Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy in our accent and Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in these Circumstances, we shou'd really be the People most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe?68

  However, to draw rigid distinctions between the English and Scottish enlightened traditions is anachronistic, largely because such a delineation merely reflects later nationalisms. In philosophy, moral and natural science, the common ground between those north and south of the Tweed outweighs the contrasts. English and Scottish thinkers were in constant dialogue, be it Francis Hutcheson absorbing Shaftesbury so as to rebut Mandeville, or the long-running materialism dispute between Joseph Priestley and Thomas Reid, James Beattie and the other ‘Common Sense’ philosophers.69 Given a shared tongue and shared readerships, it is hardly surprising that the traditions fed off each other. A swelling tide of English students attended Edinburgh University after 1750, while many leading Scots, like Hume, Smith and Smollett, passed a part of their careers in England, or even further afield. Being cosmopolitan counted for much with the enlightened Scot.

  Whatever its ingredients, the catalyst of the Scottish Enlightenment is clear. In 1707, the nation's élite traded in political independence for a Union with England which promised better economic times,70 and then went on to reject the Jacobite calls to arms. By the time of the battle of Culloden (16 April 1746), the Union was visibly bearing socio-economic fruit, 71 which left Samuel Johnson astonished when visiting the Highlands (that ‘Nation just rising from barbarity’) in the 1770s:

  There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general… We came thither too late to see what we expected… a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and the reverence for their chiefs abated.72

  Remarkable developments attended the post-Union decades. Early on, power struggles erupted in an embattled Kirk dominated since 1688 by Calvinist doctrinaires in the Covenanting mould. In 1696 an Edinburgh teenager, Thomas Aikenhead, was convicted of blasphemy and put to death, and witches were still being executed.73 From 1714 John Simpson, professor of theology at Glasgow, was harassed for heresy; Archibald Campbell, professor of church history at St Andrews, was also charged with heresy, in 1736, for his A Discourse Proving that the Apostles were No Enthusiasts (1730); and so were Francis Hutcheson in 1738, William Leechman, professor of divinity at Glasgow, in 1744, and David Hume in 1756. Lord Kames was subjected to attacks from zealots for the deterministic philosophy expressed in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751),74 while the Revd John Home came under attack for writing a stage play.

  The Kirk's hardline leadership was, however, in the course of time successfully challenged by the ‘Moderates’, eager to temper faith with reason and modern learning.75 In the end the Moderate cause predominated, as is evident in the illustrious careers of its leading lights, the Revd Hugh Blair and the Revd William Robertson. The Edinburgh-educated Blair showed his colours by publishing a favourable review of Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy in the first Edinburgh Review, which praised his treatment of morality, if taking issue with his excessively aesthetic view of benevolence. Between 1776 and 1788, Blair occupied the newly created position of professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Edinburgh, bringing out his influential Lectures (1783), which praised the Spectator and even endorsed the novel as a literary form. If Blair won greatest public acclaim at the time for his defence of Ossian, he was lastingly remembered for his Latitudinarian sermons, which also made him rich – he was the first Edinburgh cleric to own a carriage.76 Robertson for his part became, with Hume and Gibbon, one of the great triumvirate of British Enlightenment historians, publishing his History of Scotland in 1759, his History of the Emperor Charles V in 1769 and his History of America in 1777.77 Becoming principal of Edinburgh University and then leader of the Moderates in the Church of Scotland, he was appointed moderator of the General Assembly in 1763 – evidence of how far the Church of Scotland had by then liberalized itself.

  After the Union, culture advanced on a broad front. Newspapers emerged, such as the Edinburgh Evening Courant, Ruddiman's Weekly Mercury, the Scots Magazine and the Caledonian Mercury (which boasted a circulation of 1,400 by 1739).78 Clubs and improvement societies also sprang up. The Easy Club met from 1712 under the poet Allan Ramsay, significantly to read the Spectator. The Mirror Club did much the same, while the Select Society (1754–64), of which Adam Smith was a founder member, was a debating club for men of rank.79 The Honourable Society for the Improvement in the Knowledge of Agriculture (1723–45) also catered for the élite. ‘The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become,’ commented Hume on the role of such voluntary associations:

  They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or breeding… Particular clubs and societies are every where formed: Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace… Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together, by an indissoluble chain.80

  The success of such clubs in bringing gentlemen together was especially crucial as, unlike England, Scotland had never had a corps of professional writers. As late as the 1730s, noted Dugald Stewart, the trade of authorship was unknown in Scotland – there was no Edinburgh Grub Street – and it was gentlemen, lawyers, divines, academics and doctors who did the writing in the ‘Athens of the North’.81

  Meanwhile, the universities themselves were modernizing. In particular, at Edinburgh and Glasgow the old regenting system (in which the professor was forced to act like a schoolmaster, teaching everything) gave way to specialized professorships.82 Despite nepotistic tendencies, the universities housed a galaxy of talent, philosophical, scientific and medical, and many eminent works followed from within and without the academy.

