THE SPANISH SUCCESSION CRISIS

By 1700, it has been suggested, Neapolitan men of letters were aware that the currents of scepticism, Epicureanism, and Augustinianism flowing so strongly from France had the potential to transform the understanding of man's place in this world. Scots were slower to appreciate this potential, quite possibly because those responsible for intellectual leadership were reluctant to engage with the new thinking; nevertheless they too were to recognise it eventually. But why should Neapolitans and Scots have become particularly interested in understanding man's place in this world? What made this increasingly their chief intellectual preoccupation? An answer, I shall suggest, lies in the incentive to thought offered by the circumstances of the two kingdoms. Before Neapolitans and Scots turned to systematic reflection on human society and its history, they had already devoted heir intellectual energies to discussion of the specific political and economic problems which they found in their own countries. Prompted by the onset of political, and in the Scottish case also economic, crisis in the late 1690s, both Neapolitan and Scottish observers began to consider the reasons for their countries' predicaments, and the means by which they might hope to escape them. Moreover it was not simply the subject matter of these discussions which pointed the Neapolitans and the Scots towards the more general analysis of the human condition; the debates also served as a testing ground of the existing conceptual resources for such analysis.