INTRODUCTION

In 1954 A. L. Macfie gave a lecture to the revived Scottish Economic Society on the subject of the 'Scottish Tradition in Economic Thought', which has produced a considerable debate. While it seems doubtful that a tradition can be identified, there is ample evidence of a particular Scottish approach to the study of the social or moral sciences in the eighteenth century, which laid great stress on socio-economic aspects. In particular, Macfie noted the emphasis on the history of civil society, a procedure which has been neatly described by Donald Winch as involving 'the pursuit of the origins and development of civil society from rudeness to refinement by means of a form of history in which universal psychological principles and socio-economic circumstances played twin illuminating roles'.

The impact of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (1748) has been noted by numerous commentators. For example, Terence Hutchison has confirmed that ‘the great significance of L’Esprit des lois for the development of political economy in the eighteenth century, and after, lay in its fundamental methodological approach, which is especially important in Scotland’. A second major influence on Scottish writers at the time is represented by Isaac Newton, whose ideas were disseminated much earlier than was at one time supposed.

THE BROAD PICTURE

Hippolyte Taine relates the following story: on an autumn morning in 1811, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, newly appointed professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, is strolling along the banks of the Seine, thinking over the content of his teaching. He is dissatisfied with the philosophy of Condillac and his followers, the Idéologues, which seems to him too sceptical and materialistic. He happens to pass a bookshop where a title catches his eye: Recherches sur l'entendement humain d'après les principes du sens commun, par le docteur Thomas Reid (the first translation, published in 1768, of Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense). He opens the book, reads a few pages and his mind is filled with light. Taine concludes: 'He had just bought and founded the new French philosophy.' Among Royer-Collard's first students was Victor Cousin, , dedicatee of Sir William Hamilton’s The Works of Thomas Reid.

This anecdote might be too nice to be true – in fact, Thomas Reid was already known to the French – but we can draw a lesson from it. When we study the impact or influence of one nation upon another, of one philosophical tradition upon another, we cannot ignore the various accidents and circumstances which intervene in the causal connections of a sequence of events. We have to consider the role played by translations (and the ability of the translator), the reception given by philosophical or literary journals, the import of the message in such and such intellectual contexts, the position of people, the pliability of doctrines, the ability of a philosopher to assimilate a new idea or a new way of ideas, and so on.

The Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable intellectual flourish that lasted for much of the eighteenth century, was an event of great importance for western culture. During it scientific, economic, philosophical and other advances were made which had an immediate impact in Europe, America and beyond, and the impact is still felt. The seminal writings of the time are discussed by scholars who return to them in search of insights that can then be put to work in ongoing debates. Hence, though there is an antiquarian interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, interest in it is by no means solely antiquarian, as witness the numerous references we find to Hume, Smith, Reid and other Enlightenment thinkers in present-day discussions of contemporary issues. In this book the historical circumstances of the Scottish Enlightenment will be described; and thereafter attention is focused on the leading ideas, without however losing sight of the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment is a historical event located in a set of historical circumstances that were essential to the movement's birth and growth. Attention is also focused on the highly social nature of the movement. The writers were held together by bonds of friendship; they argued and debated with each other, and created many clubs and societies designed to facilitate discussion. This aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is a crucial feature of it, and will be duly noted in the following pages. But these historical and social considerations would hardly hold our attention if it were not for the brilliant ideas that were the products of all this high-level clubbing.

INTRODUCTION

To a modern readership the leading, and most provocative, figure writing in the philosophy of religion in eighteenth-century Scotland was David Hume. To Scots contemporaries too he was no doubt the most provocative, but he was far from leading. They sought to minimise his impact and played down his significance, and in the short term they succeeded. This was less because they had other major players than because the main traditions of thought ranged against Hume could count on enough broad support within their respective spheres to counteract a challenge that was not seen at the time particularly to tax their wits. If posterity has been less sure that they were entitled to be so complacent, it is important to be clear where the strength of opinion at the time actually lay. Accordingly, this chapter falls into three parts. The first explores the state of the subject before Hume wrote, distinguishing between an orthodox tradition for which theology was the primary science that could dictate terms of reference to philosophy, and a new, largely imported (English and Dutch), tradition of 'rational' religion that subjected the whole framework of religious belief to the same rational critique as other forms of knowledge and belief. Within the universities, this was part of a recognised adjustment of interests between divinity and arts faculties, but outside academia it generated bitter conflicts between conservative and progressive parties in the Kirk.

HUTCHESON AND MORAL SENSE

Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith were the main Scottish participants in the British debate on the foundations of morals. Here their moral theories will be outlined as three rival systems, and then Thomas Reid's critical attitude towards their theories will be discussed.

