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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Arthur H. WilliamsonReviewed work(s):

Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early ModernHistory by David Allan

Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 700-703Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124234

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700 Book Reviewspamphlets and then summarizedthem in what he candidly describes as "a straight-forward, often literal fashion rather than subjecting them to deconstructionist,reductionist, magist or symbolic methods of interpretation"p. xiii). He takes on notjust historical scholars but also literarycritics. He is probablyright when he suggeststhat this material was read much more widely by contemporaries than the moresophisticated theological and political material. Nonetheless, while it is helpful toknow a little more abouthow popularbeliefs were then as now deeply conservative,being reminded of that fact is not especially helpful as we strive to understandwhychangeneverthelessdoes take place. It is likely thata close examinationof these kindsof sources from the seventeenth century onward would demonstrate the innateconservatismof their readership.Nonetheless,the world keeps changing,andattitudestowardpoliticaland divine authority,political representation, ndmanyothersubjectschange with it. There must be something going on somewhere that escapes theattentionof the tabloids and their forebearsand to which historiansrightly pay somemind.

MICHAEL G. FINLAYSONUniversityof Toronto

Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship inEarly Modern History. By David Allan.Edinburgh:EdinburghUniversity Press, 1993; distributedin the United States byColumbia University Press, New York. Pp. viii + 276. $69.00 (cloth); $25.00(paper).Well over a century ago it became a commonplace to claim that the Reformationbreatheda spiritcompletely alien to theEnlightenment nd bore no connection,beyondhostility, to the great intellectual events of the eighteenth century-a view madecanonical by ErnstCassirer in 1932, though well establishedby the mid-nineteenthcentury. Nowhere has this perception been less plausible than with regard to theScottish Enlightenment.And yet nowhereis it more vehemently nsisted upon.At leastsince Henry Buckle, Scottish culturalachievements in the eighteenth century havebeen portrayedas the resultof the kingdom's happyescape from its execrablepast ofthe previous two centuries,a past characterizedby Calvinism, bigotry, and clericalrepression.Taken to its logical extreme-perhaps most visibly in the work of H. R.Trevor-Roper-this anti-Protestant hesis detaches the Scottish EnlightenmentfromScotland and insists that the two have precious little to do with one another.At present such deeply held assumptionscontinue to underlie the work of a greatmany historiansof the period,including thatof N. T. Phillipsonand John Robertson,among numerous others. Perhapssurprisingly,the positivist methods of nationalisthistorians ike John Ferguson have downplayedthe significance(and Scottishness)ofScotland's Enlightenmentand thereby confirmedrather than confuted conventionalwisdom. Portrayedas deriving from English and continentalstyles of thoughtand asinvolving but a handful of giants, the Scottish Enlightenment has found itselfdecontextualizedon all sides. Even historians deeply immersed in the entire earlymodern period, like T. C. Smout and the late Gordon Donaldson, have approachedthese events gingerly and with considerable hesitation. Still more tellingly for theproblemof context,AlexanderBroadie's recent and quiteunique studyof what he hascalled the Scottish tradition n philosophyfinds anticipationsof the Enlightenmentn

