In Our Time - The Enlightenment in Scotland

Episode Date: December 5, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. In 1696 the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aitkenhead, claimed theology was "a rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense". He was hanged for his trouble - just one victim of a repressive religious society called the Scottish Kirk. Yet within 60 years Scotland was transformed by the ideas sweeping the continent in what we call the Enlightenment. This Scottish Enlightenment emerged on a broad front. From philosophy to farming it championed empiricism, questioned religion and debated reason. It was crowned by the philosophical brilliance of David Hume and by Adam Smith – the father of modern economics. But what led to this ‘Scottish Miracle’, was it an indigenous phenomenon or did it depend on influence from abroad? It profoundly influenced the American revolutionaries and the British Empire, but what legacy does it have for Scotland today?With Professor Tom Devine, Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen; Karen O’Brien, Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Warwick; Alexander Broadie, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1696, the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aikenhead, aged 18, claimed that theology was, quote, a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense, unquote. He was hanged.

Just one victim of a repressive religious society called a Scottish Kirk. Yet, within 50 years, Scotland was transformed, by the ideas sweeping the continent in what we call the Enlightenment. This Scottish Enlightenment emerged on a broad front, from philosophy to farming, it championed empiricism, question religion, and debated reason. It was crowned by the philosophical brilliance of David Hume and by Adam Smith, the father of modern economics.

But what led to this Scottish miracle? Was it an indigenous phenomenon, or did it depend on influence from abroad? It profoundly influenced the American Revolutionaries and the British Empire, but what legacy does it have for Scotland? Scotland today. With me, to discuss the Scottish Enlightenment at Professor Tom Devine, director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen,

and author of the Scottish Nation, Karen O'Brien, reader in English and American Literature at the University of Warwick, and Alexander Brody, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, and author of the Scottish Enlightenment. Tom Devine, can you give us a broad definition of the Scottish Enlightenment? I think the markers of the Enlightenment were the extraordinary range of achievement, I mean, as you've indicated yourself, Melvin, already, everything from geology through to philosophy, everything from poetry through to painting, and also the fact that it's aligned with the great economic transformation of the time.

The second thing I think which is absolutely typical is the sheer quality of the achievement. It's not simply range, it's in-depth brilliance, because some of the superstars of the 18th century belong to this particular movement. And the final thing, I think, is there's almost a kind of set of changes in values among the elites and the middling elements,

or at least some of the middling elements in Scotland in the 18th century, there's a kind of rejection of past authority. There's a wish to think for themselves. If you like, there's a new tolerance of civilised discourse. And that is perhaps not only cause but also effect of the process as a whole. That's an excellent summary. Can I just sort of expand it a little bit?

First of all, can you just give us some idea of what it came from? I know you want to go into this in more detail later. the Kirk. I've talked about the hanging of this boy in 16, 96, 18-year-old boy, even though he was contrite, even though he was of good family and so on Christmas Eve as well. And then the next year, six so-called witches were hung in Paisley,

and then after you've got that. So that's wanting that leap. And secondly, some idea of the names, because the names are extraordinary. We've mentioned David Hume and Adam Smith, but you in your book have mentioned a great number more, and I think it will surprise many people. So could we have those two? Well, I mean, if you go back to your first point, believe I or not up until very recently

there was a view that this great celebration of intellect was deeply rooted in the Union of 1707 it was almost as if the English civilising influence had been brought to bear in a kind of archaic and semi-barbaric country to the north I think most current thinking would actually push the so-called in quote-mark's origins of the Scottish Enlightenment

way back in time not only simply into the 17th century but even perhaps further back into Renaissance and Reformation times. So once we get to talk about origins, I think we'll have to take that kind of long time scale and also a kind of territorial sweep because there are very important relationships going on

with, if you like, the European Citadel's of Excellence again going very much further back in time. But if you come on to the individuals, it is really a galaxy of great names. I mean, in addition to those you have mentioned, John Miller, who was almost certainly one of the serious moulders of what we now call sociology. Adam Smith, clearly the father of modern economics. If you go to the more practical area, James Watt, fashioning if you like out of the existing technology of the steam engine,

the separate condenser adjustments, which produced in a sense the power source of the Industrial Revolution. the fact that in the agricultural area Scotland by about 1800 had become recognised as a European Centre of Excellence such that individuals from France and Holland were coming across to study the new means so you know it's it's the depth in the range and of course also the great names

that have really come down to us what I would say however in addition to that is that we've got to be aware of you like of over-celebrating the enlightenment in Scotland because there were limitations as well Karen O'Brien, Tom has given us a good summary there, but already, as it were, brought up one of the issues in terms of origins, which is perhaps the most, not vexed, but one of the most interesting to talk about.

