In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

In the first of two chapters devoted to the ways in which philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment used ‘conjectural’ or ‘stadial’ history to re-think the development of human society, Aaron Garrett examines the epistemic problems which stimulated their enquiries. Confronting questions in legal history which could not be answered on the principles of positive or natural law, the jurist Lord Kames had recourse first to human nature then to contextual historical developments (such as the rise of commerce) to enable him to bridge gaps in the evidence with empirical and explanatory ‘conjectures’. Kames further drew on Hume’s discussion of time as a psychological experience of a succession of ideas, which carried the implication that the times of history might be experienced in multiple forms. This implication is clarified by a comparison with the strictly chronological conception of time adopted by Adam Anderson in his history of commerce, which fitted every development of note into the same unitary Biblical time scheme. The point of stadial history, by contrast, was to compare societies at different levels, or ‘stages’, of development according to their own time schemes. By pluralising time, the Scots made it possible to envisage multiple histories of human origins, religious belief and social development.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

This chapter juxtaposes This Too a Philosophy of History with Herder’s treatises On the Origin of Language and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul to specify the specific targets and the theoretical foundations of his radical criticisms directed at European societies and morality in the 1770s. It also explores his alternative account of moral psychology and modern moral virtue. A fundamental continuity exists between Herder’s writings of the 1760s and the Treatise as far as Herder’s views on human nature, morality, and sociability are concerned. The significant changes include Herder’s embrace of Ferguson’s account of the unsocial sociability of tribal groups, and his claim that Providence had foreseen that mankind would be reunified at a higher mental level thanks to the process of Bildung. Herder’s ridicule of modern liberty, ‘love of mankind’ and linear moral progress in This Too should not be seen as a full-scale rejection of these values; rather, he cautioned against modern self-complacency and ethical and political blind spots. In This Too, Herder emphatically drew attention to historical forms of human sociability, whilst he in On the Cognition highlighted human freedom and self-determination as the core of Christian virtue.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most politically influential books to appear in Britain during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810). This was a book that many commentators at the time felt had an impact on the political life of the nation second only to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pasley calls upon Britain to wage an aggressive war of conquest to resist Napoleonic France. The nation must, he contends, build a universal empire as the only bulwark against French conquest of Europe. Although he insists that British conquests will form an empire of liberty, his calls for aggressive military action also seek to remodel Britain itself in relation to far-reaching demands of military security. Considering, in turn, why he was so widely praised as a writer, more a poet than a statesman in Wordsworth’s view, this chapter proposes that Pasley displaced the traditional patriotic functions of the national bard to establish a new kind of national wartime narrative, a sublime liberal epic founded on the nation’s traumatic confrontation with war.

In this chapter, Ryan Patrick Hanley surveys some of the best-known Enlightenment sources of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. He considers in particular the respective influences of René Descartes, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal on the arguments and methodology of Democracy in America. Rather than conceiving of Tocqueville as either pro- or anti-Enlightenment, Hanley argues that we should instead understand Tocqueville as an example of a “Moderate Enlightenment” that eschews the rationalism and materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment.” By way of illustration, Hanley identifies specific affinities between Tocqueville and the moderate Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith.

This chapter explores a variety of philosophical engagements with Cicero in the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to the varied, and at times contradictory, purposes that Cicero might serve. Following an introductory discussion of Cicero and John Locke, the chapter proceeds thematically, turning first to Cicero and eighteenth-century ethics, then to eloquence, civil religion, and law, and finally to Cicero’s status as an exemplar of the active life. In exploring these themes, the chapter deals with the Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley-Cooper, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Adams, James Wilson, and Immanuel Kant.