  In 1754, the original Edinburgh Review was founded by a band of literati including Blair and Smith. Though it survived for only two numbers – evidently it was precocious to the point of prematurity – it provided a pointer to the future. ‘This country which is just beginning to attempt figuring in the learned world,’ remarked Smith in the second and final number, ‘produces as yet so few works of reputation, that it is scarce possible a paper which criticizes upon them chiefly, should interest the public for any considerable time.’ The priority lay in absorbing Continental works and, in order to set an example, Smith embarked on an account of the Encyclopédie, no less.83 Regarding it as its mission to regularize Scottish writing, the Review censured ‘vulgarity’ of language; the uphill ‘progress in knowledge’ in north Britain, explained the preface to the first number, arose from the ‘difficulty of a proper expression’ in a country lacking a refined standard of writing.84

  With polarities thus staring them in the face – between lively England and languishing Scotland, but also between the advancing Lowlands and the backward Highlands – Scottish thinkers could hardly avoid producing theoretical models highlighting social contrast and change. Perhaps the most ambitious emerged from one of the rare Highlander protagonists, Adam Ferguson, a man whose careers propitiously spanned those of soldier, clergyman and professor. His An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) analysed the moral and material headway of nations towards commercial society, notably in two historical discussions of social development – ‘Of the History of Rude Nations’ and ‘Of the History of Policy and Arts’. The last three parts – ‘Of Consequences that Result from the Advancement of Civil and Commercial Arts’, ‘Of the Decline of Nations’ and ‘Of Corruption and Political Slavery’ – presented, as the tides make clear, historico-moral cost – benefit analyses of the transition to mode
rnity.85 Offering a conspectus on developments ‘from rudeness to civilization’, his diagnosis of the problems of advanced commercial society voiced civic humanist disquiet regarding Scottish attempts to pursue economic development while remaining virtuous. Born on the borderline of primitive and advanced societies in a nation seeking a new kind of commercial and constitutional liberty, Ferguson was deeply engaged with Scottish problems, even if his Essay discussed backward economies without ever naming the Highlands, commercialization without dwelling on England and the State without alluding to the Union. The big issue was the place – or replaceability – of traditional civic virtue in the modern state. Would not modernization sap vital traditions of martial and civic spirit and in the end undermine liberty? Surely the price of affluence would be too high?86

  The Essay engaged in tacit dialogue with David Hume, who demurred from Ferguson while, like him, silently mapping Scotland old and new on to a broader historical canvas. Hume conducted his own comparison of polities ancient and modern, by addressing the contrast between Sparta (for which read medieval Scotland) and modern commercial society.87 As the exemplar of a free society, Sparta had long been celebrated by Scottish ‘Commonwealthmen’ from Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun88 to Ferguson, but Hume torpedoed the anti-luxury case for Spartan virtue: trade, he held, spelt not corruption but civility, peace and progress.89 Countering the old glorification of Spartan valour, recently boosted by Rousseau's Discours on the arts and sciences (1750), he subverted the civic humanist tradition which prized the landed warrior as the cornerstone of a free society. Essaying a ‘science of man’ derived from ‘cautious observation of human life’,90 Hume held that warrior states like Sparta were both undesirable and obsolete, whereas the ‘ages of refinement’ brought by modern commerce were ‘both the happiest and most virtuous’.91

  Hume set the ‘arts of luxury’ in historical context. His initial phase – soon to reappear as Adam Smith's first state of society – was the ‘savage state’, a subsistence economy devoted to hunting and fishing. Thereafter societies went on to pursue agriculture, which in time could support ‘superfluous hands’, free to apply themselves to the arts. With many acquiring the ‘opportunity of receiving enjoyments with which they would otherwise have been unacquainted’, well-being spread.92

  Sparta stood out as the stark exception to such developments – indeed, as the perfect model of ‘classical’ virtue, it had been held up as a moral reproach to lesser nations. What had happened in Sparta was that its extra hands had been devoted not to economic but to military activity. A tension evidently existed between the ‘greatness of the state’ (its military machine) and the ‘happiness of the subject’.93

  Ages of luxury were happier, their happiness consisting in three ingredients: ‘indolence’, ‘action’ and ‘pleasure’ – this last being clearly linked with action, for action invigorated the mind, thereby satisfying natural appetites and inhibiting unnatural ones.94 In praising action Hume was, however, celebrating not Cicero's preoccupation with the res publica – involvement in affairs of state – but the private pursuit of ‘industry’. People were roused to activity or industry by the desire for a more ‘splendid way of life’ and for the ‘pleasures of luxury’.95 These had been despised by classical moralists and Christians alike because they pandered to the gratification of bodily desires, but Hume dissociated himself from such reproaches and praised ‘innocent’ luxury; only monks and others ‘disordered by the frenzies of enthusiasm’ could denounce innocuous things like good food or clothing. Indeed Hume counterargued that the refinement of pleasure which luxury brought actually spelt a reduction in coarse indulgence – it was the barbarian hordes who were the gluttons, not the courtiers of Versailles with their ‘refinements of cookery’. Moralistic attacks on ‘excess’ in modern commercial society were thus off-beam.96

