Between approximately 1740 and 1800, the city of Edinburgh – population around 80,000 at the period’s peak, capital of a country recently absorbed into the British state by the Act of Union, geographically peripheral to the centres of European intellectual life – produced a concentration of original thought that reshaped economics, philosophy, geology, chemistry, sociology, history and political theory. This is not a provincial boast. It is a statement that the intellectual historians of several countries have spent two and a half centuries trying to explain.
David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 and A Treatise of Human Nature was the most radical statement of empiricist philosophy in the English language. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and provided the conceptual framework that modern economics has spent 250 years building on and arguing with. James Hutton published his Theory of the Earth in 1788 and demonstrated that the earth was incomprehensibly old, laying the conceptual foundations for modern geology and for Darwin’s evolution theory. Joseph Black isolated carbon dioxide in 1754 and described the principles of specific heat. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society in 1767 created what became sociology. William Robertson’s historical method anticipated the practices of professional modern historiography.
The Social Infrastructure
The question of why Edinburgh in this period produced this concentration of thought has several partial answers. The social infrastructure was important: the clubs and debating societies – the Select Society, the Poker Club, the Oyster Club – brought professionals, academics, lawyers and merchants into regular contact with each other in a way that crossed disciplinary boundaries. Hume, Smith and Adam Ferguson were close friends who discussed each other’s work. Black and Hutton were neighbours. The city was small enough that the intellectual elite was a community rather than a set of parallel institutions.
The university was central but not in the standard way. Edinburgh University in the eighteenth century was more practically oriented than Oxford or Cambridge – less classical, more oriented toward medicine, law and natural philosophy. It attracted students from across Britain, from the American colonies, from continental Europe. The medical school was among the finest in the world. The teaching brought people to Edinburgh who then stayed and participated in the intellectual culture the university had seeded.
The Political Context
The Act of Union of 1707 had a paradoxical effect on Scottish intellectual life. By removing the Scottish Parliament to Westminster, it freed the Edinburgh professional classes from direct political engagement with governance. The energy that had gone into parliamentary politics redirected into intellectual production. The Enlightenment figures were not, for the most part, political actors. Hume was a diplomat and librarian. Smith was a customs commissioner. Their intellectual ambitions were channelled into ideas rather than power.
There was also a particular Scottish Calvinist inheritance at work. The emphasis on literacy – every parish to have a school, every communicant to read the Bible – had produced by the eighteenth century a society with unusually high literacy rates and a cultural tradition of taking ideas seriously. The Enlightenment figures were arguing against Calvinist orthodoxy in many cases, but they were arguing in a culture that had been shaped by Calvinism’s insistence on the importance of thought.
What They Left
The specific ideas the Edinburgh Enlightenment produced have had very different fates. Smith’s economics became the intellectual foundation of capitalism; his work has been invoked to justify practices he would not have recognised as consistent with his arguments. Hume’s philosophy remains genuinely unsettled – his problem of induction, his argument against miracles, his scepticism about causality are still active philosophical problems. Hutton’s deep time became the foundation of modern earth science.
The physical Edinburgh of the Enlightenment is largely intact. The New Town, built from the 1760s onwards, was where many of the Enlightenment figures lived and worked. David Hume’s grave is in Calton Hill cemetery, visible from Princes Street. Adam Smith’s grave is in Canongate Kirkyard on the Royal Mile. The house at 17 Panmure Place where Adam Smith lived in his last years is still standing. The city that produced the intellectual framework for the modern world is available, on foot, in an afternoon.
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