How far did the Union with England in 1707, in your view, help, spur, trigger, inform the Scottish Enlightenment? How big an influence was it? Well, I think I would, to some extent, disagree with Professor Devine in the sense that I think that the union had a big but delayed influence, and one of the consequences of the union was a series of rebellions culminating in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie. And I think for many of the Enlighteners,

the experience of that invasion from the highlands of living in Edinburgh and seeing Edinburgh taken over by Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops, joining companies of volunteers, seeing the too easy defeat of the British troops just south of Edinburgh, was deeply formative. think it led them to reconsider the terms on which the union between England and Scotland would have to be renegotiated. And I think to this extent, the way that I see the Scottish Enlightenment is certainly something which had deep roots in Scottish Calvinist and other intellectual traditions, but which also was a cultural project engaged in rethinking the

relationship between England and Scotland. And the way that I would see this is not in terms of a kind of anglicising of Scottish culture, although that would clearly be one aspect of the Scottish Enlighten, but actually a new kind of partnership between England and Scotland. Yes, to some extent the Scottish Enlighteners were anglicisers. They very consciously wrote in a highly polished, correct English. They were very worried about what they called Scottishisms in their prose and spoken English, and they tried to make standard English a shared language between England and Scotland, and this was ignoring the fact that Scotland in the 18th century was a multicultural, multilingual society. At the same time, a great deal of Scottish Enlightenment work was about

constructing a paradigm of historical progress, analysing history by saying that history moves, has moved in, certainly in Europe from a period of feudalism, religious intolerance, and military patriotism to a period of commercialism, modernity and cosmopolitanism. Now, that is an analysis, but it's also a prescription. It's a prescription for Scotland, but it's also a prescription for England, for Britain and for the British Empire. And in a way what the Scottish Enlightenment was saying was that we have an Enlightenment and it's time that England had one too. Also I would say that within that paradigm of progress,

the Scottish Enlighteners were concerned also to preserve and celebrate the indigenous aspects of Scottish culture, those features of Scotland which they regarded as distinctive Scotland's traditions of independence, of communal loyalty, of very high standards of education. and I think that they thought that they could bring about a fusion of these elements within a unified Britain. So I would tend to emphasise the union aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment. How far you, what emphasis would you give? Again, Tom Devine, in his summary gave us a lot of leads for this discussion. What emphasis would you give to influence from what we might call for the purposes of this discussion

are the European countries, most notably France, but also Holland, of course, the link with the University of Leideners on. Well, I'd give considerable emphasis to that, and I would say in some ways that Europeanism is an indigenous feature of Scottish culture and had been for a very long time. So we're actually talking about a long indigenous tradition of links with the continent. In the 18th century, the new component was certainly the influence of the French Enlightenment. And at the point when the Scottish Enlightenment is getting going in the late 1740s, early 1750s, there is in Scotland this tremendous sense of excitement about the amazing new developments in France. Adam Smith and a number of his friends get together and they produce a new rather short-lived journal

called the Edinburgh Review in the late 1750s and at the end of this journal Adam Smith writes a letter in which he describes some of the things that are going on in France he praises Voltaire, he praises in quotes Russo, he praises Montesquieu, and he talks at great length about the encyclopedia the great French dictionary of the arts and sciences which was then just starting to come out

and the encyclopedia was really the idea behind encyclopedia was a new synthesis and accessible model of knowledge, which would enable a wider public to put knowledges about humanity, about technical matters to practical use. And I think he was very excited by that practical aspect of enlightenment. It was also, as I understand it, rather subversive. Certainly very subversive, and Adam Smith was very aware of the conditions of censorship

under which the French Enlightenment operated. Having said that, I think a key difference between the French Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment would be that Scottish Enlighteners were institutional players and French Enlighteners were more in the mode of alienated intellectuals and that is certainly a dissimilarity between them. Alexander Brody, to try to bring together then some notion of the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment, I know it's not easy to do it briefly in conversational terms, but let's try. Can we weigh the Indigenous with the influence, the sudden influence from outside, as it were?