Francis Hutcheson (1694 1746) was the first Scottish philosopher to approach the problem of the foundations of morals in an original way. His strategy was to construct a unitary doctrine drawing both on Lord Shaftesbury's teachings on the relation between natural affection and morality, and on Locke's new empirical epistemology. In response to Hobbes's theory that human nature is fundamentally selfish and anti-social, Shaftesbury had argued that God provided human nature with a number of generous forms of affection, from family affection to a love for mankind, that naturally predispose men to live together. Human beings are also provided with a natural capacity to feel attraction to these affections and a dislike for the contrary ones. In Shaftesbury's works it is not clear whether moral distinctions derive from reason or sentiment, an omission that Hutcheson was to remedy.

From Locke, Hutcheson took the doctrine that men lack innate ideas, and that they derive their complex ideas of things and actions from experience, compounding, enlarging and abstracting from simple original ideas.

Over the past half century or so, there has been an outpouring of literature on the many ways in which Scottish thinkers influenced America in the period of the founding. For social and cultural historians, this literature has meant a deeper understanding of the 'outlying provinces' of the British Empire; for historians of ideas, it has meant a better understanding of the reception of Scottish thought in its time; and for political theorists, it has inspired a reinterpretation of the political vision represented by the founding of the American republic.

As a political philosopher, I am primarily interested in this last project. The Scottish influence has been used to counter an earlier picture of the founders, according to which they were putting into practice the natural-rights theories, and concomitant radical individualism, to be found in Hobbes and Locke. So the debate between the Scottish and the Hobbesian-Lockean view of the founders is part of a larger controversy over whether the political philosophy expressed in the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution is primarily a ‘liberal’ or a ‘civic republican’ one. Like most scholars who attend to the role of the Scots, I agree that the Hobbes-Locke picture, still very common in schools and popular literature, is badly misleading.

During the past thirty years the role of the natural sciences and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment has been hotly debated. Elaborating on the interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment advanced by Nicholas Phillipson, John Christie argued in a series of influential essays that the pursuit of natural knowledge was one of the 'major elements whose combination formed the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment'. Stronger claims for the importance of science and medicine were subsequently made by Roger L. Emerson, who contended that if we are properly to understand the origins and defining characteristics of the Scottish Enlightenment then we must see the cultivation of natural knowledge as being central to enlightened culture in eighteenth-century Scotland. On the other hand, following the lead of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), John Robertson recently insisted that the Scottish Enlightenment should be defined in terms of a core of related enquiries in moral philosophy, history and political economy, and that the natural sciences and medicine were peripheral to the intellectual preoccupations of enlightened savants in Scotland and in the Atlantic world more generally. Richard Sher likewise rejects Emerson's claims, and suggests that the Scottish Enlightenment can be more fruitfully defined in terms of the 'culture of the literati' which, for Sher, encompassed science and medicine but was not rooted in these fields. While it would be inappropriate here to enter into the complexities of this debate, we should recognise that the points at issue are far from trivial because they raise serious questions not only about how we characterise the Enlightenment as an historical phenomenon but also about how we conceptualise the genesis of our own world.

INTRODUCTION

Scepticism has taken many forms in the history of European thought. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, there were four different versions that were especially significant, two of which were of ancient origin. The first was Pyrrhonian scepticism. It was taken to claim that we have no evidence for any proposition, because any proposition may be contradicted by another proposition of equal probability. Pyrrhonism so understood leads to the suspense of judgement. The second form of scepticism derived from Academic scepticism. The members of the so-called ‘New Academy’ had argued against Pyrrhonism that scepticism cannot be founded on the claim that there are contradictory propositions of equal probability; rather, it is the result of the fact that we can never overcome deception with certainty. The threat of deception, however, did not exclude, for them, the possibility that some judgements are more probable than others: indeed, they thought that we could not live our lives without accepting at least some judgements as being warranted. Thirdly, in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Descartes introduced the idea of methodological doubt as a means to overcome doubts and uncertainties. Descartes argued that knowledge of ourselves was the most fundamental kind of knowledge, and that only things we perceive as clearly and distinctly as the cogito (‘I think, therefore I exist’) can count as true knowledge. A fourth kind of scepticism is related to John Locke, who rejected much of Cartesian metaphysics and especially the concept of innate ideas that was inherent in it. Locke claimed that the faculties of our understanding are very limited indeed.

Scotland's singular voice within the polyphony of the European Enlightenment has attracted a great deal of debate. As historians attempt to weigh local varieties of Enlightenment, informed by disparate religious, political and cultural settings, against the transnational concerns and cosmopolitan aspirations of 'the' Enlightenment, Scotland posits a remarkable case in point. Scotland's European contexts have often been overlooked; by the same token, its distinct features can only be mapped against the contours of the European Enlightenment. David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, John Millar and Adam Ferguson were subtle disciples of European intellectual traditions, and conversant with a range of Enlightenment cultures. At the same time, their writings convey a powerful sense of Scotland's incomparable position as a kingdom within the British union, set apart by its church and jurisprudence, and by its singular decision to trade sovereignty for empire. Nowhere is this apparent tension more pronounced than in the field of political theory.

