The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations has brought a burst of renewed attention to the Scottish Enlightenment. Discussions have ranged widely, from Adam Smith’s conception of aesthetics to how the thought of his teacher, the “never-to-be-forgotten” Francis Hutcheson, shaped the American Revolution.

　　But amidst these discussions, one important question has received little consideration. Why did such a remarkable group of thinkers appear in one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most physically isolated, sparsely populated, and poorest nations?

　　On the face of it, the Scottish Enlightenment was a highly unlikely phenomenon. In 1603, Scotland lost a major stimulus for cultural development in early modern Europe when the Scottish king and court relocated to London following James VI’s succession to the throne of England. Many Scottish artists, musicians, and writers subsequently moved south to chase the type of royal patronage that stimulated intellectual life. The debilitating effects of this were accentuated 104 years later when the Scottish Parliament voted to dissolve itself and incorporate Scotland into what was always going to be an English-dominated Kingdom and Parliament of Great Britain. After 1707, some Scots called themselves “North Britons.” No one in England thought to label himself a “South Briton.”

　　This background does not suggest a self-confident and powerful nation, let alone one on the brink of an intellectual revolution in fields as wide-ranging as economics, medicine, and philosophy. As David Hume later remarked, “Is it not strange that, at a time, when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility … that … we should really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?”

　　Institutional Foundations

　　Part of the answer to Hume’s puzzlement lies in the fact that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers inherited some formidable pre-Enlightenment intellectual foundations. Medieval and early modern Scotland may have been an economic and political backwater, but it punched far above its weight in the realm of higher learning.

　　Before the Reformation, Scotland possessed three universities (one more than the much richer and more populous England) that were well-integrated into Western European intellectual life. Founded in the fifteenth century, the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen were dominated by Scots educated at leading centers of continental learning like the University of Paris.

　　Scots also featured as prominent professors in European universities. The greatest was John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), one of medieval Europe’s most influential logicians, philosophers, and theologians. Another important figure was the Scottish-born professor of theology in Paris, John Mair (1467–1550). He had among his students John Calvin but also the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, and the humanist and physician François Rabelais. Mair was famous for arguing that the native Americans had property rights that Europeans should respect.

　　In 1518, Mair became principal of the University of Glasgow. Eventually he joined St Salvator’s College at St Andrews where he taught John Knox and the humanist George Buchanan (1505–82). Buchanan himself was a graduate of the University of Paris, served as a lecturer at Portugal’s University of Coimbra, and eventually became James VI’s tutor. Among Buchanan’s many writings was his De Jure Regni apud Scotos. It argued for strict limits on royal power in the name of popular sovereignty at a time when theories of absolutism were coming into vogue.

　　These interchanges between early-modern Scotland and Europe extended to the natural sciences. The poet and astronomer Thomas Seget (1569–1627) studied at the universities of Leiden, Louvain, and Padua where he encountered Galileo. He then moved to Prague to collaborate with the mathematician Johannes Kepler on producing proofs for Galileo’s theories. Yet another Scot, the mathematician and physicist John Napier (1550–1617), who appears to have spent eleven years in Europe, has a good claim to be the first to develop logarithm tables. Similarly, the physician and botanist Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722) studied at Leiden, Paris, and Angers before becoming professor of medicine at Edinburgh University and a founder of the Royal College of Physicians.

　　It is telling that someone like David Hume, despite being widely viewed as an atheist and an advocate for skepticism, could flourish in eighteenth-century Scotland.

　　The Reformation did not alter this state of affairs. The sons of wealthy and noble Scottish Presbyterians and Episcopalians often studied theology, philosophy, medicine, and law in Leiden, and, after 1603, at Oxford and Cambridge. Some later assumed leading positions at Scottish and English universities. The Aberdeen-born mathematician David Gregory (1659–1708), for example, pursued medicine at Leiden. He eventually became professor of astronomy at Oxford, where he worked closely with Sir Isaac Newton.

