As in Proust’s novel, evoking fading recollections of our past helps us to define more clearly our national essence than does today’s frenetic jumble of liberal media’s hedonism and violence.
Appropriately for the 4th of July, Bob Curry presents another aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment that was so hugely influential in the formation of our constitutions, both written and unwritten.
His earlier essays on this subject can be read here, here, here, here, and here.
For a comprehensive treatment of the 18th century Enlightenments, see Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments.
Losing Track of the Enlightenments
By Robert Curry
The Enlightenment was an international movement that included French, English, Scottish, American, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Russian schools. Isaac Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader
Keeping this simple fact clear is apparently the biggest challenge in understanding the Enlightenment.
In the first place, it is evidently easy to lose sight of the big picture when one or the other of the Enlightenments captures a writer’s vision. Over time the French Enlightenment eclipsed all the others, so much so that today even the well-informed often write as if the French Enlightenment was the Enlightenment. On the other hand, the eminent historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, while doing an outstanding job of making clear the special character of the American Enlightenment and distinguishing it very clearly from the French one, in the process manages to eclipse the Scottish Enlightenment behind the British one.
Misplacing one or more of the Enlightenments then leads to additional confusion. In tracing the influences on the Founders, many scholars go from the early thinkers of the British Enlightenment directly to the Founders, leaving out the Scottish Enlightenment entirely. Tom Brewton has even noted that some academics have tried to advance the idea that the Founders were inspired by the French Enlightenment
The current situation in modern Scotland is in some ways even more amazing. To get a sense of the radical disconnect between the Scotland of Smith, Hutcheson, Reid and Ferguson and the Scotland of today, here is part of an editorial from the Scotsman: “Last Wednesday was a deeply disappointing day for those of us who had long entertained the hope that the Blairs would exit from public life in identical fashion to the Ceausescus.” This is a leading Scottish paper publishing the “hope” that the Blairs would be murdered by the citizenry.
Although the Scottish Enlightenment has vanished from Scotland, leaving hardly a trace, the ideas and arguments of the Scottish Enlightenment, extended and ingeniously applied in the special circumstances of the new world, live on in the vigorous political life of our own country. Of course, most Americans have lost sight of the fact that the Founders were luminaries of the Enlightenment, and the intellectual debt the Founders owed to the Scottish Enlightenment is even more completely unknown. Undoubtedly it would benefit our country if the history and the philosophy of the Founding were better taught and better understood here, but we must not lose sight of how enviable our situation still is. It is again our privilege to celebrate another 4th of July. Let us on this day and every day rejoice in the continued vigorous life of the ideas and institutions that are the gifts of the Founders.
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