How the Scots Enlightened Us

Sometimes a random impulse buy really hits the spot

Browsing at a Barnes & Noble, I stumbled across How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. That title makes a bold claim, which succeeded in capturing my attention. More importantly, Herman succeeds in making a compelling case for why we owe much to the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Herman’s book is a broad one, covering a range of topics—education, economics, philosophy, the law, politics, the American Revolution, the Highland Clearances, alcohol, the birth of historical fiction, and so much more. And it’s all fascinating.

For example, thanks to the School Act of 1696, Scotland achieved high rates of literacy compared to other European nations.

“Scotland became Europe’s first modern literate society. This meant that there was an audience not only for the Bible but for other books as well,” Herman writes.

Therefore, intellectuals began writing not only for each other and elites but for a much broader reading public. Book ownership was on the rise, and so were lending libraries.

That’s really only the start.

Herman says, “The Scottish Enlightenment embarked on nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge. It sought to transform every branch of learning—literature and the arts; the social sciences; biology, chemistry, geology, and the other physical and natural sciences—into a series of organized disciplines that could be taught and passed on to posterity.”

History and human nature were common themes that appeared in the most influential books to emerge from Scotland at the time.

Henry Home, who eventually became known as Lord Kames, sorted history into four different periods. The first two, hunter-gatherers and pastoral-nomads, required no law or government beyond the family level. The third, the agricultural community, “bred a complexity of rights and obligations no one had encountered before, and which earlier custom could not control,” Herman says. This meant the creation of laws and the enforcement of such rules.

Further complexities arise in the commercial society, the fourth stage.

“It brings even more benefits, and more cooperation, but also more complexity. It requires new laws—contract and maritime law, laws governing the sale and distribution of commodities—but also generates new attitudes and manners,” Herman says.

Kames’s four periods were used to categorize countries as either savage or civilized, which Herman notes was later exploited toward racist ends. The Scots, however, tended to be colorblind in the application of such ideas. “The fundamental issue for them was not race but human liberty,” Herman writes.

In 1777, Scotland courts decided that slavery was illegal in their country, in a case involving African-born slave Joseph Knight, who was taken to Scotland by his master in 1769.

Herman quotes Knight’s advocate as arguing, “The law of Jamaica, in this case, will not be supported by the Court: because it is repugnant to the first principles of morality and justice.”

Kames, then an old man, agreed: “We sit here to enforce right, not to enforce wrong.”

Herman notes that the case vindicated the Scots’ approach to weighing legal issues.

“Kames and his fellow judges had decided the case not on precedent but on ‘the dictate of reason,’ in order to assert a basic principle of equity and justice. It was a victory for the notion that man’s claim to liberty is universal,” Herman writes.

A later chapter explores Adam Smith and how he formed his views on capitalism, and what exactly those views were. Herman explains and knocks down three myths about Smith: that he believed an “invisible hand” generated and guided capitalism’s wealth, that laissez-faire capitalism was Smith’s invention, and that Smith was an apologist for big business and the merchant class.

“To Adam Smith, belief in a free market was not an intellectual dogma, but a basic lesson of history. It was time for rulers to learn from their mistakes, and let commercial society follow its own course,” Herman explains.

Herman later says of Smith, “His overall picture of the typical businessman is certainly unflattering, and reading it must have made some of his Tobacco Lord friends slightly uncomfortable.”

As much as Smith championed capitalism, he never saw it as a perfect system. Indeed, he worried that as workers became more specialized in their jobs, they’d lose sight of the big picture in broader society.

“In all commercial countries the division of labor is infinite, and every one’s thoughts are employed about one particular thing,” Smith had said in a lecture.

Smith believed that civic institutions have an important role to play in countering such effects.

Jumping ahead again, I also enjoyed learning about Sir Walter Scott. Herman credits Scott with inventing the historical novel and a key theme of the genre—“the idea of cultural conflict.”

Herman writes, “[Scott] revealed to his readers that the development of ‘civilization’ or modernity does not leave clean or neat breaks; one stage does not effortlessly pass on to the next. They overlap and clash, and individuals get caught in the gap.”

These snapshots likely aren’t doing the book justice, so I’ll again recommend reading the whole thing. Even if you think the title goes a bit too far, you can still enjoy the book as a celebration of human progress.