To start with the question of the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, I would say that overwhelmingly one has to look for the origins within Scotland itself. And there's a long, long tradition of Scottish scholars going to Europe for their education and then coming back to Scotland to work in the universities. And one thinks of some of the really significant scientific achievements of the Scots prior to the Scottish Enlightenment. For example, there was Thomas Sejut, who was a close friend of both Galileo and of Kepler. There was Wedderburn, who was a friend of both of these.

One finds tremendously significant advances made by Scots in science in the 16th century and then the 17th. One thinks of John Napier and his logarithms and the Slygel, for example. and the reason I mention these examples is that they indicate two things. One of them is that Scotland saw itself as a European country, so Scots could get an education in Europe as well as in Scotland. And also, this is the second point, that there was a long tradition of Scottish science, so that when we come to look at the achievements of Scottish science during the Enlightenment,

this was a period when Scottish scientists were world beaters, we can see that they are continuing a long tradition and this is not coming from nowhere neither is it coming from England it's coming from a tradition within Scotland itself so the ideas of Locke the inventions of Newton you think they brought less than the encyclopedists

and so on the ideas of Locke and of Newton were crucial of course so were the ideas of other peoples but this was we're talking in as regards 18th century of a time when almost everybody thought of himself or herself as a Newtonian, the experimental method of reasoning which they thought originated with Newton was applied by everybody to almost everything. In that sense, of course, there was certainly most important

influence coming north from England. So when do you think these things fuse? When did you begin to think of itself as, look, we've got something here. There are a lot of us doing it on a high level. We're on a high level. We're on to do. to something. The classic period of the Scottish Enlightenment is usually taken us from say the early 1740s to about the early 1730s to about the early 1790s. You know in terms of the publication in terms of a lot of the activity that's going on, the infrastructure of the Enlightenment, the clubs and societies, the heyday of the seriously important universities, that's the kind of classical period. I think they may long and in your terms, when did the really

realise something was going on. I think one of the best indicators of this is the external response because it's in this very period, the latter part of it, that Voltaire himself indicates that there's something very special happening in Scotland.

And commentators like that, of course, he being one of the most famous of them, if not the most famous, were beginning to recognise the thing because Alex Brody already said the very important tap roots, the interrelationships with Europe. I mean, it still seems to me to be quite extraordinary in reflection

that between its foundation and the Reformation, the great University of Paris and at least a dozen Scottish rectors. So it's not simply a fact that these people are going abroad for study, they're also making an impact. And one of the things about the Scottish Enlightenment in the mid-18th century is Scottish thought is beginning to have a similar effect, not simply in ways which we might discover in the political sense, but it's actually beginning to affect the European intellectual agenda.

Can I ask us just briefly to give the listeners an idea of what ideas, what began to provide in the 1740s? You, first Alexander. I think the first really major event of the Scottish Enlightenment was the publication of David Hume's treatise of human nature. This was a philosophy which David Hube himself described as a sceptical philosophy. the impact was not a popular impact, hardly ever anybody read the book, but the philosophers read the book and some of Hume's friends, non-philosophers, read this book. And this had an impact insofar as it set in motion an alternative philosophy, which gradually came to dominate the universities of Scotland and gradually spread forth to France.

and to Germany and to the United States of America, the philosophy in question was a common sense philosophy, a school which developed, which started to work hard in Aberdeen from the early 1740s, and was led by Thomas Reed, who produced a series of masterpieces, three masterpieces, all of them, very, very heavily anti-humian. That's the negative side,

but also positively producing a philosophy. of common sense. That was distinctive. That was characteristic. Briefly, Alexander, can you just define common sense philosophy? Common sense, as used in the phrase common sense philosophy, is rather a technical term. And it refers to a number of principles that all human beings have. Let's say that it's a belief system that we have in order to be human. So just as you can give an account of human beings biologically, we've all got two arms and two legs and twice. We've also got certain beliefs about the world.