　　Many beleaguered Scottish Catholic gentry families likewise sent their sons to study abroad. The most famous was the historian Father Thomas Innes. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1662, Innes studied at the College of Navarre and eventually became vice-principal at the Scots College in Paris. His Civil and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, A.D. 80–818 dismantled many myths surrounding Scotland’s origins. Significantly, the religious divides of the time did not impede Innes from corresponding with the classicist and official printer to Edinburgh University, Thomas Ruddiman, and the Scottish Episcopal bishop Robert Keith.

　　Mentors and Modernizers

　　Early eighteenth-century Scotland was thus a nation that had long been wired into European high culture. This meant that Scottish scholars were familiar with the ideas of seventeenth-century thinkers that would drive Enlightenment thought such as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Pierre Bayle, John Locke, and, above all, Newton. His championing of the empirical method would be embraced by figures like Hume and Smith who believed that Newtonian approaches to the natural world could be applied to human society. Scottish Enlighteners also benefited, however, from an institutional environment that created conditions in which “the science of man,” as Hume called it, could flourish. This owed much to major reforms to Scottish universities enacted in the 1690s and 1700s.

　　One pioneer of modernizing reforms, the Presbyterian minister William Carstares (1649–1715), had been educated at the universities of Edinburgh and Utrecht. Following a career in Whig politics, Carstares became principal of Edinburgh University in 1705, holding the position until his death ten years later. During that time, Carstares overhauled Edinburgh’s curriculum, which he modelled on Leiden, to allow more specialization in topics. To that end, he established faculties of law and arts as well as chairs in botany and chemistry. Not long after Carstares’ death, the university instituted a chair of history and a teaching hospital for physicians. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, separate chairs in logic, Greek, Latin, moral and natural philosophy were created during the eighteenth century’s first three decades.

　　These changes reflected a growing conviction shared by major figures in the Scottish judiciary and the Church of Scotland that Scotland needed specialists in fields like law, the liberal arts, and the sciences. One impetus for this came from Scotland’s union with England. This gave Scots unimpeded access to the much bigger English economy and the immense commercial opportunities occasioned by Britain’s emergence as a global power. The subsequent economic prosperity in cities like Glasgow, from which Scottish merchants traded with Britain’s North American and Caribbean colonies as well as its outposts in India, created a demand for people with expertise in fields like commercial and international law.

　　Over time, these transformations contributed to the ascent of a distinct group of people, concentrated in the church, universities, and the legal profession, with the interest, time, and resources needed to study ideas for their own sake. The philosopher and judge Henry Home, Lord Kames, is an excellent example. Besides writing about specific features of Scottish law (particularly property law), Kames wrote widely on literature, philosophy, history, religion, and the relationship between economic development and political change.

　　But Kames also understood the vital importance of patronage and used it to advance the careers of individuals anxious to promote the new learning: most notably, Hume, Smith, the diarist and biographer James Boswell, and the philosopher Thomas Reid. Likewise, clergymen such as Smith’s mentor, Francis Hutcheson, the historian and Moderator of the Church of Scotland William Robertson, and the rhetorician and preacher at the High Kirk of St Giles Hugh Blair, provided institutional ballast for other Scottish Enlighteners.

　　This included helping to create private associations like the Select Society and the Poker Club in Edinburgh, and the Literary Society and the Anderston Club in Glasgow. In such settings, leading Scottish thinkers gathered with lawyers, merchants, and clerics to discuss and debate the intellectual currents of the time. Not only did these venues help make Scotland’s “literati” a tight-knit group, they also reflected the fact that Scottish Enlighteners enjoyed staunch support from, and a presence in, the Scottish establishment. This made it harder for their ideas to be marginalized or ignored.

　　A Habit of Tolerance

　　The cohesion and status acquired by Scottish Enlighteners did not, however, translate into uniformity of opinion. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers did not agree about everything. They believed, moreover, that improvement (a classic Enlightenment motif) necessitated thinking with and critiquing others. This points to another element that accounts for Scotland’s Enlightenment: the high moral premium that became attached to an atmosphere of relative toleration.

