From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment

1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. M. Höpfl
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Past ◽  
Preliminary Identification ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
Indirect Source

“He (Adam Smith) wanted to show how from being a savage, (man) rose to be a Scotchman.” (Walter Bagehot)The Rev. Dr. Folliott:“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’”(Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle)The purpose of this essay is to consider an intellectual method which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the philosophes of Scotland. This method, ‘conjectural history,’ appears to be the direct or indirect source of many of the schemes of social evolution so popular in the nineteenth century, but it has itself been little investigated, and often misunderstood by assimilation to its progeny.I. The Nature of Conjectural History‘Conjectural history’ was, it seems, first distinguished from the more conventional narrative form of history by Dugald Stewart. He remarked on its use in the writings of Adam Smith, but the sort of inquiry to which we find Stewart referring is a method for understanding social phenomena which was characteristic of a whole group of Scottish writers, and we may take what he tells us about Smith as preliminary identification of the method.Stewart explained conjectural history as arising out of comparisons between “our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, [and] those which prevail among rude tribes” (whether of the past or the present). Such comparisons, he claimed, cannot fail to raise the question “by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.”

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Retrospective Assessment ◽  
The 1960S

A collection of essays by a leading scholar. The work selected spans several decades, which together with three new unpublished pieces, cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole while incorporating detailed examination of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. There is, in addition, a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry’s personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1960s. Each of the previously published chapters includes a postscript where Berry comments on subsequent work and his own retrospective assessment. The recurrent themes are the ideas of sociability and socialisation, the Humean science of man and Smith’s analysis of the relation between commerce and morality.

Improving Implementation Methods Subjects Study Group At Ips At Class Vi Sdn 03 Padang District Of Lengayang Marapalam Academic Year 2015/2016

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-128
Author(s):  
Lisdaini Lisdaini
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Action Observation ◽  
Sixth Grade ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Exact Science ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Year

Function lessons Social Science (IPS) Elementary School is to develop a rational attitude about social phenomena as well as an insight into the development of Indonesian society and mas world in the past and the present. While the purpose of social studies in primary school is to take the knowledge and basic skills that are useful for students in daily life and be able to develop an understanding of the development of Indonesian society since the past until the present. In the evaluation, the teaching of social studies for students of SD Negeri 03 Padang District of Lengayang Marapalam Academic Year 2015/2016 industrious and keen to learn, they will be easier to work on and solve the problems it faces, and they will be fond of social studies for social studies is not an exact lesson or an exact science that requires a definite answer. This study is an action research (PTK) using the model Kemmis and MC. Taggart (1988). Kemmis develop a model which would exist sarkan spiral of self-reflection system starts with a plan, action, observation and reflection, for re-planning is the basis for a square - square troubleshooting. Student achievement SD Negeri 03 Padang District of Lengayang Marapalam Academic Year 2015/2016 class VI is still not satisfactory. This research is a class action ( classroom action research ). In the initial condition (prasiklus) achievement of sixth grade social studies on the competence of the formation of market prices are still low. Of the 22 students who score less than KKM 14 students (53.57%), within the limits of KKM there are five students (25%) and exceeded the limits of existing KKM 3 students (21, 43%) with an average grade 66.75.  

Hume and Smith on Natural Religion

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe prominence of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in contemporary philosophy of religion has led it to overshadow his other short work, The Natural History of Religion, and thus obscure the fact that the social psychology of religion was in many ways of greater interest and more widely debated among the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment than philosophical theology. This paper examines and compares the social psychology of religion advanced by Hume and Adam Smith. It argues that Hume's account of the psychological sources and social significance of religion is less satisfactory than Smith's.

scholarly journals Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger L. Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Economic Dynamic ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract "Conjectural history" is used here to "denote any rational or naturalistic account of the origins and development of institutions, beliefs or practices not based on documents or copies of documents or other artifacts contemporary (or thought to be contemporary) with the subjects studied." Many recent historians have focused on the apparent emergence within Scotland of a large number of sophisticated conjectural histories around ¡750, and analysed them within the framework of a Marxist-oriented social science. This paper argues that such a perspective is "inappropriate and misguided." If one looks at these works as an outcome of what went before, rather than a forerunner of what came after, they begin to lose their modernistic flavour. Conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment were based essentially on four sources: the Bible and its commentaries, the classics, modern works of philosophy and travel accounts. Each had an influence on the works produced. The parallels between the Biblical and the secular conjectural histories are, for example, instructive and it is clear that no Scottish historian could consistently hold a doctrine of economic deter- minism or historical materialism and still reconcile this position with his Calvinist beliefs. Works such as Lucretius' On the Nature of Things had influenced the con- jectural histories of the Renaissance and continued to be used by the Scots just as they were by the English deists, whose speculations about historical development were also helpful to Scottish writers. Travel accounts provided information concerning mankind at various stages of civilization, but no explanation of the developmental process. While the study of history was a popular pursuit during the Scottish Enlightenment this inte rest followed trends on the continent and elsewhere. Furthermore, an examination of the great works of this period suggests that they were firmly based on the writings of scholars of a generation before. Certainly the leading writers of the "golden age" from roughly 1730 to 1790 gave a more sophisticated, detailed and elaborate treatment cf these ideas, but the sources, problems and concepts which they elucidated were not new. In their analyses, they did not employ historical materialism or economic determinism, though they were undoubtedly more political-economic, dynamic and secular in their attitude. They desired change for Scotland out of a patriotic regard for the comparative backwardness of their country, but the causes and cures for that condition were not fundamentally economic in nature. If these writings are examinedas a unit, and seen in context, the conjectural historians of the Scottish Enlightenment appear to be an understandable outcome of their intellectual milieu. The author supports this conclusion by a close examination of the work of Hume and Smith. This further explicates his theme that a nascent economic determinism was not the impetus for this writing that recent historians have read into these works.

Idealists and Realists: British Views of Germany,1864–1939

1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
Past Century ◽  
General Survey ◽  
Small Segment ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
Sheer Number

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

The Anglosphere as a Principle of Progress

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Michael Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
First Empire ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Language Area ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Anglosphere is not only a linguistic entity, it is more fundamentally based in a binding of linguistic improvement, commerce, and historical advance, and it can be read in linguistic aspirations specifically set against the improving background of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment rhetoric guides answered the imperative of adjustment to British union and a desire to level the ground for individual public advance, and they define the language area in terms of a teleology, pointing inevitably towards commercial society. For literati like Adam Smith, linguistic improvement was the raw material of exchange, exchange was a clear historiographical good, and this good can moreover be demonstrated more or less empirically. The Anglosphere should be understood as a space that is simultaneously linguistic, economic, and historiographic, remaining readable in Victorian statecraft, and in Greater Britain’s ‘linguistic ethnicity’, and in the lost colonies of Britain’s ‘first empire’. It is doubtful, however, whether the Anglosphere in this understanding has retained its direction after the attenuations of the late twentieth century, the new pressures on property creation, and the undoing of the original ethical knot of language, economy, and historiography.

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