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Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

Page 71

by Roy Porter


  56 For Ireland, see W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1972); Constantia Maxwell, Dublin under the Georges, 1714–1830 (1946); Roy Foster (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1991); David Dickson, New Foundations (1987); Mary Pollard, Dublin's Trade in Books 1550–1800 (1990); Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History (1990).

  57 Theobald Wolfe Tone, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (sn, 1791); see Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord (1997); Foster, The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, pp. 180–84. See below, chapter 20.

  58 For general developments, see T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (1969); Charles Camic, Experience And Enlightenment (1983); R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment (1994); T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (1999), pp. 64f.

  59 On the universities, see George Davie, The Democratic Intellect (1961); Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (1904); Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (1985); Roger L. Emerson, Professors, Patronage and Politics (1992); Paul B. Wood, The Aberdeen Enlightenment (1993). For the literary tradition, see David Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680–1830 (1961).

  60 For the important new idea of ‘civil society’, see Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1994); John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse (1987).

  61 There is a balanced discussion in David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (1993), p. 18. For the Scottish Enlightenment in general, see Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (1976), and The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian Society (1986); Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (1997); Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (1997); David Daiches, The Scottish Enlightenment (1986); Nicholas Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’ (1981), ‘Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’ (1973), and ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth Century Province’ (1974); Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (1970); R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (eds.), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (1982); Jane Rendall, The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment (1978).

  62 A. Allardyce (ed.), Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, from the MSS of John Ramsay (1888), vol. i, pp. 6–7, quoted in Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 18. ‘It is well known that between 1723 and 1740… [the] writings of Locke and Clarke, of Butler and Berkeley, presented a wide and interesting field of inquiry’: John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, quoted in Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (1972), p. 60.

  63 Quoted by Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’ (1967), p. 1649, from Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (1854–60), vol. i, p. 551. Trevor-Roper himself subscribes to the Victorian view that the Scottish Enlightenment should largely be seen as a massive rejection of traditional Calvinism.

  64 Janet Adam Smith, ‘Some Eighteenth-century Ideas of Scotland’ (1970), p. 108.

  65 John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (1992), p. 234.

  66 J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Letters of David Hume (1932), vol. ii, p. 310.

  67 Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (1981), p. 534; Smith, ‘Some Eighteenth-century Ideas of Scotland’, p. 108.

  68 Quoted in Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 12. Hume, of course, did not think it was one bit strange, exclaiming: ‘This is the historical age and we are the historical people’: see the discussion in David Daiches, Robert Burns (1952), p. 2.

  69 Forbes, Beattie and His Friends; Selwyn Alfred Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (1960).

  70 John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire (1995).

  71 See, for instance, Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000, pp. 105–23.

  72 Chapman, Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, p. 51; see Claire Lamont, ‘Dr Johnson, the Scottish Highlander, and the Scottish Enlightenment’ (1989).

  73 Michael Hunter, ‘Aikenhead The Atheist’ (1992).

  74 Kames denied the reality of free will while claiming God had given man the illusion of it: Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751), p. 147. He later abandoned the doctrine of the fallacious sense of liberty and became a frank necessitarian. See Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, p. 152; Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, p. 13; Gladys Bryson, Man and Society (1968), p. 54.

  75 On the Moderates, see Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment; Ian D. L. Clark, ‘From Protest to Reaction’ (1970).

  76 Brian Hepworth, The Rise of Romanticism (1978), p. 233; Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, p. 20.

  77 For Robertson as historian, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. ii, section 4.

  78 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, p. 12. Approximately the same circulation as an English provincial newspaper.

  79 David Dunbar McElroy, Scotland's Age of Improvement (1969); Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, p. 26; Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day, p. 67.

  80 ‘Of Luxury’ (1741–2), later retitled ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in David Hume, Selected Essays (1993), p. 169: see Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury (1994), p. 143.

  81 John Clive, ‘The Social Background of the Scottish Renaissance’ (1970), p. 227; Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment.

  82 Peter Jones, ‘The Scottish Professoriate and the Polite Academy’ (1983).

  83 Adam Smith in the Edinburgh Review, quoted in Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, p. 177. The Review spoke of Scotland as being ‘in a state of early youth, guided and supported by the more mature strength of her kindred country’: see the discussion in Daiches, Robert Burns, p. 28.

  84 Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680–1830, p. 52.

  85 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 97; David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (1965); William C. Lehmann, Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (1930). See also Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. ii, section 6. Ferguson is discussed further in chapter 17.

  86 Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, ch. 3.

  87 See Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue (1983); Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (1996). For Smith's Wealth of Nations, see chapter 17.

  88 A key figure in the neo-Harringtonian lineage, Fletcher had argued in the immediate pre-Union years the cause of a Scottish form of civic virtue, to be preserved by safeguarding an autonomous parliament and militia: Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire, and Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (1997).

  89 For a general discussion of Hume and politics, see above, chapter 8. For the proverbial Sparta, see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969); Berry, The Idea of Luxury. For Hume's undermining of traditional Scottish patriotic history, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past (1993), ch. 9.

  90 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1978 [1739–40]), p. 273; Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science’ of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment (1989), and (ed.), Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (1988). The discussion following takes elements of the broad account of Hume's case for modernization, already set out in chapter 8, and applies them specifically to the Scottish debate.

  91 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 169.

  92 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, p. 157.

  93 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 161.

  94 Hume, Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 170; cf. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, pp. 144–5.

  95 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 163.

  96 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Sele
cted Essays, p. 175.

  97 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 176.

  98 Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1741-2), in Selected Essays, pp. 133–54.

  99 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 169.

  100 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 170.

  101 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977), p. 60; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, p. 331; see Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1750 [1748]), bk XX, ch. 1.

  102 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 172.

