If the Agriculture and Manufactures were improved and carried on to the height they could bear, we might be near as easy and convenient in our circumstances as our sister kingdom of England seeing neither our soil nor our Climate is unfriendly, and, since we enjoy the same Priviledges of Trade with them. If we are far behind, we ought to follow the faster.8
Perhaps the most striking cultural development of all was the way in which the teaching of the university was realigned with the culture of the city. Outside the Netherlands, most of the tiny colleges that counted as universities in northern Europe were academic enclaves, semi-detached from the public life of the towns and cities in which they were situated; Hutcheson’s Glasgow, a radical moderate Presbyterian island with magnificent buildings, cocooned within a deeply suspicious orthodox and dissenting Presbyterian merchant city, was a case in point. Edinburgh was different. Radical reforms in the early decades of the century had had the effect of forging an unusually tight relationship between town and gown. Between 1708 and the 1740s, the Crown, the town council and the legal and medical corporations had joined forces to provide the College with professors of law and medicine and a new classics and philosophy curriculum modelled on that of Leiden, in order to foster the growth of moderate Presbyterianism and to encourage gentlemen to educate their sons in the city rather than in Holland. The new professors were recruited from the Faculty of Advocates, the College of Physicians and the Surgeons’ Incorporation, as well as the Kirk, and they generally had legal and medical practices and local parishes to attend to. They were, in other words, professor-practitioners who were bound by loyalties to the city, its clubs and societies as well as to the university. It was a dual life which encouraged the development of the symbiotic relationship between an academic and a polite civic culture that was to be one of the hallmarks of Edinburgh’s enlightenment and of Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in public life.
Forging this relationship between town and gown was to be the achievement of the later decades of the century. Nevertheless the possibilities were evident in the 1720s and 30s. The Rankenian Club and the Philosophical Society had significant numbers of College professors among their members, including much respected figures like John Stevenson, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and Colin MacLaurin, Professor of Mathematics and one of Newton’s brightest pupils. MacLaurin’s presence was particularly interesting. His lectures on mathematics and Newton’s physics were attended by a city public as well as students and even by women, who were all ‘entertained with his experiments and observations; and were surprised to find how easily and familiarly he could resolve the questions they put to him’.9 He was the moving force in persuading the original members of the Medical Society to expand their discussions to include natural philosophy and archaeology and to open their meetings to noblemen and gentlemen as well as professors, and it was he that persuaded them to rename the society the Philosophical Society. In doing this MacLaurin appeared to the Edinburgh public as the local counterpart of Hutcheson, a philosopher who had the power to improve the minds and manners of the public. It was fitting, if sad, that he should have died in 1746 of a heart attack, attempting to organize the defence of the city from the Jacobite army.
However, a fusion of the values of town and gown was far from complete in the 1720s and 30s. Popular and fashionable teachers like MacLaurin, Stevenson and the Professor of Civil History, Charles Mackie, filled classrooms but lectured on subjects that were peripheral to the core classics and philosophy curriculum. Those who came to Edinburgh reasonably well educated complained that the teaching of the Classics was rudimentary and largely remedial. Others thought the teaching of moral philosophy pedestrian compared with what was available at Glasgow. Alexander Carlyle, an ambitious young moderate Presbyterian, voiced the widely shared view that the teaching of divinity was ‘Dull, Dutch, and prolix’.10 The ever-restless young Henry Home had found the teaching of civil law pedantic. Bright medical students like William Cullen complained that the new medical curriculum was old-fashioned and that some of the professors were simply reading out the lecture notes they had taken at Leiden. For critics like these, the new curriculum seemed better suited to the needs of country clergy, law clerks and surgeons’ or apothecaries’ apprentices than to aspiring polite, philosophically minded citizens.
No doubt these criticisms were untypical and unfair; after all, student numbers seem to have been growing, though by how much it is impossible to say. But they came from a significant quarter, a new generation of ambitious, intellectually minded young men who had been born in the 1720s, had attended the university in the decade before the Forty-Five and were now on the threshold of significant careers in the Church, university and professions. Their subsequent influence on the cultural and intellectual life of the city was enormous. They transformed the Philosophical Society in the 1750s and 60s. In 1754 they founded the celebrated Select Society, which was to combine discussion of moral philosophy and the fine arts with practical schemes to encourage improvements in the arts and sciences. These two societies, and the many societies founded in imitation, were to be the principal mechanisms for drawing the pursuit of philosophy, science, literature and the fine arts into the public world and linking learning with the values of politeness, improvement and patriotic endeavour. Equally important, this was the generation which supplied the university with a new generation of professors, who began to take up their appointments as their predecessors died off and chairs became vacant from the later 1750s onwards. William Cullen’s appointment to the chair of Chemistry in 1755, Adam Ferguson’s to the chair of Natural Philosophy in 1759 and his translation to the chair of Moral Philosophy in 1764, Hugh Blair’s appointment as first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in 1762 and, above all, William Robertson’s appointment as Principal in the same year, marked the arrival of the first wave of professors who brought the culture of the city into the university and developed a curriculum designed to provide the ‘philosophical’ professional education needed to turn budding practitioners into citizens and gentlemen. When Robertson died in 1793, the process of fusion was as complete as it would ever be. Edinburgh had established itself in the popular mind as the Athens of Britain, and later the Athens of the North. Nor did contemporaries overlook the irony in the sobriquet which the modern heritage industry has conveniently forgotten, that it had been Athens’ historic destiny to provide the Empire which conquered it with its philosophy and intellectual culture.
