Preposterous title aside, this is an excellent history of the Scottish Enlightenment
Review of How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman
As many intellectuals do – particularly when highly specialized in academia – this book takes things too far, extending an idea until it is so over-stated as to be almost ridiculous. Regardless of their many contributions, the Scots did NOT invent the modern world. Perhaps Herman wrote the book this way in order to market it to Scots in the US, who (like my father, who was perhaps 1/32 Scottish) enjoy imagining their heritage is connected with greatness. At any rate, the title does not do the book credit: it is an absolutely excellent study of the evolution and legacy of the "Scottish Enlightenment in historical context" – that would make for a less sexy title, but it better describes the many strengths of this enjoyable book.
Perhaps because of my own ignorance, this close re-telling of basic Scottish history fascinated me from the beginning. At the end of the 17th century, Scotland was an extremely poor backwater, dominated by fundamentalist Presbyterian tradition to such an extent that a young blasphemer – really only a vociferous student adolescent – was executed for heresy in 1697. The economy was limited by poor soil and climate, dooming residents to subsistence farming under a small, parochial ruling elite. Paradoxically, it was only via its absorption into England (to form Great Britain in 1707) that Scotland finally began to come into its own, first as an economic powerhouse benefitting from access to English markets and later as a pioneering intellectual hotspot, whose luminaries included not only Hume and Adam Smith, but also James Watt, the engineer who perfected the steam engine.
The intellectual contribution of Scottish thinkers, according to Herman, is the development of a scientific perspective on the development of man: rather than a static creation by God, they argued that all the attributes of man (our ethics, our beliefs, our capabilities) were a product of evolution and the environment. This opened the door to sociology/anthropology, psychology, economics, even historical research. Furthermore, Herman argues, Scottish universities attempted to reorder the entire corpus of human knowledge into organized disciplines, that is, inter-related specialties, placing them in context if not hierarchies. Finally, it was Scots who wrote some of the great literary classics, often establishing the foundation of new disciplines, from Smith's Wealth of Nations and Hume's Inquiry into Human Understanding to Boswell's biography of Johnson. The stories behind these accomplishments are recounted in absolutely wonderful thumbnail sketches of their work, vividly evoking the social context from which they arose.
On the economic front, the Scots were typical of those entering a system from the periphery: they studied what others in more developed areas were doing from their own point of view and created fundamental improvements and new applications, unimagined ways of doing things, in many cases far better than the original inventors. Once again, it was done in accordance with scientific pragmatism – by trying things in a practical way, James Watt hugely improved upon the steam engine that someone else invented. There can be no doubt that these innovations were crucial to the development of industrial capitalism, a new way to harness chemical energy in the service of man, arguably the greatest advancement in human society and technology since the introduction of farming practices in the neolithic age. In a similar way, Scots invented the breach-loading rifle and sealed bullet shells, creating a massive military advantage for Europeans as they were conquering the world. There are many more examples of this kind of practical innovation.
That being said, Herman begins to go overboard when he posits that virtually all of it came from Scotland or Scots who had emigrated. About 2/3 of the way through, the book becomes a catalogue to prove this, which is boring compared to the luscious historical context he develops in earlier chapters. This became a slog for me and I began to yearn for the book to end. Essentially, I think that many of the innovations came from Scots, but does the point really need to be made? Sure, Scots were involved in all of the Enlightenment stuff, but so were many others: in my opinion, it was a Euro-American movement that transcended borders, it was cross-fertilizing rather than the product of any one people. Herman's claim has about as much meaning as arguing that rock is "black"(read The Blues) or "white" (read Rockabilly) – it makes no sense to do so.
I learned a great deal from this book, indeed it has changed my perception of the period fundamentally. Herman's writing style is elegant, clear, and evocative. I just wish he had not pushed his arguments to such a preposterous extreme.
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