Fyfe, Aileen and Kidd, Colin (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914

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Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) xii + 273 pp. £85.00 Hb. £24.99 Pb. £24.99 Ebook. ISBN: 9781474493031

David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black, Dugald Stewart, Adam Ferguson, John Leslie, James Hutton, William Cullen, James Watt. These very prominent and influential philosophers, economists, chemists, natural philosophers, engineers and geologists, along with many others, are now collectively referred to as the core figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. The problem with this term, however, as this collection of excellent essays points out, is that that it was not coined until 1900 and not widely used until the 1960s when Scotland began its identity crisis which it has not yet resolved. Since then, other Enlightenments have been constructed by historians – English(!), West Midlands, Derbyshire and so on.

All sorts of reasons have been advanced to account for the remarkable number of influential intellectuals (especially in proportion to the overall population) active in Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such explanations range from the influence of Calvinism, to the loss of political independence in 1707, to Scots taking a disproportionate role in forging and running the British Empire (and is it a coincidence that Scots began their protracted identity crisis just as the Empire was ending?).

So much scholarly effort has been devoted to studying the Scottish Enlightenment that little historical research has been undertaken into what came after. Perhaps there was a sense amongst historians that Scotland in the nineteenth century was living in a gigantic shadow of what had immediately gone before (as those of us who went to university in the 1970s felt about having missed the 1960s). This book is intended to provide an initial sketch as to what a history of Scottish intellectual life from the start of the French Revolution to the beginning of the Great War might look like. It is edited by two historians from the University of St Andrews, which also provided five of the other contributors with the rest based elsewhere, but mostly in Scotland.

One thing that struck me about the book was the dominance of the biographical approach with seven chapters (out of fifteen including introduction and epilogue) devoted to specific individuals: Dugald Stewart, James Macintosh, Christian Isobel Johnstone, Robert Mudie, Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle and Andrew Lang, although of course they are placed in their contexts. While these figures are known to a greater or lesser extent, I do wonder why there is very little discussion of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell, those Scottish giants of nineteenth-century physics.

The other thing that struck me was the part played by religion in nineteenth-century Scotland’s intellectual life. The role of Calvinism during the Scottish Enlightenment is particularly pertinent, since education of the population was an essential part of the mission of the Church of Scotland which doubtlessly contributed to the high levels of intellectual endeavour during the eighteenth century. That illustrates that, given the right conditions, Calvinism is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Another example would be the Golden Age in the Netherlands which not only produced wonderful works of art, but also where dissenting views were tolerated in ways that would have been inconceivable elsewhere in Europe at the time.

Of course, figures such as Hume and Leslie had had their difficulties with the Church of Scotland which, in terms of university appointments, as Leslie found, could cause serious career problems. But judging by this book Calvinism became a lot less generous in its attitude towards intellectual matters in the nineteenth century. But this was not completely straightforward as the leading optical researcher and historian of science, David Brewster (sometime Principal of St Andrews and then of Edinburgh University and another major figure who might also have received more discussion here), was one of the founders of the Free Church of Scotland following 1843 Disruption. Though his example might be non-typical of the period, it does show that Calvinism had not entirely eschewed rationality. But on the whole the thrust of the book does suggest that the Church of Scotland no longer tolerated dissent. That, I think, goes a long way to account for the discussions of free thinking in this book, though it isn’t really clear how widespread or influential it was.

This book shows how can one go beyond something that was not perceived to exist at the time. In sum it should be viewed as a very useful starting point for future studies of what, with some exceptions especially in the physical sciences, has been an understudied area. Such future studies might tell us why Scottish intellectuals decided that there was something called the Scottish Enlightenment more than a century before the term was coined and might even help modern Scotland to overcome its identity problems.

Frank A.J.L. James,University College London

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