Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (review)

Most readers of this review will be familiar with the famous portrait of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, painted by the Scotsman Allan Ramsay in 1766. In it, Hume is wearing a powdered wig, a scarlet red coat and waistcoat embellished with fine gold brocade and buttons, and a lace cravat and cuffs. He is looking directly at the viewer, and his shoulders are squared toward the viewer as well. As Viccy Coltman writes in her contribution to this volume, the portrait has “come to personify the Scottish Enlightenment in dust jackets and conference posters” (168). In the context of her chapter titled “The ‘Peculiar Colouring of the Mind’: Character and Painted Portraiture in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Coltman’s comment might seem to be a simple throwaway description of the iconic status Ramsay’s painting has achieved among modern scholars. Yet, upon further examination, Coltman’s observation offers subtle hints indicating that we may have missed something by naturalizing this image of Hume as a synecdochal symbol for the Scottish Enlightenment. Or more importantly, we may have forgotten why—besides the depiction of its inimitable subject—this painting represents the Scottish Enlightenment so succinctly. Coltman’s answer, and the primary focus of this collection of essays, is the word character.

“‘Character’ is a spacious term, encompassing at once the whole human species, each distinct nation, and particular individuals,” Silvia Sebastiani writes in her superb contribution to this volume titled “National Characters and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate” (187). Sebastiani’s piece engages the formation of “national character” as each nation, region, or group of people becomes differentiated from each other and specialized according to their particular brand of the division of labor as they progress through the stages of economic development broadly identified in Scottish stadial history: the hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial stages. Scottish conjectural history was an innovation that worked to provide data for the Scottish Enlightenment project of what Hume called in his Treatise of Human Nature the “science of man.” The science of man, as described by Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning in the volume’s introduction, was a “programmatically anti-theoretical” attempt to gather truths about human nature in the form of “insights based on observation of the manifestations of customary life, the daily transactions between individuals in society” (4). This collection of essays addresses the multifaceted ways in which eighteenth-century debates over the concept of character helped elucidate foundational principles for the science of man in the form of sociability, selfhood, and sympathy.

Surprisingly, most of these essays do not engage with recent conversations in philosophy and literary criticism that treat modern conceptions of selfhood. In fact, concerning the three probably most well-known and most-often referenced studies in modern selfhood—Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989), Jerome Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy (1998), and Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self (2005)—only Stephen J. McKenna’s essay on Adam Smith—outside of the volume’s introduction—chooses to challenge any of these influential works. (Seigel also has an essay in this volume.) But, as the editors clearly state in the introduction, the question of the self has a long history and “the present volume does not retrace this ground, though the discussions that follow owe much to important work by Charles Taylor, Jerrold Seigel, Dror Wahrman, Deirdre Lynch, Barbara Taylor, and others” (8). Upon further consideration, the decision to steer clear of these conversations on selfhood is probably the right one for this collection of essays. The introduction does the work of situating the essays within the fields of philosophy, history, and literary criticism—as well as within current discourses on eighteenth-century rhetoric and narrative. The authors, then, are free to focus on the primary texts using tightly focused secondary material without the distraction of the necessity to claim grand and overblown arguments they will not be able to fulfill...