Awaiting the dawn of a new Enlightenment

It’s not impossible that Scotland could once again recapture global admiration as in the 18th century, writes

without even mentioning the Enlightenment. There was probably something about the Scottish Enlightenment that especially appealed to Voltaire, an easy and tolerant man, despite his acid tongue, compared to the brittle and intellectual French Enlightenment or the idealistic and authoritarian German Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment, nicest of them all, was an affair of good cheer, good drink and good talk, irresistible to the many foreigners who flocked here to partake of it. They came from as far away as America and Russia, and when they went home again they spread the great ideas round the world.

It is the humanity of the Scottish Enlightenment I seek to bring out in my new book, A HigherWorld,Scotland17071815 (Birlinn, £25).

To illustrate it, let me compare two figures who are not normally compared, Robert Burns and Adam Smith. They probably never met, though when Burns first came to Edinburgh, he stayed in the Lawnmarket, while Smith was working as a commissioner of customs in what is now the City Chambers. So near and yet so far – but perhaps they were closer than we usually think.

For the humanity of Burns, it is hardly necessary to advance any argument. He is the man of the people rather than (as poets often like to be) the lonely pioneer, because this status satisfies in him his natural man. It is filled, too, with useful examples of what the common man, if also a man of sense, should look out for in life if he wants to make the material best of it (not a matter to which even Burns could be indifferent).

Smith is particularly vigilant against examples of collusion between politicians and businessmen, in what today we call rip-offs. He writes: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Smith did not live into the age of the lobbyist, but he had already got the general idea.

He added that when businessmen put to government some wonderful new scheme of overwhelming benefit to the public, we should always remember that “it comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed the public”. That also seems a perfect description of their role in the Scottish referendum.

These are just two of the high standards, in poetry and in political economy, that Scotland set in many fields in the 18th century. They gave this small nation its one era of truly global significance. Never again was Scotland to be so exemplary – though perhaps we need to wait to see what yet may happen in the 21st century.