enjoyed an unusually close relationship with one another. In fact, they plainly did not. Rather, Robertson’s point is that it is the existence of two markedly different and in some ways contrasting national contexts, with relatively limited direct contact between them, that makes it possible, when comparing the resulting intellectual cultures, to probe the much broader and far more important question of the coherence of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, the study raises the question of whether there might exist here what Robertson’s title describes as a ‘Case for the Enlightenment’. In other words, despite everything that has lately been written about the sheer diffuseness of eighteenth-century thought and culture, and thus about the advantages of thinking of a diverse and differentiated ‘family’ of Enlightenments in the plural, was there nevertheless something fundamental that bound together practitioners situated even in peripheral societies at opposite ends of Europe and in basically very different circumstances? It will be obvious that such a detailed comparative study is necessarily a large and complicated undertaking for any historian. It is therefore very much to Robertson’s credit that he has spent many years, both in Italy and at home, gradually piecing together a masterly study of complex intellectual activity and its peculiar social and cultural contexts. At the book’s heart lies a thesis that, whilst not entirely unprecedented, as he admits, is at least somewhat unusual among the most recent attempts to characterise the Enlightenment. This is that political economy – a set of inquiries ‘whose goals were the wealth of nations . . . and the improvement of the condition of all of society’s members’ (p. 29) – formed the main project of both the Scottish literati and the Neapolitan illuministi. Readers of the present review will probably be able to guess the outlines of the argument as it relates to Scotland, even if the detailed exposition offered here is highly original. David Hume occupies centre-stage; Fletcher, Kames, Smith and a few others play significant supporting roles; the nation’s merchants and improving lairds supply a closely-engaged chorus. The...