For example, that the thoughts and pains and so on that I'm conscious of really do exist, that there is a continuing mind which I have through time, that there is an external world, that wherever there is action, there is an agent performing the act, wherever there are qualities, there are substances that have these qualities. These are all things that we don't learn from experience, but that we bring to bear on experience, as a result of which we have the objectively valid experiences that we do. These things which seem, in an ordinary sense, to be perfectly good, common sense,

are asserted because it was understood that Hume himself denied these things, and so they've got to be reformulated. And what one has to remember here is that Hume, the sceptical philosopher, was not the father of any school of philosophy, but Thomas Reed was the father of a school of philosophy that was international. Karen O'Brien, could you come in on this when it, as it were, begins to know itself

and exchange ideas for and against because both sorts of the positive, the thesis and the antithesis are equally important in what's going, and Hume and Reed and so on. Can you give us an idea, and then we can move forward forward to the ideas of an achievement?

Yes, I think I would agree with that point that the Enlightenment begins to know itself in a sense when it generates reaction. And I think an enlightenment and an encounter Enlightenment are embedded in the whole process from the very beginning. And this vigorous dialogue that Alexander mentioned

between human read is only a part of it. I think that a good example of this would be the Abidonian philosopher James Beatty. He was a professor of moral philosophy. He reacted very strongly against what he saw as the moral skepticism and the dangerous atheism of Hume's philosophy and he published a treatise on truth.

He came down to London in the 17th and 70s. He was lionised and Joshua Reynolds painted a picture of him standing in his academic robes with Voltaire and Hume being kind of squashed down by an angel into a far corner of the painting. So I think that certainly on the London side of things the English started to become aware of the Enlightenment through a process of reaction and counter-reaction

and the story would be the same in America, a dynamic of reaction and counter-reaction, which ensured that Scottish Enlightenment ideas were vigorously debated and contested from their very inception. Before we go south of the border or even east or west of the country of Scotland, that just depend a little more time. The central debates around the idea of human nature, as has been indicated by Alexander. Tom, what we're finding here? Well, I mean, the conversation is obviously necessarily concentrating at this point on the philosophical endeavours.

but what I would want to say is that this is part of a much wider process of cultural change, of social change and economic change. But it's also a process of where there's a deeply conservative element. I think earlier on it was mentioned this signal difference between French, the French Enlighteners and the Scottish Enlighteners. The Scottish Enlighteners are deeply politically conservative. They accept the political realities of the time. And it's this kind of paradox that in a sense they are, you know,

intellectually in the vanguard, but they accept something which perhaps to the 19th century mind would not be unacceptable. For example, if you take the Scottish political process, only 0.2% of the Scottish population had a vote at the time of the Enlightenment. But people like Adam Smith don't see anything wrong with this because they believe that property is a necessary base, if you like, for entering the political arena.

And one of the things about Scotland is it doesn't, experience the kind of developments that France did in the later 18th century, for example, the French Revolution. And one factor in that is this kind of philosophical background. There is no real inheritance in late 18th century Scotland of a sustained critique of the existing system, a direct sustained critique of the existing system of political order. I'll bring Karen in here, and then I'll come back to your time. So we've got to occur. It's a useful starting point to bring him that boy in 1696 and a burning of.

the witches, with a clamp of ideas on a small, obviously very powerful, small country. Not much later, what is the sort of, what's the idea shift? Can you just describe to people what the idea shift was? So it's not that anymore, that's the ruling and controlling idea. It's, is it reason alone? Is it the idea of reason? It certainly isn't the idea of reason, and this is one of the ironies. If the French Enlightenment was about reason, the Scottish Enlightenment was about understanding

how the irrational aspect, of man, his passions, his economic self-interest could actually lead to a wider social good. But I think to develop what Tom was saying, in other ways, yes, the Scottish Enlighteners were socially conservative, but I think from another point of view, you could say they were progressive from the point of view of their day. They had seen, in their own lifetime, the tremendous economic takeoff in Scotland, and they'd seen the capacity of trade, commerce, the transatlating trade in particular to widen citizenship, to widen people's participation in society. And they saw commerce not as a means to votes to political rights, but to a wider sense of

participation in the social order. And commerce is something, trading is something that people do because they act out of their own self-interest, they act out of their irrational desires to consume and to produce. And the Scottish Enlightenment was deeply engaged in analysing those economic processes and optimistic about the possibilities of those process for a wider sense of citizenship and what they would have called personal liberty, not perhaps political liberty, but personal liberty. Alexander Brod, I'm fascinated because you can, there's how did ideas that coming from a few men and one obviously accepts that their geniuses, but so I'll put my question a little bit earlier,

