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In the past thirty years, a number of scholars have demonstrated the unique intellectual contribution made by a group of like-minded eighteenthcentury Scots who were closely affiliated, both personally and professionally , and self-consciously unified around an identifiable theoretical project. The basic goal of the Scottish Enlightenment was to establish what David Hume, one of its leading lights, termed a “Science of Man” applicable to the increasingly complex commercial societies of Europe. The Scots sought a scientific understanding of individual ideas and beliefs as the key to understanding their social world and its historical development.1 They aimed, The Scottish Enlightenment, the Moral Sense, and the Civilizing Process 1 1. See especially N. T. Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19–40, especially 20; see also Phillipson, “Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in City and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Paul Fritz and David Williams (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), 125–47. In addition to a wide variety of primary sources, what follows intentionally relies on works that provide a broad overview of Scottish Enlightenment ideas, in order to elaborate the general conclusions scholars have drawn with respect to the Scots’ thinking about moral philosophy and history. In this regard, I am deeply indebted to Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Other general studies from which I have benefited include Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945); Jane Rendall, ed., The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1707– 1776 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); Louis Schneider, ed., The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Alexander Broadie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001); Broadie, ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1997); Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Savage, Md.: Barnes & Noble 1990); Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (Totawa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976); David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982); Peter Jones, ed., The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid, and Their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); M. A. Stewart , ed., Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); George E. Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment and Other Essays (Edinburgh: 22 I The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate that is, to provide an empirical account of human mental processes as the first step in analyzing human social arrangements and their development over time.2 Various scholars have described this project as an attempt to study “man and society,” “human nature and society,” or “social man.”3 Such phrases suggest the Scots’ shared commitment to studying moral philosophy as the essential prerequisite for any full-fledged narrative of social interactions and the ways in which these interactions changed over time.4 This chapter provides a broad sketch of the Scots’ approach to two closely entwined issues, moral philosophy and social history, the two components of the Scottish Enlightenment that would do the most to create the Scots’ distinctive language of politics and thus the most important for Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. What follows, therefore, moves along two closely related but analytically separable axes, the first focused on the Scots’ understanding of individual moral psychology and the second on the ways in which they understood social interaction over the course of history. These twin concerns provided the basic linguistic building blocks that Burke and Wollstonecraft would appropriate and meld into radically antithetical interpretations of the French Revolution. “Moral Sense” Philosophy When it came to the study of moral philosophy, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment began with John Locke and Isaac Newton. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke had systematized sensationalist psychology by denying the existence of innate ideas and conceiving the human mind instead as a tabula...

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