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THE EDGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: IRELAND AND SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2013

IAN MCBRIDE
IAN MCBRIDE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, King's CollegeLondon E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2013 , pp. 135 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 The outstanding exception is Patrick Kelly, some of whose valuable articles are cited below.

2 See in particular Stewart, M. A., “John Smith and the Molesworth circle”, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 2 (1987), 89–102Google Scholar; Moore, James, “The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment”, in Stewart, M. A., ed., Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), 37–59.Google Scholar

3 Livesey, James, “From the Ancient Constitution to Democracy: Transformations in Republicanism in the Eighteenth Century”, in Bartlett, Thomaset al., eds., 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003), 243–78.Google Scholar

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5 Among other articles see Phillipson, N. T., “Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment”, in Stone, Lawrence, ed., The University in Society, 2 vols (London, 1975), 2: 407–48Google Scholar; Phillipson, Nicholas, “The Scottish Enlightenment”, in Porter, R. and Teich, M., eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar And now see also his authoritative Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London, 2010), esp. chap. 4.

6 Robertson, John, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 This expands upon his earlier article, Livesey, James, “The Dublin Society in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Thought”, Historical Journal 47/3 (2004), 615–640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Hont, Istvan, “The Rich Country–Poor Country Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy”, in Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 271–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in his Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (London, 2005), chap. 3.

9 See McBride, Ian, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009)Google Scholar, chap. 8.

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12 Ibid, i, 67.

13 Maxwell, Henry, Reasons Offered for Erecting a Bank in Ireland (Dublin, 1721), 43.Google Scholar Maxwell does mention Davenant three times but not in connection with Ireland; indeed he seems to have accepted “dependency” as a fait accompli.

14 Prior, Thomas, A List of the Absentees of Ireland (Dublin, 1729), 62–3Google Scholar. Browne, John, Seasonable remarks on trade. With some reflections on the advantages that might accrue to Great Britain (Dublin, 1728), 42.Google Scholar

15 James Arbuckle, considered below, remarks in passing that gambling is pernicious to civil society. [Arbuckle, Jameset al.,] A Collection of Letters and Essays on Several Subjects, Lately Published in the Dublin Journal, 2 vols. (London, 1729), 2: 139Google Scholar. Livesey does not mention Hutcheson's, inaugural lecture, De naturali hominum socialitate (Glasgow, 1730)Google Scholar, which does set out his conception of society and, incidentally, employs the term (status or societas civilis) in the orthodox sense discussed below. For a modern edition see Francis Hutcheson: On Human Nature, ed. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge, 1993).

16 Robertson, Case for Enlightenment, 340. In a later chapter on the 1790s Livesey similarly omits Thomas McKenna, the Irish Catholic pamphleteer who most seriously engaged with Scottish political economy.

17 [Arbuckle et al.,] Collection of Letters and Essays. Hutcheson was not, as Livesey states, the author of this work. He contributed six essays (numbers 10–12 and 45–7), out of a total of 102, which have long been recognized as crucial to his philosophical development. Livesey quotes from essays 6 and 20. On Hutcheson's Dublin writings see Moore, , “Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson”, and Brown, Michael's Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–30 (Dublin, 2002)Google Scholar. chap. 4.

18 Livesey cites the 1724 pamphlet in a footnote at 248 but no copy of this work has ever been found. It is not mentioned in the ESTC. The compiler of the most recent bibliography of Catholic works was unable to find it: Fenning, Hugh, “Dublin Imprints of Catholic Interest: 1701–39”, Collectanea Hibernica 39–40 (1998), 130Google Scholar. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Nary's “Case” was not in fact published before its appearance in an appendix to The Impartial History of Ireland (1742).

19 See, for example, The State and Case of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland; or Reasons why they may be allow'd to Purchase, Take Mortgages for their Money. Fee-farm, or other Leases (Dublin, 1723).

20 For Irish-language sources see the work of Morley, Vincent, especially Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–83 (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his recent “Catholic Disaffection and the Oath of Allegiance of 1774”, in Kelly, James, McCafferty, John and McGrath, Charles Ivar, eds., People, Politics and Power: Essays on Irish History 1660–1850 in Honour of James I. McGuire (Dublin, 2009)Google Scholar. For the Continent see Geoghegan, Vincent, “A Jacobite History: The Abbé MacGeoghegan's History of Ireland”, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 6 (1981), 36–55.Google Scholar

21 [Nicholas Plunkett?], “A Light to the Blind”, Book 2, chap. 3, National Library of Ireland, MS. 476 (Fingall MSS), 393–428.

22 The best account is Kelly, Patrick, “‘A Light to the Blind’: The Voice of the Dispossessed Elite in the Generation after the Defeat at Limerick”, IHS 24 (1985), 431–62.Google Scholar

23 [Nicholas Plunkett?], “To the Catholicks of Ireland: A Memorial for the Defence of Their Country, Anno 1703”, NLI, MS. 477 (Fingall MSS), 6.

24 Ibid., 13.

25 [Nicholas Plunkett?], “The Case of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland 1710”, NLS, MS. 477 (Fingall MSS), 1, 3.

26 ‘Light to the Blind”, Book 1, chap. 2, 11–12.

27 Ibid., Book 3, 844.

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29 Phillipson, Adam Smith, 53.

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31 There is an unresolved tension between these two alternatives—between, that is, civil society as a substitute for politics and as a new mode of political accountability.

32 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (1755–6).

33 This is one of only three examples produced by Livesey of Irish texts referring to “civil society”. O'Connor is cited at 180 and again at 206; the others are at 191 and 193.

34 Kaviraj, Sudipta and Khilnani, Sunil, eds., Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, esp. the essays by Antony Black, John Dunn and Fania Oz-Salzberger. See also Taylor, Charles, “Invoking Civil Society”, in Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 202–24.Google Scholar Contrast the clarity with which Finlay, Christopher distinguishes terminology and concepts in “Hume's Theory of Civil Society”, European Journal of Political Theory 3 (2004), 369–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), 1: 47Google Scholar.

36 There is something almost whimsical about a book which argues, for example, that French mystical Catholicism provided Irish Jacobites with an alternative to the “Mandevillian genealogy” of political economy (127) when no evidence is produced to show either that French mystical Catholicism had any impact on Irish thought or that Irish Jacobites developed a political economy.

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