  103 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, pp. 157f.

  104 Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, pp. 223-274, and ‘Of Commerce’ in Selected Essays, p.157

  105 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 159.

  106 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 162.

  107 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 487–8.

  108 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 160.

  109 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’ (1758 [1741]), in Selected Essays, p. 56.

  110 Hume, ‘Of Interest’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, p. 180.

  111 Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays, p. 67.

  112 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. xx–xxi.

  113 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 157.

  114 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Selected Essays, p. 174.

  115 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 417, 437.

  116 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, pp. 154–67.

  117 Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Selected Essays, p. 160.

  118 For Kames, see Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774); Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day; William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment (1971); for the law, see David Lieberman, ‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society’ (1983), and The Province of Legislation Determined (1989); Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989), p 15.

  Another subscriber to similar stadial notions was the historian William Robertson. As he put it in his The History of America (1777), ‘In every inquiry concerning the operations of men when united together in society, the first object of attention should be their mode of subsistence. Accordingly as that varies, their laws and policy must be different’: Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1975), p. 2; see also Karen O'Brien, ‘Between Enlightenment and Stadial Theory’ (1994); Ronald L. Meek, ‘Smith, Turgot and the Four Stages Theory’ (1971); Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, ch. 5.

  119 Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 101. Kames's enlightened optimism about human nature was attacked by Samuel Johnson. Of the Sketches of the History of Man (1774), Johnson observed:

  in this book it is maintained that virtue is natural to man, and that if we would but consult our own hearts we should be virtuous. Now after consulting our own hearts all we can, and with all the helps we have, we find how few of us are virtuous. This is saying a thing which all mankind know not to be true.

  Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii, p. 353.

  120 Quoted in Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined, p. 149.

  121 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Historical Law Tracts, 3rd edn (1776), vol. i, pp. 30–31; Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 101; Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p. 102.

  122 Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, p. 208.

  123 Kames, Historical Law Tracts, vol. i, p. 77.

  124 Kames, Historical Law Tracts, vol. i, p. 78.

  125 Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 163.

  126 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. ii, p. 320.

  127 Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), pp. 107–8, quoted in Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 104. Wordsworth was later to grumble: ‘A Scotch Professor cannot write three minutes together upon the Nature of Man, but he must be dabbling with his savage state, with his agricultural state, his Hunter state &c &c’: Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 30. Stadial theories were also satirized by Peacock. In Crotchet Castle (1831), Mr MacQuedy is the great exponent:

  MR MACQUEDY: Nothing is so easy as to lay down the outlines of perfect society… (Producing a large scroll.) In the infancy of society–’

  THE REV. DR FOLLIOTT: Pray, Mr MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin every thing they write with the ‘infancy of society’?

  MR MACQUEDY: Eh, sir, it is the simplest way to begin at the beginning. ‘In the infancy of society, when government was invented to save a percentage; say two and a half per cent –’

  Garnett, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, p. 686.

  128 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. ii, bk V, ch. 1, p. 715, quoted in Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 104. Smith's views are analysed more fully below in chapter 17.

  129 William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801 (1960), p. 326. For Millar, see the discussion in Michael Ignatieff, John Millar and Individualism’ (1983), and in general Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801.

  130 Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801, p. 125.

  131 Quoted in Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, pp. 100–101. See also Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801, p. 125.

  132 John Millar, Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), p. 4.

  133 Millar, Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, p. 3. Scotland did not have a monopoly on stadial theories; they were for instance deployed by Gibbon: see discussion in J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’ (1985). There was less urgency, however, in the task of applying such theories to explain English history (which was less of an enigma).

  134 Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. x, pp. 32–4, 37; Bryson, Man and Society, p. 87; H. M. Hopfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman’ (1978); Wokler, ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’ (1995). For another aspect of Stewart, see S. Rashid, ‘Dugald Stewart, Baconian Methodology and Political Economy’ (1985); Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. x, pp. 32–4, 37. Stewart was himself a great luminary, as witness Lord John Russell's tribute (1812):

  To nearer worlds the source of life and light,

  To further orbs a guide amid the night

  Each sun, effulgent, fills its radiant throne,

  Gilds other systems, and preserves his own;

  Thus we mark Stewart on his fame reclined,

  Enlighten all the Universe of Mind.

  Quoted in Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian Society, p. 21.

  135 Millar, Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, pp. 94–5. Women, judged Hume and Millar, were a ‘school of manners’. Compare the views of William Alexander on women and society discussed in chapter 14. See also Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 109.

  136 John S. Gibson, ‘How Did the Enlightenment Seem to the Edinburgh Enlightened?’ (1978); Istvan Hont, ‘The “Rich Country–Poor Country” Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy’ (1985).

  137 Bryson, Man and Society, p. 31; Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy, for the Use of Students in the College of Edinburgh, 2nd edn (1773); Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 14–15.

  11 HAPPINESS

  1 Quoted in Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (1988), p. 21.

  2 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4), epistle IV, ll. 1–2, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 536.

  3 Cited in Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792 (1962), pp. 204.
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  4 H. Digby Beste, Personal and Literary Memorials (1829), p. 209. I owe this quotation to Michael Neve.

  5 For the Greeks, see A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (1970); H. North, Sophrosyne (1966); Peter Quennell, The Pursuit of Happiness (1988), pp. 167–9.

  6 For Renaissance attitudes, see Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man (1947); J. B. Bamborough, The Littlle World of Man (1952); W. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (1963); M. M. Rabelais and His World (1968).

  7 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), PP. 35–45; Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment (1987).

  8 See Alasdair Maclntyre, A Short History of Ethics (1966); Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Even Christian theology, Bentham later noted, did not fundamentally decry happiness; that was to be attained, however, only upon the heavenly-reunion of the soul with its Maker.

 

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