The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: "Lyrick" Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment

What was the Scottish Enlightenment? In a pair of influential texts Alasdair MacIntyre presents it as the tragic demise of a Scottish tradition of moral philosophy grounded in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. ¹ The decline began with Francis Hutcheson's attempt to synthesize traditional ideas of natural law and religious obligation with two new strands of thought: Shaftesbury's belief in the passions of the individual as adequate grounds for moral action, and a Lockean "epistemological stance embodying a first-person point-of-view" (Whose Justice?270). However, this synthesis proved unstable, and David Hume helped ensure its dissolution. He did so by retaining Hutcheson's "moral epistemology" but jettisoning his teleological and theological view of human nature. In their stead, he posited a network of sympathetic exchange through which we judge our actions by our "responses to others who are in turn responding to us" (292). ² Hume also enthusiastically furthered the Anglicization fatal to the Scottish tradition that Hutcheson had unwittingly begun. For while Hume may have presented his regulative ideas of pride and humility as universal, they were in fact rooted in "the prejudices of the Hanoverian ruling elite" (After Virtue, 231).

This view has not gone unchallenged. Cairns Craig criticizes MacIntyre for making two mistakes characteristic of a long-standing, misguided model of Scottish culture as always already degenerate. ³ The first, noted by other recent commentators, is the reduction of the whole of Scottish culture to Hutcheson, Hume, and the other "great men" of Scottish philosophy. ⁴ Although a handful of social histories treat the universities and clubs of the Enlightenment, very few inquire into the way that the Scottish literary market and other less elite institutions and persons shaped Enlightenment thought or were shaped by it. ⁵

Along with contracting Scottish culture to these philosophers, MacIntyre and other recent scholars oversimplify the complex interplay of class and nation that structured eighteenth-century Scotland. ⁶ Presenting English and Scottish culture as static rather than engaged in "a continual series of interchanges" (Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, 31), these accounts repeat early-twentieth-century models of "national schizophrenia" that posit an unbridgeable gap between an authentic but obsolescent Scottish culture and an attractive but artificial Englishness. ⁷ Some decades later David Daiches elaborates on this model by suggesting that although the literati of the Enlightenment may have professed a brand of Scottish nationalism in the wake of the Union of 1707, they repeated the Union's violence by displacing Scottish with "refined" English and by banishing Scottish political independence to the realm of the "elegiac and literary." ⁸ Among the bad effects of the schizophrenia paradigm is that it tends to collapse struggles over status and class into national identity, casting the post-Union emergence of "politeness," "sensibility," and other values as mere capitulation to England. In fact, the rise of these values cannot be understood in terms of a simple antithesis between Scotland and England. While crucially informed by English models, politeness and its cognates were the dual effects of forging a "new British culture" and negotiations within Scotland between aristocrats and the middling classes (not to mention the role played by Continental philosophy) (Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, 28). ⁹ Yet despite challenges by scholars such as Thomas Crawford, Leith Davis, and Tom Nairn, the schizophrenia model remains influential. ¹⁰

In the following pages I aim to extend this critique of narrow models of culture, class, and national identity while preserving the insights of MacIntyre and others into the roles played in the Scottish Enlightenment by "first-person" epistemology, sympathy, and conjectural history. The focus of my effort to wed cultural history with a due sense of the complexities of Enlightenment thought is a figure often presented, when at all, as an object lesson in the costs...