it was clumsy. How did they spread so rapidly and so deeply into the minds of people working in so many different areas? Well, there were two conduits. First of all, there were the universities themselves. One's got to remember that overwhelmingly, the major contributors, overwhelmingly, not totally, the major contributors to the Scottish Enlightenment were the professors and the ministers

and the lawyers. The ministers, that's interesting. The ministers, the ministers were very important. The point about the professors and the ministers was that they had captive audiences. The professors spoke to their students, developed their ideas, almost all the writings that have come down to us by Thomas Reed, are lecture notes and developments of lecture notes. And these students became the educated middle classes, and they had the ideas, they accepted them because it was so well argued.

Secondly, the ministers, well, they had their pulpit, and they spoke to their congregation every Sunday. And so, for example, to introduce some flesh and blood here instead of abstractions, there was Hugh Blair, who as well as being the first professor of rhetoric and belletre in the University of Edinburgh, was also the minister at the High Kirk of St. Jowles in Edinburgh. And so he had the theory which he told to the students during the week, and he proceeded to practice that theory. The sermons, which are the practice, were published, and these were bestsellers. And these are interesting because these are not heavy theology.

These are really rather philosophical, social documents in which he develops a moral philosophy, ideas about morality, that would actually be fully acceptable to hum the so-called atheists. That's very important. Right. Tom Devine, in a few minutes we've left, let's talk briefly about the flow of ideas into the British Empire and then into America. Briefly about the British Empire and see if we can spend more about time we've got in America. Right. Well, I mean, the first of all you've got to recognise the historical basis of this, and that is the remarkable flows of people from Scotland.

Not simply from Scotland, from the descendants of the Scots who had settled in Ireland, the so-called Scots Irish or Ulster Scots, because they're very important as well in this story, because most of the elites of that group were educated at the universities we've just described in Scotland. Very high levels of out migration, but importantly in the 18th century as far as the empire is concerned and then the developing USA is that a disproportionate number of that immigrant group were people from the middling ranks in society

who if you like exported some of these ideas as part of the intellectual baggage. And when you look at the position in North American particular, which of course in this period was the salient part of the British Empire, then you find that North American medicine, colonial medicine, most of the major and developing institutions of higher education in North America. The Kirk, a whole variety of other, you know, the developing, if you like, the developing colonial infrastructure is not only dominated by Scots,

but it's increasingly dominated by Scots ideas. Let's go back to America, Karen. The Declaration of Independence in 1776, is that, can that be traced back at all to the Scottish Enlightenment? It's often said that it can because Jefferson was educated by an Aberdonian professor at the College of William and Mary. And I think the idea, I mean, the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident, the idea of self-act, that men are created equal. That idea of self-evidence is a distinctively reading idea that there are some ideas that we just have in our minds, intuitively, things that we just know, and ideas that we can use and develop for the general good of society.

So I think certainly the Declaration of Independence, perhaps even more saliently though, Madison, James Madison, the architect of the federal constitution, he was educated by John Witherspoon, a Scottish Enlightener of sorts at what subsequently became Princeton. And many of the ideas embedded in the federal constitution and the way in which Madison justify the federal constitution are very close to Scottish Enlightenment ideas and very much derived from Hume. And fundamentally, these have to do with thinking about, how can you bring together a Republican culture and an expanding commercial culture and how can you make it work?

Would you like to add to that, Alexander Brady, about the influence on America? Just one detail, and that is that the Scottish historians of the 18th century were very popular in the United States, none more so than William Robertson, who wrote a history of America that was hugely popular in America itself. There was an edition, a student edition, that was published by John Frost with examination questions at the end and was used in most of the colleges. And the point about that is that Robertson was thought to be good for America, that he had certain fundamental ideas that were driving him to do with civic virtue, a Christianized form of civic virtue that was thought to be of just the kind of ideology that America needed. Well, I'd hope to get back to Scotland today, but we haven't got there. Another time, there's plenty of time. Thank you all very much.

Alexander Brodie, Tom Devine and Karen, Brian, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.