The Enlightenment from below.
In April 1764, Voltaire was annoyed with Scotland.
In the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, a paper he supported and wrote for, an anonymous barb appeared that is easy to credit to him. The occasion was a book by the Scottish judge Lord Kames, who had dared to dismiss the French classics — Voltaire’s own tragedies included — as rule-bound and bloodless. Voltaire struck back: “It is a wonderful effect of the progress of the human mind, that today there comes to us from Scotland rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.”
The supreme arbiter of European taste found it absurd that rough, poor Scotland of all places should presume to tell Paris what art was. “From epic poetry” was aimed at the Scottish scholars then proclaiming the forged Ossian poems the new Homer. “To gardening” was aimed at Kames’s long chapter on landscape gardens — and for the lord of Ferney, who proudly tended his own beds, being lectured on gardening by a Scottish lawyer was the height of presumption.
Behind Voltaire’s venom was a fact he could not deny: in Scotland, something had happened. A cold, Calvinist country of barely more than a million people, which in 1707 had just abolished its own parliament, produced in two generations the founders of modern economics, sociology, and geology, the chemistry of heat, the steam that drove the Industrial Revolution, and a philosophy that still bites today. Smith, Ferguson, Hutton, Black, Watt, Hume. Out of the poorhouse on the edge came the brain of Europe.
How?
Knox’s children
It begins, as so much on the island does, in the church, and a stern one at that.
In Part 5, John Knox stood at the start of Scottish Calvinism. His reformed programme made one demand that sounded harmless and changed everything: every person must be able to read Scripture for himself. So the Scottish church built schools. A law of 1696 required a school in every parish, paid for by the landowners, run by the church and the local community.
The result was one of the most literate populations in Europe. A ploughman who knew his Bible and argued predestination over the whisky. A stonemason who had the catechism by heart. That is human capital from below, broadly spread instead of locked up in the cloister and the court.
One should not idealise it. The same church that taught reading banned the theatre and hounded unbelief; it denied Hume a chair his whole life and nearly excommunicated him. The literacy and the narrowness came in the same package. But the package held something most of the Continent lacked: a people who could read.
The university in the trading city
Scotland had five universities when England had two. And they were of a different kind.
Oxford and Cambridge dozed. Adam Smith, who spent a few years at Oxford, later wrote drily that the professors there had “for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching”. The young Gibbon called his months at Oxford the idlest of his life. The Continental academies, for their part, hung on the court, endowed from above, turned toward the crown.
The Scottish universities sat in the middle of the city. They were cheap, urban, open even to sons without a pedigree, and they taught in English rather than Latin, with specialist professors instead of general tutors. Edinburgh’s medical faculty became the best in Europe. Above all, knowledge and trade were not kept apart. Glasgow grew rich on the tobacco trade, and Smith taught moral philosophy among the sons of the tobacco lords and dined with their fathers. Joseph Black, professor of chemistry, worked out what really happens when things are heated and melted: latent heat. His friend James Watt, instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, took exactly that knowledge and made the decisive improvement to the steam engine. The Carron ironworks, founded in 1759, brought the professors’ science to the blast furnaces.
Here runs a thread that reaches into our own day. Europe complains now that its universities and its industry live past one another, while in the Anglo-American model lecture hall and factory interlock. The pattern was set in Glasgow. The university did not stand in the ivory tower. It stood at the harbour.
The Enlightenment from the tavern
Where did this thinking organise itself? Not in a royal academy. In clubs.
Edinburgh’s Old Town was so cramped that a visitor marvelled he could stand at the Mercat Cross and within a few minutes take fifty men of genius by the hand. These men met in societies they founded themselves. The Select Society for debate, from 1754. The Poker Club from 1762. The Philosophical Society, which became the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Oyster Club, at whose table sat Smith, Black, and the geologist Hutton. They met in taverns, over oysters and claret, and talked the world apart.
This is a difference that counts. The French Enlightenment lived in the salon, and the salon belonged to an aristocratic hostess and hung on patronage and favour. The Scottish one lived in the club, and the club belonged to its members. Civil society, voluntary, from below. The Scots organised their intellectual life like a society because they organised everything that way that the state did not take in hand. And the state took little in hand, for they had just lost their state.
