Smith’s friends, his fellow literati, were a close-knit group of people from remarkably similar backgrounds. None came from particularly ancient or wealthy families: they were the sons of church ministers, minor landowners, and lawyers and they were making their way in Hanoverian Britain as members of a newly emerging middle class. What they shared in common was a similar educational background and a desire to improve their country. Many of these thinkers became leading figures in their respective disciplines. For example, Smith’s teacher the Irish-born Francis Hutcheson, sometimes referred to as the ‘father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, developed the style of philosophical education that became the backbone of the Scottish universities during this period. Hutcheson’s success as a lecturer popularized the reconstructed version of the moral philosophy curriculum that became the shared basis of education in the Scottish universities. All students had to take moral philosophy, and the subject, which covered what we now think of as ethics, jurisprudence, aesthetics, politics, sociology, and philosophy of religion, formed a shared background to the thinking of the time. Hutcheson’s desire was to provide a system of moral philosophy that contributed to our knowledge of social life, through a natural jurisprudence and a theory of a moral sense (the innate sense in the human mind that allows us to identify the right thing to do). But more than anything, Hutcheson saw his primary role as the education of virtuous citizens and good Christians. Enlightened education had a social as well as an intellectual function, and this notion deeply influenced Adam Smith’s understanding of what was expected of him in his role at the University of Glasgow.
Hutcheson’s role as a father figure to the Scottish Enlightenment in Glasgow is paralleled by the role of Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Edinburgh. As we saw above, Kames was a senior judge, but he was also a philosopher and legal theorist who produced works of literary criticism and history. Kames sat at the centre of Edinburgh intellectual life, and his reputation as a sarcastic and combative thinker does not detract from his energy in promoting the careers of the younger members of the literati. Kames also acquired a significant estate through marriage and set out to apply the latest scientific knowledge to agricultural improvement, with his book The Gentleman Farmer (1776) intended to be a practical guide to improving land by the introduction of crop rotation and new crops such as the potato.
Another figure who applied himself to amateur scientific agriculture was Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). The long-serving Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who was the only member of the group born in the Highlands, kept a farm at Hallyards in Lothian, where he would experiment with the latest agricultural methods. Ferguson’s fame was built on An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which has earned him the reputation as one of the founders of sociology. Ferguson’s book was intended to trace the development of human social life through history, and it is a clear example of what we will see as the Scottish Enlightenment’s fascination with social change. Ferguson was interested in the details of the descriptions of different types of society that were being collected by explorers. These suggested that the divergence between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland was merely a particular case of a more general division between savage, barbarian, and civilized societies. The interest in types of society became the characteristic feature of Scottish thinking about society and history. Like his fellow literati, Ferguson attempted to explain how a universal human nature adapted to different circumstances to produce diverse social institutions. Ferguson’s history of civilization was accompanied by his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783), which sought to trace the social changes that led Rome to move from republic to empire. Ferguson, like Hutcheson, was keen to draw a moral lesson from his work, and both the Essay and the History are characterized by an interest in the dangers of moral corruption that face commercial societies.
Thomas Reid (1710–96), who succeeded Smith at Glasgow when he left for the tour with the Duke of Buccleuch, was the founder of the ‘common sense’ school of philosophy and a critic of some aspects of the work of Hume and Smith. Reid, like Ferguson, was also a Minister of the Kirk and shows the intimate relationships that existed between the various institutions of Scotland at the time. Another prime example of this is Hugh Blair (1718–1800), who was Minister of the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh, and perhaps the most famous pulpit orator of his generation, while also holding the post of Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, a position which is often regarded as the first university chair in English Literature. Before his appointment to Edinburgh, Blair succeeded Smith in giving the public lectures on rhetoric in the city and closely followed Smith’s model for a modern rhetorical education.
William Robertson (1721–93) also maintained a parallel career as Kirk Minister and Edinburgh Professor. He was a Professor and later the Principal of Edinburgh University, the leader of the Moderate faction in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Moderator of the Kirk, and Historiographer Royal for Scotland. The Moderate faction within the Kirk was the main political manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment. Under Robertson’s leadership, the literati were able to advance their Enlightenment project in the face of opposition from the evangelical traditionalists of the Popular faction. The Moderates were active in protecting thinkers like Hume and Kames from prosecution for heresy. They were also able to place sympathetic Ministers in the most influential parishes and to promote a form of religion that was far milder than the rigid Calvinism of the traditional Kirk. The decline in the enforcement of social conformity through the Kirk was accompanied by a shift in focus from strict adherence to the literal word of the Bible to a form of teaching that stressed conscience and good moral behaviour. In a period of less than fifty years, Scotland had moved from a near theocracy where heresy was punishable by death to a more liberal society where David Hume’s heterodox views on religion were met with social disapproval rather than prosecution.
Another interesting feature of this group was their tendency to move around the Scottish universities. For example, Smith’s friend and executor Joseph Black was a Professor at Glasgow and then Edinburgh. Black’s fame rests on isolating carbon dioxide and conducting ground-breaking experiments on latent heat. The other executor of Smith’s estate, James Hutton, studied chemistry and made a fortune by perfecting the production of ammonium chloride. Hutton’s true interest was geology and he travelled around Scotland observing rock formations, eventually producing his Theory of the Earth in 1795, the first modern account of geology. Black was also a physician and acted as doctor to several of the leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland became famous for producing some of the leading medical men of the century. John Gregory (1724–73), William Cullen (1710–90), and the brothers John (1728–93) and William Hunter (1718–83) were pioneers of modern medicine. They built the reputation of the Scottish universities as the most advanced centres of medical training in the world.
True to the interest in applying scientific knowledge, the Scottish Enlightenment also produced some of the most successful engineers of the century. James Watt (1736–1819) worked as instrument maker at the University of Glasgow while Smith was a professor there. He went on to develop the separate condenser for the Newcomen steam engine, an innovation that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Telford (1757–1834) was a gifted civil engineer whose work on the Caledonian Canal helped to open the Highlands to commerce and, together with the Forth and Clyde Canal, facilitated water transport in the Scottish mainland.
Smith’s childhood friends from Kirkcaldy included the architect Robert Adam (1728–92), whose Palladian style and neo-classicism dominated architecture at the time and helped to shape the most obvious physical symbol of the Scottish Enlightenment, the New Town of Edinburgh, whose Georgian elegance stands in contrast to the medieval old town. The building of the new town also involved the significant engineering feat of the draining of the Nor Loch and its replacement with Princes Street Gardens.
Adam was among the leading figures in the arts who emerged from Scotland at this time. Others include the portraitists Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) and Allan Ramsay (1713–84), who painted many of the central figures of the period, the historical landscape artist Gavin