In this book Alexander Broadie describes The Scottish Enlightenment (Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) as a deeply collaborative, highly practical explosion of intellectual energy in the 1700s. He shows how this movement in Scotland reshaped how the Western world viewed human nature, economics and science.
Rather than viewing it as a sudden, isolated historical anomaly, Broadie argues that it was an extension of Scotland’s centuries-old pre-Reformation academic traditions, uniquely accelerated by the social and political landscape of the 18th century.
David Hume and Francis Hutcheson saw human beings as co-extensive with the natural world. They determined that human morality stems from inherent feelings of sympathy and sociability, rather than divine command. Adam Smith set out a new moral theory. Smith argued that humans develop an internal “impartial spectator” (conscience) to self-regulate actions based on how an objective observer would judge them.
The author is good at describing the highly social nature of the Scottish Enlightenment. Brilliant ideas were forged in the densely populated streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow, cultivated in university lecture halls, taverns, and debating clubs. The ideas which emerged were tightly coupled with societal benefit. Scots became geologists (like James Hutton) and chemists (like Joseph Black) specifically to solve real-world problems like discovering mineral wealth, improving agricultural fertilizers, and creating industrial dyes.
Finally, Broadie emphasizes that the Scottish Enlightenment had an immense, far-reaching impact. Through the Scottish diaspora, figures like John Witherspoon exported a new curriculum directly to the American colonies, heavily shaping the intellectual architecture of the American Founding Fathers and the Western democratic tradition. The Scots have thus given us the modernity that we live in today.
Alexander Broadie (Professor Alexander Broadie : Royal Society of Edinburgh) is a renowned philosopher and historian of ideas. In 1995, Broadie was appointed to the prestigious Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow, a position famously held by Adam Smith in the 18th century.
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First published 1997
240 pages in Birlinn paperback
ISBN 978 1841586403
Alexander Broadie