  Whereas savage nations like Sparta remained lacking in social graces and humanity, the advent of industry unleashed progressive forces. ‘Every art and science’ was improved, ‘profound ignorance’ was banished and the ‘pleasures of the mind as well as those of body’ cultivated.97 Hume rebutted the trite moralistic castigation of urban corruption, that supposed sink of debauchery which lured innocent peasants off the land. Underpinning that hackneyed antipathy to the urban was the Harringtonian model, upheld by Ferguson, of the virtuous citizen with plough and sword. For Hume the consummate Modern, by contrast, civilization, civility and the civic life were of a piece;98 sociability and humanity encouraged ‘laws, order, police, discipline’; and it was in ‘polished’ ages that ‘industry, knowledge and humanity were interlinked by an indissoluble chain’.99

  Sparta's kings put warfare before welfare. For Hume, however, ‘humanity’ itself demanded that tempers and manners be ‘softened’, 100 echoing ‘the doctrine of the doux commerce’ spelt out by Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (1748).101 One sign of that desirable softening of manners was that modern wars had become less ‘brutal’, while, over time, courage – that virtue supreme in uncultivated nations – had also been played down. Such a softening, soothed Hume, did not mean a collapse into effeminacy – the might of contemporary France and England clearly proved that ‘luxury’ did not lead to military decrepitude!102

  Hume paraded his positive alternative to the Spartan ideal of the ‘strict moralists’, the ‘modern’ notion of liberty, a view soon to be more fully elucidated by his friend Adam Smith. Spartan society had been stymied by its rigid polarization, divided between helots and ‘the soldiers or gentlemen’.103 One desirable consequence of the growth of luxury lay in the ending of such crude divisions. Slavery was ‘disadvantageous’ to happiness, whereas in a commercial society the population at large would be happy, as all its members would ‘reap the benefit of these commodities’.104

  Hume clinched his case with an appeal to the science of man. Sparta was exceptional, ‘violent and contrary to the more natural and usual course of things’ – impossible, had it not actually existed!105 Modern states should not – indeed could not – return to that way of being: Sparta was a world we had luckily lost. The notion of a modern city as a ‘fortified camp’ with its inhabitants fired with a ‘passion for the public good’106 hardly rang true, for ‘our strongest attention is confin'd to ourselves’.107 Governments must manage subjects by those feelings that truly moved them – they must ‘animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury’.108

  For Hume, avarice, that bête noire of the ‘severe moralists’, was, paradoxically, the ‘spur’ to ‘civil Liberty’109 and to that ‘exercise and employment’ for which ‘there is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable’.110 Avarice operated ‘at all times, in all places and upon all persons’111 – a universality significant for the Humean science of man which looked to ‘principles as universal as possible’.112 Hence understanding of politics must not be based upon freaks like Sparta, rated ‘a prodigy’ by everyone ‘who has considered human nature’.113

  It would require, suggested Hume, in a telltale choice of words, ‘a miraculous transformation’ to rid mankind of vice.114 Magistrates must handle men as they are, and play off one vice against others less prejudicial to society. Government could not impose the ‘good life’ by fiat. Rather, since human nature was fixed, a ruler had to channel the passions constructively, to promote well-being. Sparta had got it wrong: ‘industry and arts and trade’, properly understood, would increase ‘the power of the sovereign’; but such an increase should not, as in the case of Spartan militarism, be bought at the cost of ‘the happiness of the subjects’.115

  Whereas a commercial nation was potent, observed the enlightened philosopher, the non-trading society was going nowhere: soldiers were at bottom ignorant, insolent and idle. A civilized nation, because of its other attributes, would constitute an effective military power, not least because, in a rich nation, an army could be raised through taxes.116

  Above all, commercial society was progressive, argued Hume, alludin
g to ‘the great advantage of England above any nation at present in the world’. This success consisted not simply in possessing a ‘multitude of mechanical arts’ but in the ‘great number of persons to whose share the productions of these arts fall’, for ‘every person if possible ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour’. The equitable spreading of benefits harmonized with human nature.117 All in all, the enlightened science of man taught a clear lesson: Scotland should anglicize herself as swiftly as possible.

  Hume thus blew the trumpet for the modern: Scotland should not copy Sparta, nostalgia was wasted on that imagined community. Time had moved on, partly because of the human impulse for improvement. Unlike Ferguson, and even to some degree Adam Smith, for whom modernization brought harm as well as gain, Hume was fully optimistic about the direction of social change.

  Such assumptions became inscribed in the model of an unfolding plan of history, driven by a spring. It became a characteristic of post-1750 thinking, particularly in Scotland, to hold that societies almost necessarily passed through a series of stages, with all elements of their development – economic, moral, legal, cultural and political – symbiotically interacting. One for whom such a model became second nature was Hume's kinsman Henry Home, Lord Kames.118 After producing his early Essay on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751) – a work ruled dangerous by the Kirk – that judge and inexhaustible speculator on the human condition turned, in his Historical Law-Tracts (1758), to a history of the origin and development of law, concluding in 1774 with the expansive Sketches of the History of Man, a 4-volume anthropology of morals which traces the historical development of all manner of social institutions.119