The paradox of the Union
In 1707 the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence. The Union with England. It was deeply unpopular; a generation later Robert Burns wrote bitterly that the country had been “bought and sold for English gold”.
And yet this loss did something strange. It dissolved the political top and left everything beneath it standing. Scotland kept its own church, its own law, and its own universities. The three institutions that carried the country at its core stayed Scottish. To that was added free access to England’s markets and to the empire, and Glasgow flourished.
With the law there is a nice twist. It was shaped by Roman law — of all things, the law that in Part 4 stood for order from above. Only no emperor had forced it on the Scots; at Scotland the Romans had failed. The Scottish jurists had fetched it themselves, as students in Bologna, Orléans, and later Leiden, as a learned tool, not as the command of an autocrat. It spoke Roman, but it argued like the common law, from cases, custom, and the great jurists, never from a code. Roman content, bottom-up form.
Scottish energy, cut off from politics, poured instead into trade, law, medicine, and ideas. A nation that lost its state discovered how much of a nation lives below the state. To anyone who has experienced that — that society carries itself when the state withdraws — the next idea hardly needs explaining.
The idea: order that grows
The Scots looked at their own society and saw a marvel. The market, the language, the law, the manners, the whole dense weave of living together — no one had designed it, and yet it worked. Out of that they made a science.
Adam Ferguson wrote, in 1767, the sentence that puts it best. Nations, he says, “stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. Order without an orderer. A result without a plan.
Adam Smith made economics of it. In his Wealth of Nations of 1776 stands the most famous sentence in economics: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Thousands pursue their own advantage, and without anyone commanding it, everyone is fed. The invisible hand. Years earlier, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith had shown that morality too arises this way, from below, out of sympathy and the inner impartial spectator, not from a code handed down from above.
And Hume, the sceptic who runs through this whole series, had long since prepared the ground. He had shown that even our firmest certainties rest not on pure reason but on habit, and that justice and property are no invention of a legislator but grown conventions.
You see the pattern. Scotland theorised order from below because it lived it. A people that taught itself to read, institutions that governed themselves, a society that flourished when its state was taken away. The experience came first; the theory came after.
Not better, but different
The Continent thought in the other direction.
The French Enlightenment was central, it was close to the state, and it was constructivist. Its great men sought the nearness of power; Voltaire corresponded with Frederick the Great, Diderot travelled to Catherine. Their faith was that reason could and should redesign society from the drawing board, cut away the inherited undergrowth and put in its place the clear, considered plan. The Encyclopédie was the blueprint of all knowledge, ordered from above.
This was no error; that constructivist nerve gave Europe the courage to abolish real injustice by design, instead of accepting it as “grown”. To declare universal rights. To write a rational code of law. To rebuild bad institutions instead of bowing to them. For the Scottish reverence for grown order had its own blind spot. Smith’s Glasgow grew rich on the tobacco that slaves planted, and the “spontaneous order” contained much suffering that no one had chosen and that now no one seemed bound to change.
So the two Enlightenments stand facing each other. The one gave the world universal principles and the will to rebuild it. The other the science of how orders grow, and the warning that what you did not design, you cannot simply redesign without cost.
Among all these Scots, one had gone further and reached wider than the rest. No philosopher only for professors, but a writer the whole reading public devoured, whose history sold better than anything else of its time, and of whom a German would later say that he had woken him from his dogmatic slumber. David Hume. The man who reached every citizen is the next part.
Sources and references
Primary sources – Voltaire, anonymous note in the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe (4 April 1764), on Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762); the journal ran 1764–1766, edited by Suard and Abbé Arnaud, with Voltaire as a contributor (among others a review of Hume’s History, May 1764) – Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) — “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40) — habit; justice and property as convention (full treatment in Part 8)
Secondary literature and references – On the Scottish Enlightenment: Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (2001); Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (2003) – On Scottish education: the Act for Settling of Schools (1696); parish schools across the country, high literacy – On university and industry: Joseph Black (latent heat), James Watt (steam engine, University of Glasgow), the Carron Company (1759); Smith on Oxford in the Wealth of Nations, Book V – On the clubs: the Select Society (1754), the Poker Club (1762), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783), the Oyster Club – On the Union of 1707 and the survival of church, law, and universities as Scottish civil society – On the contrast with the French Enlightenment (the Encyclopédists; Voltaire–Frederick II; Diderot–Catherine II)
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