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Book Reviews 701the late Middle Ages, while quite specifically dissociating such thought from theRenaissance and Reformation.David Allan's important book seeks nothing less than to explode this deeplyentrenched, almost reflexive approach to the eighteenth century. For Allan, theEnlightenment s the culmination of Scotland's Calvinist experience, not a radicaldeparture romit. The axial period,he argues, is the sixteenth century,when Scottishintellectuals synthesized humanistmethods and assumptionswith the objectives ofCalvinist reform.The signal resultwas a form of historicalscholarship hat made theReformationand its purposes intelligible by locating them within developmentalprocesses. At once intensely moralistic and militantly public-minded, the newscholarshipsought generally to instill civic virtue and, specifically, to educate a socialleadership.Although Scottish scholarshipdrew on and reassembled medieval materials, itscritical methodsand ambivalence toward the past gave it a presentfocus, and,Allannotes, only afterthe mid-seventeenthcentury did a Calvinist vision of the full courseof Scottish history actuallyemerge.Allan brieflynotices the apocalypticexpectationsof the Scottish Reformation but stresses their "recrudescence"after 1650 in formsemphasizingdivine providenceand higher purposesnot readily perceivedby humanreason.The new emphasis on providentialismand Stoicism visibly derived from thepoliticaldisastersof the latercentury,and while these increasinglysomberattitudesdidnot displace altogether he earlierand more optimisticintegrationof Calvin and Cato,they clearly qualifiedit. While in no way leadingto quietismandwithdrawal,evidenthistoricalcausationand the efficacyof humanwill in society recededfromtheirformerpersuasiveness.All of these elementsand the tensions among them,Allan maintains,were absorbedinto the changed circumstancesof the early eighteenthcentury.In this more secure,more prosperous, and less conflicted environment, Scottish scholarship becameincreasingly articulate, elaborate,and diverse in its themes, but not fundamentallydifferent in its root character.Despite a new tone and, often enough, by 1740self-serving triumphalist llusions, it remained the same projectwith the same socialpurposes.Only its context had changed.Neither the focus on "experience" n historynor on "conjecture"constitutedreal departures rom earlierattitudes,while the newscience and the new philosophydid not confront(or contribute o) Scottish scholarlytraditions. If there now emerged an unprecedentedpreoccupation with materialconditionsand their social consequences, these grew directlyout of long-establishedmoralistic concerns reaching back to Hector Boece and George Buchanan in thesixteenth century.The new environment eventually ensured that the discussion ofmannersandjurisprudencebecame enriched with economics and protosociology,butthe form of the inquiry and its intentions remained strikingly continuous. Notsurprisingly, he new materialcategories long continued to be descriptiveand evenhortatory ather hancausal.Even the triumphalist epudiationof earlier earning, tselffarfrom universal, adopteda voice startlinglysimilar to thatof its Calvinistforebears:fathersof the ScottishReformationsuch as JohnKnox and RobertPont,afterall, boreutterly analogouscontemptfor Scotland's recent and darkpast.Most striking is the eighteenth-centuryscholars' continuing moral and didacticpurpose,their confidencein the applicationsof historical earning,their civic urgency,their powerful engagement rather than dispassionate reflection. Humanist orators,Calvinist preachers, Enlightened historians all comprised similar social figuresparticipatingn a common tradition.The transitionfrom David Hume of Godscroft,circa 1556-1631, to theDavid Hume, 1711-76, was less a matterof purposethan of

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702 Book Reviewspower: in the eighteenth-centurycircumstances, with the political elites drawnincreasingly away to London, the Scottish scholars themselves assumed the socialleadershipwith which they had so long been exercised. The house of intellect, Allanseems to suggest, has rarely if ever occupied a position as compelling and powerful.But it did not last long. By 1770, Allan argues, their confidence in civic virtue andradical humanism was manifestly in decline. Increasingly concerned with the unin-tended consequences of political action and the essential irrationality of socialoutcomes, Scottish intellectuals foundthemselves drawn to providentialismand Stoicantirationalism.This, Allan suggests, is the truecontext for Adam Smith's "invisiblehand"and, more generally,for the liberalutopia'ssupplantingof its republicanrival.Allan sees a close relationshipbetween orthodoxcausality and the ultimatelyblindworld of passion andinterest, and he invites his readersto imagine the developmentand demise of the Enlightenmentas the workingout of the deep tensions within theCalvinist and humanist traditions from which it arose. Under a range of lateeighteenth-centurypressures-social and political fragmentation,Frenchand Ameri-can radicalism, London-basedreaction, the new industrialization-antirationalismnthe humansciences seemed increasinglypersuasive,andyet nothingmorethoroughlyimpeached hese intellectuals'social statusandany programof social improvement. nthe end the Scottish Enlightenmentfracturedbefore philosophical radicalism andBurkean conservatism, with perhaps Whig historiography emerging as Calvinistprovidentialism'sfinal resting place. By the early nineteenth century the Scottishintellectexperienceda failureof nerve-in part manifestedby the rise of a simplisticpatriotismand a polite anglophobia-that would render Scottish cultureincreasinglyprovincialandderivative.It was a failure of nerve,Allanseems to suggest, from whichScotland has yet to recover.In at least broad terms Allan's thesis is simply unassailable,and by almost anystandarda book like this one has been long, long overdue.However,it is not withoutproblemsand lacunae of considerablemoment.Allan appearsdistinctlyuncomfortablewith the Scottish apocalypse. This idea, so central to the sixteenth century and,indirectly, o the modem world, strikes him as simply grim, violent, paranoid pp. 31,44, 53, 203). He sees none of its creative power whereby Scots could imaginequalitative change in time and history.Later seventeenth-centuryprovidentialism sthus much less a recrudescence han an attenuation.The real measureof the Calvinistapocalypseis the mid-seventeenth-century cottish Revolutionwhere the vocabularyof civic virtuesurely reached an unduplicatedapex:one encounters n the registersofthe Committee of Estates during the 1640s unending reference to the "publictinterest," he "publictaccount,"the "publictwelfare."Perhapsonly in Scotland couldpolicies be enacted in the name of the public interest and thereaftersomehow findconfirmation n the name of the king.More important,apocalypticism-so integralto the foundationsof Scottish culturethat not even such resolute classicists as Buchananand Hume of Godscroftprovedfully immuneto its power-is severely discontinuouswith the Enlightenment.But theconclusion will likely turn out to be less the rejection of the apocalypse than itstransvaluation ndreformulation.The divide consequentlywill almostcertainlyproveless severe than might initially appear.But no serious discussion of the period dareignore the issue, for to do so will barely do other than confirmBuckle's Victoriandisquiet.Still other potential problems abound in imagining the Enlightened heirs toScotland's Renaissance and Reformation: the role of the covenant, anticlericalism(perhapsthe apparentlyearly role of the clergy within such problematicventures as

