How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Inquisitive, penetrating, unsentimental; impatient with pious dogmas or cant; relentlessly thorough, sometimes to the point of pedantry; rational, but buoyed by a tough-minded sense of humor and a grasp of the practical. We see these qualities reflected in the portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn of the leading Scottish minds of the age: dressed in black coats with elegant white cravats, their strong, clean-shaven faces and clear features projecting an air of imperturbable self-confidence that their predecessors, for all their accomplishments, never knew. And no wonder. Having helped to create one new nation—America—Scots now set about saving another—their own.

  Since 1780, Britain had entered a period of crisis. It had lost the war to prevent American independence, and had taken a beating at the hands of the French and Spanish. Its politics were stuck in permanent factionalism and gridlock. A sense of malaise had settled over its ruling class, while popular unrest, encouraged by the French Revolution, spread across the provinces. In 1797 mutiny broke out in the British navy; Ireland was on the brink of revolt; the Bank of England, symbol of the nation’s stability, had to suspend cash payments.

  For nearly a hundred years the main cultural current in Britain had flowed from south to north. Now it reversed itself. Out of Scotland came thinkers, politicians, inventors, and writers who would restore Britain’s self-confidence, and equip it with the tools to confront modernity on its own terms. They remade its politics. They galvanized its intellectual and educational institutions; they gave it a new self-image and a new sense of its place in history. They also redid its infrastructure and refitted its empire. The “Scottish invasion” of the first three decades of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the great triumphs of the Victorian age.

  The keynote of the new Britain was self-confidence: confidence in its own powers, confidence in its future, confidence in its relationship with the past. Edinburgh epitomized this energy and optimism. It had grown up from a provincial town of just 50,000 persons as late as 1760 to an internationally recognized capital of nearly 100,000 by the turn of the century. It had burst its old boundaries. New buildings swarmed over the new South Bridge to the south, and residential terraces and graceful curved streets or “crescents” appeared to the north and west of Robert Adam’s Charlotte Square.

  The Adam style had given birth to a permanent Greek Revival, with an army of offshoots and imitators. One, Robert Reid, completed Charlotte Square with his West Register House and gave Parliament House a new, harmonious neoclassical façade. Another, William Playfair, turned Calton Hill overlooking the New Town into an Acropolis of elegant porticoed buildings and monuments. More than any other architect, Playfair gave Edinburgh the look to match its sobriquet of the “Athens of the North.”

  The University of Edinburgh had also outgrown its bounds and desperately needed a new home. On November 2, 1789, Principal William Robertson opened a public subscription to construct new buildings suitable “to the flourishing state of that seminary of learning,” which now educated “not only a great part of the Youth of Scotland, but many students from different places in the British Dominions, as well as Foreign Countries.” Robert Adam supplied the overall plan; it included a double pavilion of buildings, and a central tier with a dome and a massive, columned portico. Adam died before much of it had been built. Then events abroad, with the coming of the French Revolution and war with France, stopped construction completely. Almost thirty years would pass before William Playfair finished what Adam had started. But the new university, like its original design, expressed a sense of civic pride in Edinburgh’s rise as a center of learning, both for Britain and Europe.

  It offered an honor roll of distinguished teachers. William Cullen, professor of medicine, friend to Adam Smith, and mentor to the American Benjamin Rush, had died in 1790. But there was still Joseph Black, discoverer of carbon dioxide and professor of chemistry, and John Playfair, the architect’s father and a brilliant mathematician. Above all, there was Dugald Stewart, who had replaced Adam Ferguson in the chair of moral philosophy in 1785. For the next quarter-century he would influence the mind of Europe and the English-speaking world to a degree no Scotsman ever equaled, before or since.

  He was born and bred to the academic life. His father succeeded Colin Maclaurin in the University of Edinburgh’s chair in mathematics. Young Dugald attended both Edinburgh and Glasgow, and was versatile enough to substitute for his father as math professor, as well as for Adam Ferguson in moral philosophy. When Ferguson retired and Stewart took his place at age thirty-two, he brought with him a depth and breadth of learning probably unmatched by anyone else teaching at a British university. As one student recalled him: “He was of middle size, his forehead was large and bald, his eyebrows bushy, his eyes grey and intelligent, and capable of conveying any emotion, from serene sense to hearty humor. . . .” Mathematics, natural science, jurisprudence, history, political economy, ethics, the philosophy of mind—these were the fields over which Stewart ranged at will and which he opened up to successive generations of devoted students. He was the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the flesh (almost literally, since he wrote the preface for the famous third edition, published after his death, in 1822).

  Dugald Stewart served as the intellectual bridge between the Scottish Enlightenment and the Victorian age. The jurist Henry Cockburn remembered, “To me, Stewart’s lectures were like the opening of the heavens. I felt I had a soul.” His pupils included no less than two future prime ministers, Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. (The latter’s English father told him “there was nothing to be learned at English universities,” and sent him to Edinburgh instead.) They also numbered a future First Lord of the Admiralty (Lord Minto), a future Lord Chancellor (Henry Brougham), members of Parliament by the handful, and a cluster of leading philosophers. Through Dugald Stewart, “the Scottish philosophy” touched nearly every aspect of public life in Britain, for Stewart was not just a revered teacher; he was also a great synthesizer and organizer, who put the disparate works of the Scottish school together as a system, the foundation for what we call classical liberalism.

