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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
  • James A. Harris
Alexander Broadie , editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 366. Cloth, $65.00.

A Cambridge Companion can be expected to attempt to do two different things at the same time: to provide a clear and concise introduction to the existing scholarly literature on all the principal topics discussed by the philosopher or school of philosophy to which the Companion is devoted; and to advance the discussion in ways that will be of interest to those already working in the field. Alexander Broadie's Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment succeeds admirably at both tasks. Excellent introductions are provided to eighteenth-century Scottish writing on religion, the philosophy of mind and its engagement with scepticism, the history of the human species and the basis of human sociability, mathematics and natural science, moral philosophy, political philosophy and theories of justice, economic theory, legal theory, historiography, and aesthetics. In the process, familiar figures such as Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Reid are placed amid a huge range of writers no longer very often taught at the undergraduate level, and the result provides a rich resource for those who want to begin to broaden and deepen textbook accounts of what was achieved in Scotland during le Siècle des lumières. In fact, as a single-volume introduction to the wealth of ideas bestowed to posterity by the Scottish Enlightenment, this book has no serious competition. It is almost entirely free of the overblown rhetoric and blatant chauvinism characteristic of some recently published accounts of what the Scots contributed to the modern world.

In addition, many of the chapters contain information and arguments that will stimulate and sometimes provoke those who need no introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment. M. A. Stewart, for example, reminds us how easy it is to exaggerate the damage Hume did to religious belief in his own time. His Scottish contemporaries did their best to minimize Hume's impact and to downplay his significance; and, Stewart shows, for the most part they succeeded. Aaron Garrett describes the various ways, some rather less-than-enlightened, in which historians used animals, women, and racial difference in order "to get at the original of man." The editor of the volume takes important steps toward placing Scottish writing on the arts and aesthetic judgment in the context of what he terms "the general [End Page 479] programme of improvement that characterised the Scottish Enlightenment from its earliest days" (295).

In his Preface, Alexander Broadie sets out three rival large-scale interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment considered as a whole: one that gives priority to political economy and the disciplines which form its intellectual foundation (moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and the historical study of social institutions); another which sees the cultivation of mathematics and the natural sciences as central to the process of enlightenment in Scotland; and a third which portrays the Scottish Enlightenment as being a cultural phenomenon as much as a purely intellectual one, using just enough of both the "political economic" interpretation and the "natural scientific" interpretations as is necessary to understand how the Scottish "literati" worked within and transformed the institutions that shaped the Scotland of their day: the law, the Kirk, and the universities. My judgment is that the reader of this volume will find himself leaning toward the first of these three approaches. This is partly because the chapters both on the disciplines on which political economy was built and on economics itself are the strongest in the book: Fania Oz-Salzberger on political theory, Knud Haakonnsen on natural jurisprudence, Andrew Skinner on economics, John Cairns on legal theory, and Christopher Berry on "sociality and socialisation". Ironically, perhaps, these chapters work so well because they build on a brilliant account of "The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment" provided by one of the chief exponents of the "natural scientific" approach, Roger Emerson.

Broadie claims that it is "arguable that science is crucially important to the Scottish Enlightenment, perhaps more important than were moral philosophy, historiography and political economy" (4). It is to be regretted, then, that so little space...

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