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Book Reviews 703freemasonry, n stark contrastto both Protestant and Counter-ReformedFrance, isrelevanthere),and the long-standingScottish concernwith the threatof barbarism ndthe preconditionsof civilization. These are lines of inquiry that deeply inform thetextures of the early modern Scottish experience.Yet none of themdetracts rom Allan's magisterialachievement.He has earned ourunqualifiedapplause.Still, one comes away from this volume possibly less amazedbyits courage or even impressedby its insight than wondering about the ideologicalpurchasethat so prolongedsuch militant and determinedmisconceptions. Ultimately,any de-Calvinizationof the Scottishpast-whether in the name of Catholicism or anyother contemporary onservatism-must inherently misrepresent t.

ARTHUR H. WILLIAMSONCaliforniaState University,Sacramento

Riot, Risings, and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland. By Ian Gilmour.London: Pimlico, 1993. Pp. viii + 504. $19.95.This is a book by an unusual author.A politicianwho is willing to put in the researchnecessary to write a serious history book, and write it well, is a rare bird nowadays.Moreover, because Sir Ian Gilmour (a member of the first Thatcher cabinet) isquintessentiallyone of Britain's ruling elite, he has a different perspective than mostacademic authors.Even the one-nation Conservatism Gilmourespouses adds to hisdistinctiveness,for it echoes the code of his spiritual orebears: hepaternalistic quireswhose governanceof eighteenth-centuryEnglandis his subject.The book is divided into three parts. The first, "legitimacy in dispute,"deals with1660-1760 and looks at the major convulsions of the English body politic. Hencechapterson the GloriousRevolution, the Sacheverellriots, the Excise Crisis, and theJacobite rebellions. The second is thematic and deals with perennialconfrontationsbetween rulersandruledin eighteenth-centuryEngland-food riots, press gangs, gamelaws, and so on-but also considers the roles of the law and the armyas engines ofsocial control.There s also a thought-provoking hapteron thesignificanceof dueling.The final section, "Avoidance of Revolution," seeks to explain how, despite theconvulsions of the late eighteenth century,England'selite never faced a substantiveplebeian challenge to their authority.Whatemerges from Gilmour'sanalysis is a familiarpicture. England'srulerswereessentially moderate in their use of state power (i.e., state violence). Thus theycheerfullylooted the public coffers and selfishly served theirown class interestsbut,in general,were always carefulto obey the law even when it hampered he pursuitoftheirown advantage.Most importantof all, they ensuredthe middle classes could geton withmaking moneywhile seeing to it that the poordid not starve.The elite was alsounitedin its estimate of the virtuesof the statusquo andits own righteousness.Henceit couldcompromisewith food rioters,navalmutineers,andstrikerswithoutbecomingneurotic.Conversely,restrainedprotest by the lower ordersusually producedresults,which reinforced their acceptanceof the powers that were. Governors and governedworkedthrough violence, but both sides sought to keep it controlledviolence.Whatis immediately strikingabout Gilmour'sdepictionof the violent dynamics ofrelationsbetween rulers and ruled is its alignmentwith the Marxisthistoriographiccanon.And, indeed,his notes revealhis debtto scholars such as EdwardP.Thompson