　　I say “relative” because significant limits remained on what could be publicly said in Scotland, especially concerning religion. Scottish Episcopalians were only accorded formal toleration in 1712, while proposals in 1778 to grant limited toleration to Scottish Catholics were buried by widespread rioting in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Even within the Church of Scotland, Francis Hutcheson, noted for his deep faith, was investigated by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1738 for holding philosophical positions that, it was alleged, contradicted the Westminster Confession.

　　Nevertheless, it is telling that someone like David Hume, despite being widely viewed as an atheist and an advocate for skepticism, could flourish in eighteenth-century Scotland. Certainly, efforts to give Hume chairs at Glasgow and Edinburgh were stopped by clergy (including Hutcheson) on account of his presumed religious views. But other leading Scottish ministers like Robertson and Blair defended Hume’s eventual appointment as librarian at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. What’s more, when legal proceedings on account of his religious opinions were threatened against Hume in the 1750s by some Presbyterian ministers, other Church of Scotland luminaries helped to derail them.

　　Extremism and small-mindedness, compared to Scottish Enlighteners’ moderation, helps explain why the Scottish and late-French Enlightenments contributed to significantly different political outcomes.

　　Though inadequate by our standards, the scale of toleration made it possible for debate to thrive in Scotland. Consider, for example, David Hume and Thomas Reid. A clergyman, Reid succeeded Smith as the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow in 1764. Before that, however, Reid had already taken issue with Hume’s radical skepticism. Contra Hume, Reid maintained that there were principles of common sense that the human mind had an innate ability to know—such as the fact that the material world exists—and we should therefore reject skepticism about the material world’s existence and any theory of ideas that proposes such skepticism.

　　For our purposes, the specifics of the Reid-Hume debate are less important than how they engaged each other. In a 1763 letter to Hume, for example, Reid stated:

　　A little Philosophical Society here [Aberdeen] … is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of St. Athanasius; and since we cannot have you upon the bench, you are brought up oftener than any other man to the bar, accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness. If you write no more in morals, politics, or metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects.

　　In this spirit, Reid arranged for a pre-publication copy of his Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense (1764) to be sent, via their mutual friend Hugh Blair, to Hume. After initially dismissing Reid’s argument, Hume decided to study, at Blair’s urging, Reid’s text more closely. He eventually wrote Reid a gracious and appreciative reply.

　　This didn’t mean that Hume was convinced by Reid’s arguments. He later told his publisher that the second volume of his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects constituted “a compleat Answer to Dr. Reid.” What matters, however, is that these two Scottish Enlighteners—one a Christian minister and the other a noted skeptic—debated philosophical ideas without either individual trying to denigrate, censor, or imprison the other.

　　Hope and Moderation

　　The contrast with many late-French Enlightenment thinkers could not be more vivid. For instance, Voltaire was notorious for satirizing and mocking his critics rather than engaging them in serious arguments. As the American historian R. R. Palmer (an admirer of many philosophes) observed in his Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939), while many French Enlighteners “talked much of reason,” “their sharpest instruments were ridicule and vilification, which enabled them to throw off a man’s arguments by defaming his character or belittling his intelligence.” Some philosophes, Palmer states, even appealed “to the censors whose very existence the enlightened thinkers are supposed to have abhorred” to silence their opponents. Such extremism and small-mindedness, compared to Scottish Enlighteners’ moderation, helps explain why the Scottish and late-French Enlightenments contributed to significantly different political outcomes.

　　Today it is reasonable to be pessimistic about the prospects for the emergence of an intellectual movement as consequential as the Scottish Enlightenment. The incentives to participate in respectful and rigorous debate are low. Equally discouraging is the degree to which Western cultural life is in thrall to political agendas inimical to the type of mindset that characterized Scottish Enlighteners.

　　Yet there is hope. Attention to the forces and conditions that gave rise to the Scottish Enlightenment reminds us that, despite unpromising political and economic circumstances, it is possible for long-standing intellectual traditions combined with institutional reform, openness to new forms of knowledge, and twin commitments to tolerance and substantive debate to generate remarkable improvements that reflect both continuity and innovation. Therein may lie lessons for our time.