The Uses and Abuses of the Scottish Enlightenment in Modern Conservatism

Abstract

For over a century and a half after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke was acknowledged as the guiding inspiration of conservative political thought in the Anglophone world. However, Burke’s defense of the organic, the prescriptive and the traditional began to seem inappropriate for conservatives attempting both to limit the power of the leviathan state over the individual and to grapple with the social and technical complexities of modern capitalist economies. As a result, Burkean ideas have been supplanted as the historical precursors of modern conservatism by the political economy fashioned in the Scottish Enlightenment by David Hume, Adam Smith and their contemporaries. This chapter explores the appropriation of the Scottish Enlightenment by modern conservatives (and their allies among the ranks of old-fashioned free-market liberals). The focus is largely on political and intellectual developments in Britain, but the chapter also looks at the ideological salience of the Scottish Enlightenment in the United States, among groups ranging from public choice theorists to Southern secessionists.