Ethics and the Science of Legislation: Legislators, Philosophers, and Courts in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment

This chapter examines how the jurisprudence of the Scottish Enlightenment influenced the reform of the Court of Session and its procedure. It first provides an overview of legislation and courts in eighteenth-century Scotland before discussing the idea of the ‘legislator’, with particular emphasis on some of the attitudes taken to it and the ambiguities of the term. It then considers the development of ethical theory in Scotland during the period, along with Adam Smith's legal philosophy. It also analyses Smith's science of legislation and its implications in the context of Scottish legal history. It concludes by showing how Scottish rejection of ethical rationalism and Smith's science of legislation provided what can be described as a sustained critique of the contemporary structure of the Court of Session and of its operation.

The property theory of Lord Kames (Henry Home)

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Rahmatian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Property Theory ◽  
Property System ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Coherent Property

Lord Kames (Henry Home) (1696–1782) was a well-known jurist, philosopher and judge in the Scottish Enlightenment, whose writings on aesthetics and literary criticism, especially, were very significant in the eighteenth century and later, not only in Britain and the United States, but also in France and Germany. His works on law and legal history were important mainly during his lifetime, but at least one aspect of his legal writings deserves special attention today: his concept of property, which he never stated as one comprehensive theory. Nevertheless, it pervades most of his work. This article seeks to extract and piece together, from a number of his legal and non-legal works, the elements of this quite original property theory which comprises legal-doctrinal, philosophical-theoretical, historical, sociological and psychological, aesthetic-moral and economic aspects. Together these elements can be restated as a surprisingly coherent property system, which may enrich discussions in modern property theory.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

The Invention of National Legal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Rückert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Critical Method

The chapter undertakes the first European overview up to the present and a comparison of the main European variations with its significant differences and communalities. European legal history is a product of special historiographies. The decisive contexts were the legal humanism and the monarchical state-nationalism of the seventeenth century. Legal history now was understood as task of legitimation, integration, and differentiation. The scientific basis was a new critical method. In the late eighteenth century the task became a modern national drive and was concentrated on state and folk. At the same time the genre was widened in nearly all branches of law. The three pioneers and model cases, namely Hermann Conring (1643) with K.F. Eichhorn (1808), Claude Fleury (about 1670), and Matthew Hale (about 1670), are analysed intensively.

scholarly journals Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-325
Author(s):  
C. A. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Human Interest ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

Borderlands of Identity and the Aesthetics of Disjuncture: An Introduction to Scottish Gothic

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Carol Margaret Davison ◽  
Monica Germanà
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
British History ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

The idea of a ‘Gothic Scotland’, however, did not prove difficult to conceptualise in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth when a Romanticised portrait of Scotland furnished the nation’s most prevalent cultural image. As Ian Duncan astutely observes in regard to the politics of literary history, it was ‘Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or commodity’ rather than a site of Romantic production (Duncan et al. 2004: 2). Such an objectification was ironic given the existence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and its rationally fuelled preoccupations. That objectification was also, notably, expressed in two forms – in both the lighter and darker, more Gothic, shades of Romanticism. Despite the differences in these two manifestations, the Highlands served in both as a synecdoche for a Scotland that exemplified two primary attitudes towards ‘British’ history and rapid modernisation.

Respectable Mistresses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

Archibald MacLaren's “The Negro Slaves” and the Scottish Response to British Colonialism

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
British Government ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Cultivation Technology ◽  
Seeds And Fruits

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.

Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism

1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.

scholarly journals John Glas and the Development of Religious Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALASDAIR RAFFE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Government

This article discusses John Glas, a minister deposed by the Church of Scotland in 1728, in order to examine the growth of religious pluralism in Scotland. The article begins by considering why Glas abandoned Presbyterian principles of Church government, adopting Congregationalist views instead. Glas's case helped to change the Scottish church courts’ conception of deposed ministers, reflecting a reappraisal of Nonconformity. Moreover, Glas's experiences allow us to distinguish between church parties formed to conduct business, and those representing theological attitudes. Finally, Glas's case calls into question the broadest definitions of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, drawing attention to the emergence of pluralism.

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