The Scottish Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century
Backhouse, Chp 6
Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Chp 3
Richard F. Teichgraeber, III, Free Trade and Moral Philosophy
That the Scottish Enlightenment ever occurred is one of the marvels of human intellectual progress. In 1707, when the Act of Union joined the Kingdom of Scotland to the to the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland was in every sense a European backwater. The Scottish lowlands, in which lay the two largest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, was probably on an economic par with northern England but lagged far behind southern, especially southeastern, England. The Highlands were poor and wild. Still ruled by clan chieftains, who in reality were more like mafia godfathers than paternalistic heads of true families, the Highlands produced barely enough to feed the people who lived there. The Scottish – now British – king, James I, ruled the Highlands through the clan chieftains and often incited the clans against one another to accomplish his goals.
Scotland had four universities in 1707: in Glasgow, in St. Andrews, in Edinburgh, and in Aberdeen. The Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews dated back to the late Middle Ages, while the University of Edinburgh and Marischal and King’s Colleges in Aberdeen were recently founded. Despite their small size – in the second quarter of the 18th century the University of Glasgow had about 400 students and the University of Edinburgh 600 – they were centers of international learning, drawing students from across Protestant Europe, England, and Ulster. The universities were tied closely to the Scottish Kirk, the Presbyterian Kirk of John Knox, which had an immense impact on the formation of modern Scotland.
The Presbyterianism of John Knox was strict – some would say harsh – Calvinism. Humans were depraved from birth, warped by the effects of original sin. Only the grace of God enabled any to do good, and only those individuals predestined to salvation before the creation of the world would experience eternity in Heaven. Because sin affects all aspects of life, including intellectual, economic, and political life, people had to be subject to the rule by those trained in, and dedicated to following, God’s Word. In the old-line Kirk, personal freedom was not promoted.
Ironically, this hyper-Calvinist view of the nature of humans was fairly well matched by the Hobbesian view. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, “the classic treatise that founded modern analytical philosophy” (as it says on the cover of my copy), argued that in the “original state of nature” humans were selfish, aggressive, acquisitive, and, on the whole, antisocial. If a society were to succeed and flourish, if social organization were to progress and wealth accumulate, then order would need to be imposed from above. Thus, Hobbes provided the intellectual underpinnings for authoritarian reign by a monarch. Personal freedom played no greater role in Hobbes’s secular vision of the world than it did in Knox’s religious vision.
Even before the turn of the 18th century, some ministers in the Scottish Kirk began to argue that the traditional tone struck by ministers was too negative. These men were not turning from the Bible or rejecting orthodox Reformed Christianity, much less God. Rather, they were concerned about the harsh, condemnatory tone heard throughout the Kirk, and some were beginning to question certain Calvinist doctrines, such as predestination, which other branches of Protestantism had never accepted. Moderate Presbyterian minister, dubbed followers of the “New Light,” began to make their views heard in the presbyteries – and in the universities, setting off a long and contentious battle for intellectual supremacy between the traditionalists and the moderates.
When the great Gershom Carmichael, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, retired, a battle ensued over who would be his successor. Although the traditionalists seemed to have the upper hand, the intervention of a powerful Scottish politician led in 1729 to the appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy of a moderate, an Ulster Scot and graduate of the University of Glasgow: Francis Hutcheson. The Scottish Enlightenment was about to begin.
Hutcheson’s System
Hutcheson was troubled by the implications of the hard-core Calvinists but equally troubled by the implications of Hobbes’s thought. Both preached “depravity” of a sort, with the implication that successful society demanded an authoritarian government: either godly discipline by the church or an absolute state. Hutcheson sought a middle way. He found it in the natural law jurisprudence of Carmichael.
Carmichael drew his thinking largely from the German jurist Samuel von Pufendorf, who drew his inspiration from the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. Both asked, “What is a human being, when stripped of culture and social context (including religion)?” Pufendorf had argued that man carries with him the spark of divine reason, enabling him to grasp nature’s governing laws. He also argued that individuals had rights – to life and property – and obligations – to obey laws, including moral laws.
Another important influence on Hutcheson was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury. A first-rate political philosopher in his own right, Shaftesbury believed in individual freedom and had supported the “bloodless revolution” of 1688, in which William and Mary took over the English throne, establishing the House of Hanover as the royal family.
From Carmichael Hutcheson drew a deep commitment to political liberty. From Shaftesbury he drew a commitment to “politeness,” a sophisticated culture, including its “keen sense of understanding, its flourishing art and literature, its self-confidence, its regard for truth and the importance of intellectual criticism, and most important, an appreciation of the humane side of our character.” The motto of those following Shaftesbury’s philosophy was “love, serve.”
Hutcheson argued, against the Hobbesians and the hard-line Calvinists, that man has a “moral sense” much like the five physical senses. Through this moral sense a person is led to behave altruistically, doing things that benefit others without directly benefiting the actor. “A moral judgment … was not a matter of philosophical enlightenment, but the product of an intuitive response to a particular property in an observed action. … It followed from these views that virtue was not a matter of wisdom or enlightened self-love, but instead a function of our natural sociability” (Teichgraeber, 36). In contradistinction to the view that humans are asocial or antisocial beings, Hutcheson’s moral-sense theory “led to the view that man was inherently sociable, not separate and self-dependent” (p. 37).
The most important fact for our purposes is that Adam Smith studied under Francis Hutcheson. Thus, elements of Smith’s understanding of the world were drawn from Hutcheson’s ideas. In particular, Hutcheson passed along to Smith the belief that individuals relate to one another largely on the basis of “sentiments” – i.e., feelings or emotions – rather than on the basis of calculated reason. Smith would argue, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, that individuals guide their own behavior on the basis of what they believe others will think of them.
In summary, Hutcheson denied the primacy of reason in social relations. His ideological messages were three: