Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (review)

670 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:4 OCTOBER 1988 left, argued, inter alia, that James had ceased to be king not because he had fled the country but because he had nullified his contract with the people by his infringements of the law of nature. The Two Treatises, then, was a radical document even after the Revolution, for the Tories and many Whigs were not prepared to accept this version of events. It is not therefore surprising that Locke wished to keep his authorship secret. Ashcraft mounts a very strong, perhaps overwhelming, case for his interpretation. Yet one wonders if the case is quite complete without carrying it through to the end of Locke's life. hi post-revolutionary England, after all, he achieved a status both as intellectual and as civil servant, with offers from William of the highest diplomatic posts. How precisely did he stand to the revolutionary settlement and was his position all of a piece with his radicalism? We would like to know the answer. Whatever it is, Ashcraft has done sufficient in this long book as it stands to place Locke scholars and historians of seventeenth-century England greatly in his debt. G. A. J. ROGERS Universityof Keele Richard B. Sher. Church and Universityin the ScottishEnlightenment: The ModerateLiterati of Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 39o. $47.5 o. This is an excellent "collective biography" of five Edinburgh clergymen and men of letters: Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home, and William Robertson. Though none of them was as eminent as David Hume or Adam Smith, they collectively wielded considerable influence in Scotland and beyond during the second half of the eighteenth century. Their cohesiveness as a group was due to ties of kinship, education, religion, profession, marriage, politics, and ideology. Their brand of "polite Presbyterianism" became institutionalized in the early 176os when they gained control of the Church of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. Much of the credit for the Moderates' success belongs to Robertson, and be is very properly the hero of this meticulously researched and engagingly written study. Robertson was quite an operator: he knew what he wanted and how to get it. His enormously popular History of Scotland (1759) and abundant political savvy catapulted him to the top positions in Church and University. His lucrative and prestigious positions enabled him to go on to write popular histories of Charles V, America, and India. Sher treats in rich detail the machinations behind the Moderates' hegemony; but we hear less about the contents of their literary works, and even less criticism of them. The reason is Sher's methodology--the social history of ideas--which is more concerned to explain how works now seldom read were so popular two centuries ago than to analyze and assess individual contributions. To recapture the cultural meaning of such works the social historian must look beneath the surface peculiarities for the shared interests, values, and ideologies which motivated them. These objectives "render the concept of genius irrelevant" 06); yet it is a little surprising that more attention is not paid to how the best minds of the age perceived the Moderates. Hume believed that Robertson's History of Scotland was "most expos'd to criticism" BOOK REVIEWS 67t on account of its "godly Strain," i.e., he had given too sympathetic an account of John Knox and the Reformation because he had not entirely divested himself of all prejudices of country, education, and profession. Hume also recognized that the popularity of Robertson's book had been "forwarded by its prudence, and by the deference paid to established opinions," as well as by the wide-spread animosity towards Hume himself .' Gibbon found it surprising that religion, which always occupies so large a place in civil society, occupied none at all in Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, and he professed to admire Ferguson's prudence in carefully avoiding such delicate matters. Alexander Carlyle suggested that Ferguson's Essay "ought only to be considered as a college exercise," presumably because Ferguson had admitted borrowing "many notions from a French author." Ferguson for his part advised against the publication of Carlyle...