  For example, it was Stewart who put Adam Smith on the intellectual map. Prior to Stewart’s lectures on him in 1798, most Edinburgh people knew little about Smith except, as Cockburn (who attended that first class) noted, “that he had recently been a Commissioner of Customs, and had written a sensible book.” Stewart’s lectures turned Wealth of Nations into the fountainhead of all economic theory, and made the book virtually Holy Scripture to generations of Edinburgh-educated thinkers, economists, and politicians—who in turn spread its influence to Oxford, Cambridge, London, and the rest of the English-speaking world.

  Stewart merged Smith’s moral realism with the commonsense philosophy of Thomas Reid, who had been his own teacher at Glasgow. Stewart became Reid’s great champion at Edinburgh, almost his alter ego. He gave Reid an air of sophistication, smoothing out his more robust edges and making him attractive to the liberal English temper, just as he did with Smith. In fact, Stewart proved to have more success with English readers than any Scot before him, offering up a smooth synthesis of the Scottish school in a prose “as pleasing and as regular as their own rich fields bounded by hedgerows.”

  For example, Stewart downplayed the “common” aspect of the commonsense philosophy, and implied it should really be read as “good sense”—in other words, that our commonsense judgments reflect “that prudence and discretion which are the foundation of successful conduct.” While the foundations of truth were still equally available to all human beings, it was also clear that, in that respect, some are more equal than others. A trained political economist such as Adam Smith, Stewart would argue, will have more insight into the laws of human behavior, and be better able to predict how a certain fiscal policy will compel people to act, than the people themselves. Likewise, an experimental scientist such as Joseph Black will be able to offer a more comprehensive and more precise account of our daily reality than our own untrained and unscientif
ic understanding.

  Indeed, for Stewart, science became a powerful, even loaded, word. It represented the operations of the human mind at its highest pitch and turned our common experience of the world into a window on truth itself. The advance of science marked an aspect of human progress as important as civilization itself, Stewart believed; in fact, for him, it virtually defined progress. And although the other aspects of life—art, literature, ethics, politics, and political economy—remained important, Dugald Stewart wanted every student of human nature to strive for the same level of exactitude and precision as the chemist, the physicist, or the biologist.

  Of course, other Scottish thinkers had talked about politics as an exact science—David Hume had even written an essay on it. But they had looked for a scientific model as a way to understand politics and human conduct. Stewart was looking for a scientific way to organize it, and perhaps even create something new and better. He taught his students, including future prime ministers, to see the legislator in almost the same position as the experimental scientist or the inventor: applying mind and method to matter, in order to facilitate human happiness. Stewart was no utopian; this was not a blueprint for building a new society from scratch. Rather, he saw “the science of legislation” in Adam Smith’s terms, removing the obstacles that hinder the natural progress of commercial society and its social order. But he did introduce a new notion to the Scottish school. Political progress could take place in the same way it took place in mathematics or chemistry: by exhaustive investigation and research, by developing a clear theory that explained the facts, and then applying it.

  Stewart conceded that a true “political science” might not have been possible in the past. But now, in modern Britain, it was. This was Stewart’s other major point. Commercial society was not just more civilized or more productive or more rational than its predecessors; it was qualitatively different from every society that had preceded it. It broke the mold, in a profound sense, of the four-stage theory of civilization. A new dividing line now appeared in history: between the “modern” and the “premodern,” meaning all those efforts at organizing the human community over thousands of years, which had all had their moments of glory and then had come to grief. Something new, great, and permanent was here—the modern world—and the possibilities were limitless.

  This buoyant sense of optimism is partly what drew Dugald Stewart to the French Revolution. Stewart was in Paris that fateful summer of 1789, and it was with great excitement that he watched the dramatic events unfolding: the formation of the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. A new constitutional order was being born, he believed, based on justice, law, and natural right. He was repelled when the great spokesman of the old Whig Party, Edmund Burke, wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, forecasting doom, death, and dictatorship. Stewart’s student, James Mackintosh, wrote an impassioned reply vindicating the French revolutionary cause. Even the occasional outbreaks of mob violence did not deter Stewart. He wrote to a friend in late November 1791, “The little disorders which may now and then occur in a country, where things in general are in so good a train, are of very inconsiderable importance.”

  Then, over the next year, it turned out Burke had been right all along. Edmund Burke, Irishman and Episcopalian, was a strange figure in relation to the Scottish school. He knew many of its members; they heavily influenced his own view of history. But he had rejected their most characteristic conclusion, that the great driving force in the progress of civilization was economic change. Burke insisted it was the other way around: it was the elaborate network of civilized “manners,” meaning morality, law, and tradition grown up over generations, that made a system of commercial exchange based on trust possible, and hence human progress possible. He wrote, “Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures” of a higher moral order embedded in the fabric of society. Strip that away, he warned, and the entire edifice would come crashing down.

