The second half of the eighteenth century saw an astonishing outburst of intellectual creativity in Scotland covering a great range of disciplines, from the physical sciences to economic and social studies and the humanities - this is what is now called the Scottish Enlightenment.

As far as economics is concerned, the main figures in the Scottish Enlightenment are David Hume (1711-1776; his main economic work was included in his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 1752), James Steuart (1712-1780; Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, 1767) and Adam Smith (1723-1790; Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776).

A major theme of enlightenment thinking was progress, including, but not limited to, economic progress. A major theme of Hume’s economic writings is an analysis of the emergence and development of a commercial society, that is, a society producing, con­suming and trading in a wide variety of manufactured goods. This is an analysis of what we might now call economic development. It is primarily qualitative, not quantitative, and it is not clear whether it is a once-and-for-all process, so that it is not necessarily going to continue into the future. Smith took the next critical step, incorporating capital and capital accumulation as essential elements of a theory of growth. We now take con­tinued economic growth for granted. This way of thinking was largely a product of the Scottish Enlightenment.

One example will give an impression of the concentration of talent in Scotland in those years. In Edinburgh in the 1770s four men, David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black and James Hutton, agreed to meet regularly for dinner and discussion. They called themselves the Oyster club. They make a remarkable quartet. Hume is undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of all time and is sometimes described as the founder of the sceptical school of philosophy, or of British empiricism; Smith is often called the founder of economics, Black the founder of modern chemistry, and Hutton the founder of modern geology.

This is the more remarkable in that Scotland was a small and relatively poor country on the far edge of Europe. Historians no longer accept Trevor-Roper’s rather extreme judgement that “at the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland was a by-word for irredeemable poverty, social backwardness, political faction. The universities were the unreformed seminaries of a fanatical clergy” (1967: 1636). That said, Trevor-Roper’s critics have shown that a variety of elements of economic, social and intellectual progress can be traced back to the mid- or late-seventeenth century, but it remains the case that seventeenth-century Scotland played no significant role in the wider intellectual scene.

The dramatic contrast between the Scottish Enlightenment and the context from which it arose remains.

The Enlightenment as a whole was a Europe-wide movement. The term was not used at the time (though the German equivalent, Aufklarung, was) but many of those involved were conscious of themselves as part of an intellectual and (in some cases) political transformation. It is not easy to define, but the one thing that all attempts to pin the term down have in common is that Enlightenment writers wanted to base themselves on reason and on evidence, and that they rejected religious dogma when it came into conflict with the evidence (though many remained religious believers, and those who did not, generally had to conceal the fact for safety’s sake).

The starting and ending dates of the Enlightenment in the wider sense are also difficult to pin down. Many scholars simply identify it with the eighteenth century, though some would set the starting date a little earlier, and many would set an end-date at or before the start of the French revolution. The concern here is with the Scottish Enlightenment and specifically with its contribution to economic thinking, and in this case the question is easier. In the first half of the eighteenth century there were some signs of what was to come (Hutcheson 1726 and some parts of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature), but the main works which are discussed here date from (approximately) the third quarter of the century, from Hume’s Essays of 1752 to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776.

As noted above, economics (or political economy) was not recognized as a subject in its own right at the beginning of the period. James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy of 1767 was the first comprehensive work on the subject in English, but it was overshadowed by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which came out only nine years later. It was the Wealth of Nations that set the pattern for the development of what is called classical political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before Steuart and Smith, economic issues appeared in a variety of forms. Hume’s collections of essays were one example. There was a very large pamphlet literature relating to immedi­ate policy issues but often touching on wider issues, especially in London and especially in the late seventeenth century.

More relevant in Scotland in the earlier stages of the Scottish Enlightenment was the teaching and related literature on moral philosophy and jurisprudence, epitomized by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was based on his lectures at Glasgow, and the student notes of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, which have been discovered and published. In an earlier generation one could point to the work of Smith’s teacher, Francis Hutcheson. The focus here must be on the emergence of economic ideas rather than on wider aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment (on which see, for example, Brodie 2003; Hont and Ignatieff 1983).