The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Abstract

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

Hume and Smith studies after Forbes and Trevor-Roper

“…This leaves this reader with the following question: what is the future direction of Scottish Enlightenment studies after the generation who, with admittedly very different approaches, laboured, and some of whom continue to labour, after ‘the man’ Forbes – the generation of Phillipson, Winch and Hont, along with James Moore, Roger Emerson, MA Stewart, Knud Haakonssen and, of course, Berry? Anna Plassart’s The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (2015) indicates that an important part of future studies is likely to be the transformation of the Scottish intellectual culture from the 18th to the 19th century, and the history of the Scottish Enlightenment’s legacy. But there is certainly more to be done in the 18th century.…”

The moral foundations of Adam Smith’s transitional society: Reappraising Foucault’s representations of wealth and Marx’s reconstruction of value theory

“… 1. It was Foucault who related Smith’s science of man to the classical episteme, but the current interpretation and contextualization of the term science of man originated from Salomon (1945) and Kapp (1961). Aspromourgos (2009), Phillipson (2010), Forman (2013), and Plassart (2015) have further explored the historical conditions of this science of man. …”