POLITICS AND THE SCOTS

Taken as a field of enquiry, politics is a conjuncture of mind-sets responding to contemporary political issues, critical perusals of intellectual traditions and cross-fermentation with other sciences. The balance between these elements may differ according to era and culture; but eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers were able to draw vigorously on all three sources of inspiration. Their political thought was accordingly shaped by three sets of problems: Scotland’s voluntary loss of sovereignty in an age when statehood and statecraft steadily gained importance; the need for a viable modern theory of politics amid clashing idioms of the good life and the good polity; and the tall order set by the natural sciences for standards of certainty, regularity and predictability in the study of human affairs.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN

In a number of thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment – David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and others less well known – the philosophical analysis of human nature and the 'empirical' analysis of human societies, human history and the natural world merged in a distinctive synthesis that led to the rise of the human and social sciences. This was not the only eighteenth-century mixture of philosophy with history and anthropology; some equally famous fusions are Gibbon's 'philosophical history' (which was influenced by Hume and Smith), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalit é parmi les hommes (both of which were influences on the later Scottish Enlightenment). Yet the combination brewed in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, though akin in important ways to these works, was also quite distinctive.

One aspect of the manner in which Scottish authors analysed human nature has come to be called ‘conjectural history’. Dugald Stewart coined the term‘conjectural history’ to describe the methodology adopted by Adam Smith in ‘Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages’ and by Hume in the Natural History of Religion.

It is a striking fact that while Scottish philosophy of the eighteenth century is studied to the point of being a major academic industry, Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century is not only neglected but virtually unknown. Hume, Reid and Hutcheson are names familiar to almost all philosophers; Hamilton, Ferrier and Bain to hardly any. Evidence for this sharp contrast between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy lies in this startling statistic: the Philosopher's Index currently lists over 4,000 publications relating to the first three names, fewer than 40 relating to the next three.

Why should this be the case? Why should one period of Scottish philosophy be so perennially interesting and intensively studied and that which followed it have fallen so completely into oblivion? In this chapter I aim to offer a partial answer to this question, an answer couched in terms of the story of Scottish philosophy itself. The nineteenth century, I shall argue, saw the unravelling of the great philosophical project that had animated the eighteenth.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the itinerant pianists working in the whorehouses, gambling dens, bars and lumber camps of the American South played in a style known as barrelhouse. Blues, gospel and boogie-woogie piano styles all emerged from barrelhouse and so to understand the roots of these styles it is to the early days of barrelhouse that we must turn. The “race” recording industry was not underway until the 1920s and so the only sources that we have for studying the pianists of the pre-recording era are the occasional piano roll and the written and recorded recollections of a younger generation of “piano professors.” Therefore this chapter can only recount a partial history, trying to draw together fragments of a much deeper culture into something coherent. This I have done by examining the playing techniques that unite and separate these interwoven styles, their genesis, transformation and cross-genre transplantation that has so informed the development of popular music through the twentieth century.

The early rural and urban barrelhouses, juke joints and honky-tonks were bars where entertainers sporting exotic-sounding stage names such as Papa Lord God, No Leg Kenny and Drive' Em Down would play on “honkytonk” sounding pianos. Some pianists only played barrelhouse blues in their performances, others would combine blues with ragtime, popular songs and classical pieces. These piano “crushers” or “pounders” had to make themselves heard over the noise of the bar often at the expense of accuracy and certainly without much in the way of formal technique. Combined with the function of providing dance music, these conditions helped to form an aesthetic that was quite unique.

The human voice is like a thumb print, aurally and spectrally identifiable. The extraordinarily affecting voices of gospel and blues singers have, in their recordings, given us access to those singers' deepest emotions and, in so doing, allowed us to glimpse their individual and common struggles for dignity and freedom in an often terrifyingly hostile environment. Unlike other instruments, the voice emanates from and is played inside the body. In this respect it is unique. Contemporary understanding of “voice” must therefore incorporate the connection between the personality, physicality, spirituality, individual experience and social history of each singer. For the listener, description of these singers' vocal production is fraught with difficulties not least because the plethora of interpretations reflect individual singers' personal expression, as well as their commonality of experience in African American culture and society pre- and post-slavery. My own responses to this work emerge from my love of these musics and singers, and are subject also to my own cultural understanding and experience as both listener and singer/teacher. There are so many elements to “voice” that this brief chapter may only scratch the surface of the many extraordinary vocal performances in these genres. Each individual “voice” has its own story, its own personal history. I have focused on particular singers and examples in an attempt to raise some of the aspects of these relationships, personally, stylistically and in the context of their culture and society, but the voices I omit are by no means less important. Their omission is due to constraints of space and does not represent any aesthetic judgment on my own part.