Like Kirkcaldy and Glasgow, Edinburgh was to become an essential civic space in Smith’s world. Most of its leading citizens would be known to him, some would become close friends. Some would get to know him through his Edinburgh lectures and many more were to debate themes he had raised in the clubs and societies which developed in the 1750s and 60s. Above all, it was a city whose leaders came of age politically during the Forty-Five, at a formative time in the making of Edinburgh’s enlightenment and at the precise moment at which Smith’s philosophical career was to begin.
The Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was a traumatic event in history of the Union. The Scottish Highlands had long been the most turbulent and inaccessible region of the country and a natural breeding ground for resistance to government. Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy began in Glenfinnan in August as his army prepared to sweep through the Highlands to the central belt and to Edinburgh. The defeat of the government army at Prestonpans in October had been followed by a march on Edinburgh and its eventual occupation. News of the impending invasion closed down the city’s public life. The Bank of Scotland ceased trading and destroyed what must have been a large proportion of its banknotes11; the judges, government officials, Presbyterian clergy and other ‘principal inhabitants’ hastily left for the country. The company of Irish dragoons that was detailed to defend the city deserted, leaving its defence in the hands of a few companies of volunteers and a Town Guard of ‘rather elderly men’ who reminded David Hume of ‘Falstaff’s Tatterde
malian Company’.12 After a token resistance the city surrendered to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Legal, financial and cultural life ceased. When Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, four months after the battle of Culloden and the eventual routing of the Highland army, he found a city coming to terms with a bloody catastrophe. The courts and the university reopened in October, although organized intellectual life seems to have remained in abeyance until meetings of the Philosophical Society began again in 1748 or 1749.
Order was restored, but the crisis left its scars. Culloden and the atrocities which followed were a brutal reminder that the arm of the imperial British state was long and that Scotland’s informal system of devolved government rested on improvised and unstable political foundations. For a short time, the unwelcome prospect of direct rule began to seem all too plausible. Some protested by wearing tartan. More thoughtful Anglo-British patriots among the lawyers and moderate clergy began to think carefully about their role and that of their professions in a post-Culloden state. In the case of the clergy the situation was brought into focus by the celebrated Torphichen case, which concerned the rights of a local presbytery to reject a patron’s nominee to the charge of a parish. The case wound its way through the General Assembly between 1748 and 1752, raising fundamental questions about patronage and about the relations between the Kirk and civil society. Lawyers for their part were confronted by the future of a clan system which had been a source of political instability since time immemorial. Smith was to make his intellectual debut before a public which had good reasons for thinking that Scottish civil society had reached a crossroads and that they themselves were destined to play a significant part in managing its future.
The issues at stake for ministers and lawyers were considerable. For the young moderate Presbyterians, the Forty-Five had marked a coming of age. Many had joined the university’s company of volunteers and would have fought had the Principal, William Wishart, not implored them not to expose ‘the flower of the youth of Edinburgh’ to the Highland army.13 Their thinking about the place of the Church in Scottish society was shaped by their distaste for government meddling in the affairs of the General Assembly and by the indiscipline of orthodox clergy and laity who preferred to be guided by their consciences in matters of faith and church government, rather than by civil and ecclesiastical law. What they wanted was a disciplined Church that would coexist amicably with civil society and develop a form of Presbyterianism which was fertilized with the sort of learning, letters and culture that would identify ministers as polite gentlemen. As ministers, they thought of themselves in Hutchesonian terms. They wanted a religion that was based on philosophy, natural theology and the cultivation of practical morality rather than the truths of revealed religion and the teaching of the Church Fathers. They wanted their flocks to judge others by their manners and morals, rather than by their religious beliefs. They wanted to show the world that it was possible for Presbyterian ministers to live as citizens rather than as clerical isolates, and as gentlemen who would be respected for polite learning, polite manners and impeccable morals. It was during the debates in the General Assembly over the Torphichen case that the leading moderates, like the future historian and Principal of Edinburgh University, William Robertson, began to show their political muscle. They were excellent orators and formidable political tacticians who were determined to wrest control of the General Assembly from the orthodox clergy, and they were acquiring powerful allies at Court and among the gentry. Some of their leaders seem to have attended Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and found his new approach to the study of the mind a welcome alternative to that of the logicians and metaphysicians. Throughout his life, and in spite of legitimate suspicions about his religious beliefs, Smith’s rhetoric and moral philosophy was to become closely associated with moderate Presbyterian ideas of polite education.
