Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment: ‘Industry, Knowledge and Humanity.’ by Roger L. Emerson (review)

This volume collects ten essays by the distinguished historian Roger L. Emerson. Many are augmented versions of public lectures or conference papers, and all advance Emerson’s career-long study of the Scottish Enlightenment, its social foundations, and its institutional embodiments.

Emerson states his case and names his rivals in the anchor piece of the collection, “What is to be Done About the Scottish Enlightenment?” The Scottish Enlightenment, he argues, was a broad-based, indigenous movement of long standing, largely independent of English models. He attacks the view, which he attributes to Nicholas Phillipson (with concurrence in varying degrees from J. G. A. Pocock, John Robertson, and Richard Sher), “that the Scottish Enlightenment was mainly talk about moral, political-economic and social theories produced after c. 1730” (225). Emerson argues for a more inclusive understanding of the Enlightenment as a “wider set of beliefs and activities” that engaged a significant fraction of the educated population of Scotland in the search for “methods that might support improvements of all kinds” (225–26). This movement was well under way by the end of the seventeenth century, and its origins are largely to be found in native Scottish debates over economy and society and in the influence of continental writers and educational institutions, particularly the professional schools of the Netherlands. To understand this Enlightenment, we must understand the society that made it possible and the men who were its principal creators and disseminators. We must study the experience of students and job-seekers, the world of trade, commerce, and the professions, the institutions of sociability, and perhaps especially the practices of patronage: “Scotland was a society which by the late eighteenth century had been re-oriented by its great patrons and their placemen. The patrons enabled Scots to develop excellent universities strong in the teaching of science and medicine which also turned out men often eager to finance and able to help manage an increasingly vibrant economy” (246). As detailed here and in “How Many Scots Were Enlightened,” the Scottish Enlightenment was conservative, shaped by something more than a thousand men who “came from the well-off middle class or were securely attached to the gentry and nobility” (239). These men were “keenly aware of the fragility of civil order,” and “willing to secure stability by rougher means than were needed in ‘South Britain’” (241). Emerson describes the workings of patronage concretely in an essay on the greatest of the Scottish patrons, “Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761): Patronage and the Creation of the Scottish Enlightenment.” This remarkable man, who controlled Crown patronage in Scotland for more than thirty years around mid-century, became “as much the real creator of the Scottish Enlightenment as Sir Robert Sibbald, Francis Hutcheson, or David Hume” (37).

Other essays elaborate these points and put this research program into action. In “The World in which the Scottish Enlightenment Took Shape,” Emerson explores the continental roots of Scottish thought and suggests that the Scottish self-image as a backward society in need of improvement had more to do with students’ and travelers’ experiences of the prosperous cities of the continent than with comparisons with England. He argues that as a society ill-equipped to provide employment for ambitious professionals, Scotland developed an educational system geared to the export market. It was “concerned with the need to prepare young men to leave the country to make their way in a world where their principal assets would be what they knew and could do” (19). Emerson details the adaptation of Scottish education to this end in “What Did Eighteenth-Century Scottish Students Read?” In the lengthy and circumstantial essay “Numbering the Medics,” he describes one division of professional education that sent a large fraction of its product abroad and traces the fortunes of a substantial cohort that sought and found...