The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought c.1725–1915

Abstract

Scotland may well be a nation in waiting but the greatest contribution it has made to the history and development of social science in Britain occurred just after its loss of nationhood in the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and, as we shall discuss, was not unrelated to it, and this intellectual effervescence in the eighteenth century, known as the Scottish Enlightenment, first began with an Irishman, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), with pamphlets published in Dublin in 1725. Such cultural and political ambivalence only serves to encourage the tendency today to present the Enlightenment thinkers as part of the cultural heritage of an identifiable Scottish nation and evidence of its cultural viability, people who were thoroughly Scottish in their interests, concerns and identities, and part of Scotland’s ‘golden age’. The reawakened interest in Scottish social thought in the contemporary period — with a Centre for Scottish Thought and the Journal of Scottish Thought established at the University of Aberdeen in 2007 — reflects Scotland’s nation-in-waiting status. The cultural and political spaces which give interest to the history and development of Scottish thought in the present therefore intersect with the array of political and social structural factors that explain the emergence of this extraordinary period of scholarship in the eighteenth century to shape the focus of this chapter. This chapter therefore looks not only at the ‘spaces of production’ that influenced the growth of social thought in Scotland by its principal contributors, it examines the ‘spaces of reading’ in which much later these ideas were taken up, disseminated and incorporated into accounts of the history of social thought (see Livingstone, 2005, for the distinction between spaces of production and reading; see Brewer, 2013 for an application to understand some of the writings of C. Wright Mills).