The conception of the state as having the mission to accomplish the role of regenerating citizens was omnipresent among the actors of the French Revolution, in particular the Jacobins. Elements from this vision inspired by Rousseau permeated the understanding of the role of the government in France, and is present even today. This conception leads to state paternalism. The state will define the opinionst that are worthy of being heard and those that are harmful. The political needs to which the Americans were confronted found their expression in the optimism of Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment. These thinkers express trust in the self-regulating potential of civil society. This conception would legitimize minimal impact of the political order upon the social. The political order and, by extension, the legal order, would be limited to arbitrating the differences that emerge within civil society. These ideas can constitute the prism through which the American conception of freedom of expression can be understood. Today, this conception means minimal regulation of speech by the government. Political correctness is a mode of self-regulation in the spirit of Smith’s thought.

This final chapter considers Burke’s relationship to what may loosely be termed ‘enlightenment thought’ with an emphasis on Scotland. The Scottish thinkers particularly relevant for Burke were the usual suspects, including Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson. Following the work of Isaiah Berlin, Burke is often read as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. But Burke was not the only ‘enlightenment’ luminary to be confounded by the French Revolution. Edward Gibbon was equally appalled, and it eventually disappointed even the likes of Paine and Sieyès as well. This chapter demonstrates that the differences between Burke and Hume were diminished when Burke was freed from partisanship. He now advanced a sceptical defence of party: it was not exclusively the Whigs, but the old Whig and Tory parties alike, which had sustained the British mixed and balanced constitution ‘by their collision and mutual resistance’. This chapter also considers Adam Smith’s thought on party and faction.

In the Introduction to this Critical Guide to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM) we bring to light several reasons for which this book merits attention, and we offer an overview of the chapters. The Guide reveals Hume’s commitment to his earlier principles but also his shift in style and focus. It contributes to a general understanding of Hume’s position in his time, as a typical Enlightenment philosopher with an unorthodox agenda, and in ours, as a thinker whose views are alive in contemporary debates. EPM was Hume’s favorite performance, and this guide supports Hume’s ambition to see EPM receive the attention and study he thought it deserved.

This chapter shows that in the British intellectual tradition, the Scottish moralists, followed by Hume and Smith, saw reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French tradition. Instead of being viewed as something intrinsically negative and self-destructive, such reliance is described – sometimes with the same words – as something positive, contributing to epistemic and moral self-control. The central notions used in the British tradition to describe these positive effects of being dependent on others are “sympathy”, “inner spectator” and “impartial observer”. The chapter also shows that John Stuart Mill adopted the same line of thought by reserving a very positive role for the judgment of others. The chapter also attempts to identify sociopolitical reasons that may explain why such a positive understanding might have prevailed in British culture.

Chapter 12 includes the deeper normative arguments of Burke’s economic theory that come alive in the Reflections. Burke argued that among the real rights of men were the right to industry and the right to acquisition. He further contended that abstract theory overlooked the complexity of circumstance in social life, and that rigid government edicts intended to establish equality in civil society bred social chaos. Social engineering crushed the human soul. More important, I discuss Burke’s emphasis on the limits of transactional exchange in sustaining the growth of civilization. In his view, contracts could produce commercial opulence, but civilizations required pre-transactional bonds of religion, friendship, and manners in order to endure. Man’s moral obligations thus preceded the requirements of voluntary contracts; civilization might persist without commercial vitality, but it could not survive without virtue and chivalry. I also examine Burke’s commentary in Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, in which he provides remarks on the healthy state of the English economy, an Invisible Hand-type phenomenon, and the virtues of limited government, all of which complement his thoughts in Thoughts and Details and the Reflections.

James Wilson, born in Scotland and educated during the Scottish Enlightenment, became one of the most influential jurists and statesmen of the American founding era. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served as an influential delegate to the Constitutional Convention, became one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and was the first law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As a framer, jurist and educator, he consistently argued for recognizing the sovereignty of the people themselves, which he believed was a central component of a God-given natural law. Many of Wilson’s views that were innovative or controversial at the time – such as the concepts of popular sovereignty, one person-one vote, and the power of the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional laws – have become important elements of modern American government.