Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

The Scottish and French Enlightenments are arguably the two intellectual movements of the eighteenth century that were most influential in shaping the modern age. The essays in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment explore a wide range of topics of historical relevance to eighteenth-century scholars, while engaging students with broad interdisciplinary interests in the humanities and social sciences. The ways in which Scottish philosophy influenced French painting, how the Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the French Revolution, the impact of Macpherson's Ossian on the development of French Romanticism, the moral education of children, the relation between reflection and perception in the arts and in moral life, humankind's relationship to other animals, and the links between violence and imagination, fear and sanity, are only some of the topics covered. This challenging selection of essays comparing Scottish and French enlightenment views of natural history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, history, and art history complicates and enriches the notion of Enlightenment, and will inaugurate a new field of Franco-Scottish studies.

Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.

"Despite the profusion of work in recent decades on Irish and English politics in the French revolutionary era, Scotland in this period remains largely neglected, barely featuring in some recent books ostensibly on the history of Britain. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from Britain and Ireland, will help fill this gap. While not presenting a single, uniform view, several of them at the very least cast doubt on the notion of a Scotland in this period of adamantine stability and begin to recover some powerful dissident voices in the political exchanges of the 1790s. They show that the stability discerned in retrospect by some historians was not what struck most contemporaries who were witness to the successive, often alarming strains and challenges of the period which served cumulatively to shatter any complacency which existed about the terms of elite rule and authority in a society undergoing profound and rapid change."--BOOK JACKET.

Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.