The context of Scottish natural jurisprudence

One of the notable achievements of recent scholarship on moral and political thought in eighteenth-century Scotland has been a recognition of the importance of the early modern natural rights tradition for what has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment. The manner in which the natural rights theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke were received, adapted, criticised, and transformed has been narrated and interpreted from different points of view.

It has become increasingly evident, in part as a consequence of this scholarship, in part as a result of research into the history of Scottish universities, that natural jurisprudence constituted an integral part of the moral philosophy curriculum at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen (only St Andrews was the exception) from the 1690s to the late eighteenth century (Emerson 1972, 1995; Sher 1985, 1990;Wood 1993). Gershom Carmichael, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid at Glasgow; William Law, William Scott, John Pringle, and James Balfour at Edinburgh; and George Turnbull and David Verner at Aberdeen all lectured on natural rights theories. What led these professors, university councils, and noble patrons to conclude that students should be instructed in the literature and language of natural rights?

In the post-revolutionary world of the 1690s, there was the compelling practical political consideration that university students, the future political leaders of Scottish society, be made aware of the errors and dangers of pre-revolutionary political thought. In the natural rights theories of Grotius, Pufendorf, and, especially, Locke, students would find erroneous political theories – patriarchalism, the divine right of kings, indefeasible hereditary right – examined, analysed, and confuted.