An Intellectual & Scientific Revolution

In recent decades, Scotland's distinctive contribution to the Enlightenment has been of increasing interest to scholars. Often very remarkable in an analytical view, such studies may nevertheless miss their sense of the story by treating Scottish insight in abstraction from Scottish life. Taking a more concrete approach, the present study argues that the distinctive inheritance of pre-Union Scotland in law, education and especially religion is what made it possible for post-Union Scotland to make its intellectual impact by providing philosophical and historical foundations for social and political ideas which had been largely developed by the English, but which the English had failed to systemise...