THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT has in recent years re-emerged as a major historical issue. The location of Scottish political economy and moral philosophy in the mainstream of academic debate has allowed Scotland to be seen as a singularly important centre within the celebrated eighteenth-century European revival of learning. Many attempts have been made to explain the vigorous culture and climate of infectious intellectual endeavour which are now synonymous with the age of Adam Smith and David Hume. It has become acceptable, even fashionable, to consider the ‘hotbed of genius ‘ which excited the admiration of Carlo Denina and the exclamations of Matthew Bramble as a pre-eminently enlightened community. A great deal has been written, moreover, about the leading Scottish men of letters, their works and their formidable legacies. If Hume awoke Kant from his slumbers, then we now know that the ideas associated with men like Adam Ferguson, Hugh Blair, and Thomas Reid, were to be of comparable influence among succeeding generations of intellectuals. Yet, despite the vivacity with which Scottish Enlightenment studies have been taken up, and the enthusiasm displayed in scholarly debates which have generated both heat and light, one view of its intellectual origins has to a considerable extent prevailed. This view, which has grown into a historiographical juggernaut with its own formidable momentum, characterises the Enlightenment in Scotland as a revolutionary phenomenon, to be contrasted sharply with an intolerant and benighted past. In other words, it can safely be regarded as an aberration in Scotland's otherwise unblemished record of internecine bickering and cultural sterility.

For Henry Buckle, perhaps the most famous and controversial Victorian commentator on this question, the Scottish Enlightenment consisted in an escape from the clutches of the Kirk's theological embrace. If Scottish philosophy remained tainted with a deductive method, it could nevertheless be regarded essentially as a reaction against ‘one of the most detestable tyrannies ever seen on earth’. Other Victorian and Edwardian scholars like H. G. Graham and Hector Macpherson, meanwhile, put flesh upon the gaunt skeleton of Buckle's schema. Having dismissed the seventeenth century in a brief opening chapter, Macpherson actually proceeded to portray the eighteenth beneath the bold and unambiguous title ‘The Reaction: Moderatism’.