Legacy

Those who date the end of the Scottish Enlightenment to the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 are vulnerable to the fact that Smith lived until 1790 and Hutton died in 1797. The definitive two-volume version of Hutton’s greatest work, Theory of the Earth, which arguably laid the foundations for the science now called geology, was published in 1795. Further, Stewart, whose wide influence was as a disseminator and teacher rather than an original thinker, held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1785 until 1820 and from that chair had a huge impact on the young men who took the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to London and well beyond.

The outcome of this ferment of intellectual activity has been sketched in such grand, all-encompassing terms as “the invention of the modern world” or, simply, “modernity,” as historian Arthur Herman has characterized it. Alternatively, it has also been described more specifically in terms of institutions, styles of thinking and writing, or seminal works of philosophy or literature. Likewise, traces of the Scottish Enlightenment can be identified in many major cultural, political, and philosophical movements that followed it.

Herman makes a detailed case for finding key elements of modern society originating or developing significantly in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith, for instance, has been hailed by politicians and economists in the United States and the United Kingdom as the founder of, and inspiration for, capitalism. There is no doubt that in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations the fundamental principles of capitalism—specialization, the division of labour, and the primacy of free markets—are fashioned into the powerful economic and social theory that today dominates politics in much of the developed world. Along with this goes the substitution of merit, talent, and the creation of wealth as the key drivers of economic development, in place of inherited wealth and aristocratic patronage. In practice, the most significant change that the principles formulated by Smith wrought in society was the creation of the middle class. Increasing enfranchisement was an inevitable accompaniment, and with that came seismic shifts in the location and exercise of political power.

Of course, there were many other forces at play here, not all of which can be traced directly to the Scottish Enlightenment. However, the Scots did have important parts to play in the development of industrialization. The importance of Watt’s harnessing of the power of steam can hardly be overestimated, and Herman makes a powerful case for the influence of two Scottish engineers on the development of modern approaches to transport: John McAdam, the inventor of the macadam road surface, and Telford, who made massive contributions to the engineering of bridge building and canal construction. The accomplishments of McAdam and Telford are two examples of a principle central to the Scottish Enlightenment: that of accompanying the extension of knowledge through inquiry, observation, and experiment with the search for applications of that increased understanding as “useful knowledge.”

The importance of education in individual and societal progress was illustrated well and had specific legacies. A group of Scots educated by Stewart and led by Henry Peter Brougham were central to the creation of the first postmedieval university in England, the University of London. They persuaded the citizens of London of the truth of what Edinburgh’s citizens had seen some 250 years earlier: that a capital city needed a university. The University of Edinburgh and its reputation was riding high in international esteem at this time (Thomas Jefferson, for example, had been happy to recommend it to a young relative), and it was taken as an early model in the foundation in 1826 of what is now University College, London. Princeton University in the United States also owed a great deal to Scots formed by Enlightenment learning: John Witherspoon, signatory of the Declaration of Independence and early head of Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey), had studied at the University of Edinburgh, as had James McCosh, author of the first important book on the history of the philosophy of common sense and president of Princeton in the 19th century.

Less well known is the impact of the philosophy of common sense, particularly the writings of Reid and Stewart, on Andrés Bello, Venezuela’s most celebrated man of letters, who was a tutor and, later, emissary of Simón Bolívar during the early 19th century. Bello spent nearly 20 years in London, much of it in the British Library, as Bolívar’s political representative while Bolívar fought the South American wars of liberation from Spain. Bello’s reward and further responsibilities included founding the University of Chile and writing the Chilean Civil Code (1855), upon which other Latin American countries modeled their own law codes. His philosophical sources went beyond Scotland to France, but his published works show a strong debt to Reid and Stewart in particular.

Undoubtedly, the most enduring outcomes of the Scottish Enlightenment have taken physical form, whether the buildings of the Adam brothers, the portraits of Raeburn, the books of Burns, or the editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Preeminent among these, however, are the philosophical writings of Hume and Smith. In the former case, the tribute from Immanuel Kant that Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” encapsulates the extent of Hume’s intellectual influence over the ensuing 200 years. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations has been definitive in the ways outlined above, and due importance has been increasingly attached to his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) as a tool for understanding his economic theory. Many other writings of the Scottish Enlightenment have historical significance for the development of science and philosophy, most notably Hutton’s Theory of the Earth and Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), but the prize for continuing engagement with the best minds of the 21st century must go to Hume and Smith.