  A far cry from Dugald Stewart’s liberal optimism. In the event, Burke’s dire predictions were borne out in almost every detail—including, after his death in 1797, his strong conviction that the revolution must inevitably give way to a military dictator such as Napoleon. It gave Edmund Burke a posthumous reputation for prescience and sagacity that no other British political thinker could challenge. Certainly Stewart looked rather foolish; he was virtually ostracized by Edinburgh society. James Mackintosh publicly apologized for having challenged Burke, and turned into a stalwart critic of the French regime, and of revolutions in general.

  But in Stewart’s mind the issue of political progress persisted. He spent the next ten years making the lecture hall ring with his original conviction. A modern society deserved a modern political system, based on liberty, property, and the rule of law. If the French experiment had failed because it had gone too far, that did not mean that something less sweeping and more measured was not possible for Britain—and particularly for Scotland.

  Although everyone could now acknowledge that the union with England had been a blessing, it was also clear that the new society that had taken shape in Scotland had outgrown the tight constrictions first imposed in 1707, and then reconfirmed after 1745. Thanks to a rigidly high property qualification, barely one man in twenty had the vote. Economic growth had created an affluent middle class in Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberdeen that had no voice in how their affairs were governed. “There was no class of the community,” wrote Henry Cockburn years later, “so little thought of at this time as the mercantile. . . . They had no direct political power; no votes; and were far too subservient to be feared.” Instead, political power resided with the lairds and landowners, and with the government’s longtime representative on Scottish affairs, Henry Dundas, or Lord Melville. Cockburn described him, with understandable exaggeration, as “the absolute dictator of Scotland,” who “had the means of rewarding submission and of suppressing opposition beyond what were ever exercised in modern times by one person in any portion of the empire.”

  Dundas, or “King Harry the Ninth” as he was known, did control a vast network of patronage and appointments, and nearly half of Scotland’s seats in Parliament. In good times his political machine had kept Scotland on an even keel. In bad times it provoked hostility and frustration. And the 1790s were bad times, not just in Scotland but across England as well. Glasgow weavers had struck in 1787 against rising food prices; harvests failed in 1792 and then again in 1795 and 1796, as the specter of starvation spread across the land (it was, in fact, the backdrop for the first serious wave of Highland clearances). In July 1792, at Fortune’s Tavern in Edinburgh, a group of citizens calling themselves the Scottish Association of the Friends of the People launched a National Convention for a Britain-wide program of reform.

  In England, the coming of war with France in 1793 led to a massive crackdown on every suspected “subversive” or “Jacobin” individual or group the government could get its hands on. For twenty years radicals had demanded extension of the franchise, and a voice for ordinary men in Westminster. Now, with the French crisis and the Scottish National Convention as an excuse, they faced savage retribution. Several went on trial for their lives; those in England were acquitted, but Prime Minister William Pitt suspended habeas corpus.

  The bad harvests compounded the crisis. Magistrates in Berkshire organized a system of “outdoor relief” or welfare payments for the destitute based on the price of bread, and in October 1795 London broke into violent demonstrations against the opening of Parliament and against the King, Pitt, and the war against France. Two years later things had become so bad, with more suspensions of habeas corpus, a mutiny at the naval base at Spithead, and legislation banning gatherings of more than fifty persons, that opposition Whigs walked out of Parliament in protest.

  It was during this crisis that Dugald Stewart introduced his first course on political economy. He
was determined to chart a new direction for Britain, just as a coterie of his former students—Francis Horner, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn, Henry Brougham, and a transplanted Englishman, Sydney Smith—were determined to turn the Whig Party from political pariahs and has-beens into standard-bearers for change.

  The group was a volatile mix of youthful spirits, powerful intellects, and burgeoning egos. What drew them together was their commitment to Stewart’s vision of political progress. Smith was a minister, a gifted writer, and a genuine wit. Horner, “grave, studious, honourable, kind,” was studying to be a lawyer, since Edinburgh was a lawyer’s town, although he had tremendous gifts as a mathematician (at twenty he translated Euler’s standard work on algebra into English and composed a short biography of the German mathematician, both of which were published) and scientist. Horner regularly rose two hours before breakfast to do his chemical experiments, and spent his time away from the law books at lectures on anatomy and physiology.

  Francis Jeffrey was also a lawyer, and, although not yet thirty, one of Scotland’s best. The house he bought at Craigcrook, three miles from Edinburgh, was the hub of its robust intellectual society. It still stands, a crenellated Renaissance castle remodeled by Jeffrey’s friend William Playfair, where at three o’clock every afternoon writers, artists, painters, lawyers, and university faculty would gather for dinner. At Jeffrey’s table, “the talk [was] always good, but never ambitious, and those listening never in disrepute.” In fact, Edinburgh’s social pace was as relentless as ever, a habit left over from the days when everyone lived next door to one another in the Old Town. Long afterwards, Henry Cockburn calculated that in the first thirty years of his marriage, he and his wife never spent more than one night a month at home alone. Friends, men and women, met night after night at dinner and supper parties, with sumptuous supplies of food, drink, and intellectual discussion.