Scott is sometimes said to show a ‘notorious illiberalism’. But the moderate world-view his fictions appear to endorse – with its commitment to security of property, to civil liberty (meaning security from government oppression), and to the separation of the private from the political realm – can be placed within what is now identified as the ‘liberal’ tradition associated with Locke, Hume, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. In this and the following chapters I will consider how the historical perspective of Scott's fiction allows the liberal conscience to be confronted with beliefs, identities, and kinds of allegiance it has already supposedly renounced, and I will argue that this confrontation enables an unprecedented fictional engagement with some of the enduring moral, social, and political problems bequeathed by the emergence of liberalism.

In our own time, liberalism has been subject to vigorous attack on several fronts. Two kinds of criticism have special relevance here.

Individual versus Community

First, liberalism is attacked for what is seen as its emphasis on the autonomy of the individual at the expense of communal values. For example, communitarian critics such as Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre denounce what they see as the fragmented and impersonal nature of modern liberal societies, whose ‘atomism’ and lack of shared values are said to render life morally meaningless and to provide no secure basis for patriotism.