Character Self And Sociability In The Scottish Enlightenment

An interdisciplinary examination of the Enlightenment character and its broader significance. Whilst the main focus of the book is the Scottish Enlightenment, contributors also employ a transatlantic scope by considering parallel developments in Europe, and America.

An interdisciplinary examination of the Enlightenment character and its broader significance. Whilst the main focus of the book is the Scottish Enlightenment, contributors also employ a transatlantic scope by considering parallel developments in Europe, and America.

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.

The eighteenth century is often described as the age of reason. This book argues that it should also be considered the age of the passions. Eighteenth-century writers recognised the passions as the springs of human life and actions. They began to explore self-interest, sociability and love in ways that would have momentous consequences for the development of western culture. The century's philosophes did not merely acknowledge the existence of the passions; they sought to manipulate them for the good of society. When carefully cultivated, self-interest led to prudent behaviour and national improvement; sociability contributed to inter-group harmony and national identity; the powerful attraction between the sexes metamorphosed into politeness and altruism. This book explores the eighteenth-century language of the passions in its specifically Scottish context, suggesting that Scottish writers such as Allan Ramsay, James Fordyce and James Macpherson were cultural pioneers whose significance goes far beyond the transitory popularity of the literary products they created. It also examines thinkers like Adam Smith and John Millar from a radically different perspective. And it constructs new connections between the philosophy, social thought, sermons, letters, poetry and epic literature of enlightened Scottish society. The Scottish contribution to modern consciousness was nothing short of profound. The Scots brought the passions into the centre of discourse, so they could no longer be ignored, only exploited or repressed.

Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.

Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind recasts the cultivation of a democratic intellect in the late Scottish Enlightenment. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change between 1772 and 1828. Stewart was a childof the Scottish Enlightenment, who inherited the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy from the tuition of Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid. But the Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture of his youth changed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Stewartsustained the Scottish school of philosophy by transforming how it was taught as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His elementary system of moral education fostered an empire of the mind in the universal pursuit of happiness. The democratization of Stewart's didacticEnlightenment--the instruction of moral improvement--in a globalizing, interconnected nineteenth-century knowledge economy is examined in this book.

Presents major new research on gender in the Scottish EnlightenmentWhat role did gender play in the Scottish Enlightenment? Combining intellectual and cultural history, this book explores how men and women experienced the Scottish Enlightenment. It examines Scotland in a European context, investigating ideologies of gender and cultural practices among the urban elites of Scotland in the 18th century.The book provides an in-depth analysis of men's construction and performance of masculinity in intellectual clubs, taverns and through the violent ritual of the duel. Women are important actors in this story, and the book presents an analysis of women's contribution to Scottish Enlightenment culture, and it asks why there were no Scottish bluestockings.

Upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduates and scholars working specifically on the Scottish Enlightenment and early modern political and economic thought more generally.