THE TEMPORALIST ORIGINS OF THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

A CASE STUDY IN THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF PLURALISM

Little granddaughter is doing wonderfully. Between my doting, I’ve found a little time to offer up something to keep you all cogitating over here.

In an earlier post I criticized the common practice in post-liberal circles of conflating the Enlightenment with the French Enlightenment. As I pointed out there, different Enlightenments resulted in different social and political theories correlating with difference national histories and cultures. I particularly emphasized the Scottish Enlightenment, which far from manifesting the liberalism of the French Enlightenment – with its emphasis upon progressivism, universalism, monadic individualism, and rationalism – instead emphasized the importance and value of organic community, with its sustained institutions, traditions, and customs. In other words, seen through the lens of this Nisbet-Innis social analysis I’ve been developing, while the French Enlightenment was a triumph of spatials, the Scottish Enlightenment preserved a secure place for temporals.¹

Also of interest, considering recent posts to this substack, is how we might better understand this Scottish difference through the lens of Nisbet’s historical sociology. As it happens, there were very specific conditions in the years running up to and through the Scottish Enlightenment which gave rise to temporal concerns. Causation is always difficult to prove, but it hardly seems farfetched to propose that those conditions had something to do with the specific manifestation of social and political ideas within the Scottish Enlightenment – and thereby distinguished that intellectual Enlightenment’s trajectory from its French counterpart.

The central element in these specific conditions was Scotland’s relationship to England. A centuries long history of war and struggle had characterized the relationship between these countries, which achieved some kind of stasis under the rule of the Stuarts, with the Union of the Crowns, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. While this union was hardly a smooth going affair (ask Oliver Cromwell), it provided a sustainable equilibrium between Scotland and England throughout most of the 17^th century. That promise of stasis though was broken when the final Stuart king, James II, was driven from the throne amid the so-called Glorious Revolution. This development put the magnifying glass back upon the nature of this relationship.

The eventual “resolution” of the reopened unease was the Treaty of Union, in 1707, which entailed Westminster dictating the conditions of Scottish political life. It was not a popular measure in Scotland, as it led to the reduction of traditional Scottish agencies of government: both the Scottish Privy Council and Scottish Parliament were abolished. Furthermore, English models were used to establish new administrative departments: e.g., Scottish Boards of Revenue in 1707 and a Scottish Exchequer in 1708.

The Scots though were able to protect some of their traditional institutions from the administrative imperialism of the English empire. (Remember that by this time the so-called “British Empire” had established various kinds of colonial dominance not merely across the British Isles, but across other continents, including North America, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent.) Especially noteworthy in this regard were the survival of the Church of Scotland, the significantly different Scottish legal system, and Scotland’s educational system. The importance of these developments alone would seem to be enough to emphasize to Scottish intellectuals of the 18^th century the challenges and value of a people preserving their customary and traditional institutions.

But there’s even more in the story that’s relevant to our Nisbet-Innis focus. In the clan based Scottish Highlands in particular, resistance to the English empire was intense, resulting in multiple rebellions that proposed to reinstate the Stuart crown in Scotland. This movement was known as Jacobitism.² Some passages from Jane Rendall’s book, The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, provides some flavor of what was entailed in these historical developments.  

the establishment of political stability throughout Scotland was continuing through this period. The major problem was, of course, the appeal of Jacobitism, an appeal with effect mainly in the Highlands. The contrast between Highland and Lowland society was stark; the still primitive, archaic and tribal Highland society had little in common with the Lowlands. The brief [Jacobite] attempts of I708 and I7I9, and the [Jacobite] risings of I7I5 and I745, showed how little the Highlands were committed to the British Crown, and also how greatly the power of the clan Campbell, headed by the Duke of Argyll, was distrusted as the 'civilising' agent of the British Government. Lawlessness and political disaffection was finally reduced after I745; but the contrast between the patriarchal, economically impoverished Highlands, and the rapidly changing agricultural and commercial world of the Lowlands, persisted.
       The clan organisation still dominated the Highlands; the responsibilities of the clan chief to his followers, the existence of private courts, the obligation to do military service, were still a reality in the early eighteenth century. Chiefs leased land often to tacksmen, their own kin, perhaps minor gentry; but those who farmed the land were the tenants and subtenants, relying on pastoral agriculture and the export of cattle. Clearly the nature of the clan made a large number of tenants and followers desirable to the chieftain; such a policy could certainly impede agricultural improvement.

