The Scottish Enlightenment And Early Victorian English Society

Originally published in 1986, this book creates a vivid portrait of the interaction of Scottish ideas and early Victorian English society over 50 years, illuminated by detail and substantial in its range. The book delineates certain ideas of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment and the education that purveyed them. It considers those who taught and received that learning and how it was taken to England. There, through the mediation of politicians, lawyers, economists, doctors and others, the intellectual life of later 18th Century Scotland had a profound impact on many areas of historical development in early 19th Century England. The book concentrates on the influence of Scottish social thought and medical practice, high Whig politics and political economy, as well as the professional experience and socio-cultural significance of Scottish-trained physicians.

This is a reassessment of the moral and theological foundations of modern Europe. It challenges a number of deeply rooted assumptions about the basis of both Scottish culture and of Enlightenments in general. It argues that the formidable dual influences of humanism and Calvinism forced a discussion about the essentially moral function of scholarship and learning to the very centre of intellectual debate in early modern Scotland, and that this in turn led to the growth of an "e;enlightened"e; community amongst the Scottish literati. As such, the text is a direct challenge to conventional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment as an unanticipated, short-lived explosion of ideas.

Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period maps the intellectual formation of English plebeian radicalism and Scottish philosophic Whiggism over the long eighteenth century and examines their associated strategies of critical engagement with the cultural, social and political crises of the early nineteenth century. It is a story of the making of a wider British public sphere out of the agendas and discourses of the radical and liberal publics that both shaped and responded to them. When juxtaposed, these competing intellectual formations illustrate two important expressions of cultural politics in the Romantic period, as well as the peculiar overlapping of national cultural histories that contributed to the ideological conflict over the public meaning of Britain's industrial modernity. Alex Benchimol's study provides an original contribution to recent scholarship in Romantic period studies centred around the public sphere, recovering the contemporary debates and national cultural histories that together made up a significant part of the ideological landscape of the British public sphere in the early nineteenth century.

An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland is a political and intellectual biography of Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), historian, social critic, criminal lawyer, and sheriff of Lanarkshire. The first author to examine the full range of Alison's writings and activities, Michael Michie reveals a significant link between the Scottish Enlightenment and Victorian conservatism. Michie argues that Alison's conservative ideas were deeply influenced by the social and political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. He contends that Alison was the embodiment of the High Tory appropriation of the legacy of Adam Smith particularly evident in the belief that commercial agrarian capitalist society was the most appropriate form for both the maintenance of order and the practice of virtue. Developing the suggestion that a conservative interpretation of the enlightened legacy was possible for the succeeding century, Michie's study offers a useful corrective to the received wisdom that Victorian Liberalism was the true heir of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This book explores the ways in which intellectual and cultural publics from the early modern period to the postmodern present have actively constructed their cultural identities within the social processes of modernity. It brings together some of the most compelling recent writing on the public sphere by scholars in the fields of literary history, cultural studies and social theory from both sides of the Atlantic. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a major re-examination of recent scholarship on the theory of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas. They also stand as a collective effort both to interrogate and to extend this influential model by exploring modern forms of intellectual and cultural activity in all their rich diversity and ideological complexity. Contributions range from the divided inheritance of Shakespeare publishing history to the new forms of mass-mediated cultural experience in contemporary Britain; from attempts at cultural regulation in the literary public sphere of the Romantic period to the postmodern political conflict played out in the American public sphere of the 1990s; and from varieties of religious dissent to modes of postcolonial criticism. The book furthers the dialogue between academic methodologies, fields and periods, and presents readers with a contested narrative of the key cultural and intellectual practices that have made up our modern world.

Bringing together an international group of experts, this companion explores a distinctly Scottish Romanticism. Discussing the most influential texts and authors in depth, the original essays shed new critical light on texts from Macpherson's Ossian poetry to Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and from Scott's Waverley Novels to the work of John Galt. As well as dealing with the major Romantic figures, the contributors look afresh at ballads, songs, the idea of the bard, religion, periodicals, the national tale, the picturesque, the city, language and the role of Gaelic in Scottish Romanticism.Key Features* The first and only student guide to Scottish Romanticism capturing the best of critical debate while providing new approaches* Contributors include: Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley), Angela Esterhammer (Zurich University), Peter Garside (Edinburgh University), Andrew Monnickendam (Barcelona University), Fiona Stafford (Oxford University), Fernando Toda (Salamanca University) and Crawford Gribben (Trinity College, Dublin) - who have themselves helped to define approaches to the period

This book considers the politics of patronage appointments at the universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews, exploring the ways in which 388 men secured posts in three Scottish universities between 1690 and 1806. Most professors were political appointees vetted and supported by political factions and their leaders. This comprehensive study explores the improving agenda of political patrons and of those they served and relates this to the Scottish Enlightenment. Emerson argues that what was happening in Scotland was also occurring in other parts of Europe where, in relatively autonomous localities, elite patrons also shaped things as they wished them to be. The role of patronage in the Enlightenment is essential to any understanding of its origins and course.