Lawyers too were thinking seriously about their calling and their place in public life. Culloden and the Duke of Cumberland’s ruthless campaign to exterminate Jacobitism with the sword had revived long-standing fears that the Crown would attempt to pacify the Highlands by conquest.14 The lawyers, led by Duncan Forbes, the Lord President of the Court of Session, responded to this threat by arguing that the causes of the rebellion had more to do with the structure of clan society than with the ambitions and treachery of a few Highland chiefs, and that the problem of pacifying the Highlands could be better addressed by encouraging civility, commerce and economic improvement than by the use of military force. No one understood this better than William Crosse, Professor of Civil Law at Glasgow and, for a short while, Smith’s colleague. He had written a paper on the subject for General Bland, the Commander-in-Chief of HM Forces in Scotland, pointing out that, geographically, the Highlands were barren as well as inaccessible and ‘unfit for Corn Culture, [because they afforded] nothing but a coarse kind of grass fit for pasturing the low siz’d cattle of the Country’. Its people ‘are always busy’d in grazing and defending their own or attacking & carrying off the cattle belonging to their Neighbours’. Blood-ties turned private quarrels into lethal blood-feuds, which were idealized in legend and song. It was a barbarous form of civilization not unlike the ‘parcel of Robbers and Banditti’ of ancient Greece and Rome ‘that by some strange accidents got themselves form’d into regular Governments and grew to be masters of the world’. As he put it, ‘[their] way of living [flowed] as naturally from the present condition of their Class, as ours does from a more regular Government … It is our own fault they have continu’d so long in this way.’15 Crosse was thinking of Highland culture and the laws and institutions on which it was founded in economic terms, and was proposing that its problems should be considered in historically rather than in narrowly legal terms. It was no coincidence that some senior lawyers had begun to ask whether the present state of legal education was appropriate to present needs. Some thought that advocates, like moderate ministers, should be educated as gentlemen. As the new Lord President, Robert Dundas of Arniston, told the Faculty in 1748, ‘Over and above being careful to learn thoroughly the principles of the Roman Law and the Laws of Nature and Nations, they should take pains to acquire the other Sciences and accomplishments becoming the Character of Gentlemen’ and, above all, ‘that rational & manly eloquence’ should be the mark of their profession.16 Henry Home agreed but had other ideas about how this should be accomplished. As we shall see, he was to find Smith’s view about jurisprudence very much to his taste.
Smith had easy access to this distinctive cultural world. His family and friends were well-connected with legal and clerical circles in Edinburgh, and James Oswald, now an up-and-coming MP, had already pressed his friend’s claims to a place in one of the universities on the Duke of Argyll. Writing to a fellow MP, Oswald reminded him that he had already mentioned
one Mr Adam Smith to ye late Duke when I was att ye Abbey with you who is Cousin to [William] Smith who was about ye late Duke and is a young man who was bred att Glasgow and Oxford and has made an uncommon proficiency in literature by which he is extremely well qualified for a Professorship if any opportunity should happen. This young man I would likewise beg of you to put his Grace in mind of. For as his Grace Possesses ye laudable ambition of protecting ye letters and Industry of His Country which are ye two most genuine Marks of Patriotism applications of this nature will I dare say be made without Offence.17
What was almost as important was that Oswald was a friend of Henry Home. Home was a man of boundless energy and intellectual curiosity. Like his cousin David Hume, he was committed to the project of developing a science of man based on the study of the moral, political, religious and aesthetic sentiments that fitted human beings for social life. He had read and criticized his cousin’s Treatise in manuscript, persuading him to ‘castrate’ the text by removing his provocative discussions of miracles and the future state. Like Smith, he thought the Treatise unnecessarily sceptical and was to publish his own intelligent critique in 1751 under the title Essays on the Principle
s of Morality and Natural Religion. Like Smith he was interested in strengthening the empirical base of the science of man by making an intensive, systematic study of the social sentiments as they were revealed in everyday life and in history. His earliest philosophical experiments had been in jurisprudence, publishing decisions of the Court of Session for the sake of the principles of law they illustrated. During the Forty-Five he had retired to the country and written a series of essays on British legal and political institutions ‘to divert him from brooding over the Distresses of his Country’, and to develop Hume’s observation that judiciaries were more fundamental to the preservation of justice than parliaments.18 This eventually led Home to the remarkable conclusion that, in post-Union Scotland, the job of developing and refining the law ought to be assigned to the courts rather than Parliament.19 But his first love lay in constructing a ‘science of rational criticism’ based on the principles of human nature, ‘the true source of criticism’. It was an interest he shared with Smith and Marivaux, one of his favourite authors, and was one which resulted in the publication of his best-known work, the Elements of Criticism, in 1762.20
Home had what one of his friends called an ‘almost apostolical’ interest in promoting ‘the cultivation and improvement of polite literature and the useful arts in Scotland’.21 He became vice-president of the Philosophical Society in about 1752, ‘about which I am turned extremely keen now that I have got in a good measure the control of it’.22 He was a founder of the best-known of the improvement societies, the Select Society, which was founded in 1754. After his appointment to the Bench in 1752 as Lord Kames, he became a Commissioner to the Forfeited Estates and member of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland. But his greatest pride and joy were his ‘élèves’. ‘No sooner did a young man give indications of pregnant parts,’ John Ramsay of Ochtertyre commented,
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