Anyone remotely sensitive to the contrasting, if today unfashionable, values of temporals has to be a little amused by the obvious spatialist bias exhibited by Rendall in these remarks. Lawlessness and primitiveness are obviously matters of opinion seen through the lens of one’s own values. And as we’ve addressed here in other posts, “remedying” supposed economic impoverishment may well result in cultural impoverishment (see here). It’s a very particular worldview that frets about the former with no regard for the potential consequences of the latter. History is full of opinionated spatial’s (e.g., Marx’s famous remark about the “idiocy of rural life”) who saw in rural, pluralist society only backwardness and archaic traditions that stood in the way of universal progress and rationalization, in the name of “improvement,” manifest in the form of free markets and/or therapeutic social engineering of the administrative state.

Still, for all that, her description remains revealing. She draws to our attention the deeply pluralist, temporalist nature of the Scottish Highlands, rooted in the extended family of the clans, with their traditional judicial, military, and land institutions, with their customary forms of social organization. And to her credit, she does not fail to acknowledge these Scottish temporals’ deep suspicion of, and resistance to, the spatials of the English empire who regarded traditional Highland Scottish society as merely a barrier to be broken down in the interest of their supposed civilizing and improving expansionism. And what was ultimately at stake, she reveals in this later passage:

After I745, political defeat, and the example of economic change in the Lowlands, began to transform Highland life. The power of the clan chieftains had been broken; but there was still an important role for the Highland landowner to play. The demand for Highland produce, for wool and for cattle, made a new and prosperous era appear a possibility. Highland landowners saw their task as the organization of the transition from the older, wasteful forms of peasant cooperative agriculture, to a new, more efficient farming, oriented towards sheep, in which displaced tenants would be resettled in new villages devoted to fishing, to the linen industry, and to the gathering of kelp (seaweed).

Again, leaving aside Rendall’s spatial bias, in uncritically dismissing as “wasteful” a form of socially organized agriculture which may have been more worried by cultural impoverishment than economic impoverishment, her description clearly indicates that what was at work here were the same fundamental dynamics which we’ve already seen in both the French Revolution (here), and saw described in Polanyi’s analysis of the English enclosure acts (here). Temporals, with their emphasis upon organic community, shared land, and traditional institutions and customs, have their ancient rights and cultures smashed so that spatials, eager to spread the gospel of universal progress and rationalism, can gain access to the former’s land for purposes of (highly self-profiting) “improvement,” while reducing the deracinated leftover individuals to industrial fodder. As we’re seeing time and again, this is the story of spatial expansion and erosion of temporalist organic community.

It is hardly surprising then, given this contemporary context, that the thinkers who came to compose the Scottish branch of the Enlightenment should be far more concerned with the fortunes of the organic, customary, and traditional dimensions of community and social institutions than were their French counterparts, who rather than having their countrymen being the victims of spatialist expansion and imperialism, by the end of the 18^th century, had become the agents of such spatialist calamity. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, even if as intellectuals they were prone to spatialist dispositions, had witnessed either during their lifetime, or learned through knowledge of events immediately prior, the heavy costs of privileging spatial biases and values with insufficient regard to the temporal costs. Hence, as Innis would put it, they had a more sober view of the civilizational need for balance of space and time biases than their fanatically spatialist counterparts in France.

This observation, along with the intriguing post a bit back on Nisbet’s assessment of the historical role of Roman Law in advancing spatial values and practices against temporal pluralism, raises some interesting questions, especially for a materialist like me, as to the proper way to access the role of ideas in human history. I’ll have more to say about that topic in the near future.

Probably in the more immediate future, though, I’ll have some thoughts to share about my current reading of Ferdinand Tönnies’ seminal work of sociology, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and how it dovetails with our Innisian analyses here. So, if this sort of thing interests you, but you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know others who’d be likewise interested in such discussions, please…

1. On Nisbet’s pluralism, see here. On the wider civilizational implications of Innis’ grand pendulation between time and space bias, see here. For my preliminary sketching of these tendencies and the conflict between, what I’ve called, temporals and spatials as a motive force in human history, see here.

2. As Hamilton observes, in his introduction to the essay collection, Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820: “There was far more to Jacobitism than commitment to divine-right monarchy that exercised prerogative powers to dispense with and suspend laws…Jacobitism was an organic construct rooted in dynastic legitimacy that upheld a just social ordering headed by the Stuart monarchy and incorporating the body politic…The equitable running of central and local government drew primarily on the strength of custom and tradition in civil and religious affairs.”