The Scottish Enlightenment revolutionized political economy, philosophy, natural science, rational religion, medicine, anthropology, and law in the British Isles, Europe, America, and beyond. Yet this view has only slowly gained acceptance during the last few decades, largely through the pioneering efforts of Phillip Nicholson, Duncan Forbes, and others. Social scientists still widely contest the existence of a distinctly Scottish (or is it British?) Enlightenment vis-à-vis Europe, while others debate its defining characteristics. The engaging Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment reasserts the Scots’ significance, while emphasizing national influences and the “unity of the overall movement” despite its intellectual variety (2).

Editor Alexander Broadie has compiled an impressive collection of essays by sixteen well-established scholars. The authors reside in no less than eight nations with backgrounds in philosophy (eight), history (five), political theory (one), literature (one), and economics (one)—an assortment that fittingly mirrors the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of the Scottish Enlightenment itself. Rather than privilege the importance of either the social sciences or the natural sciences, Broadie supports a via media between them. Nevertheless, as the editor affirms, philosophy's “centrality is properly represented here in the fact that the perspective of the book is throughout a philosophical perspective broadly conceived” (7).

Expectedly, most articles address Scottish contributions connected to philosophy—especially those of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Adam Ferguson. Aaron Garrett argues that the philosophical analysis of human nature and the “empirical” analysis of human societies merged in a distinctively Scottish synthesis that fostered the rise of the human and social sciences. Heiner Klemme concurrently highlights the common philosophical culture and the decisive differences between Hume and Reid, each of whom marked turning points in the history of modern epistemology. The moral philosophies of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, together with Reid's critical attitude toward them, are outlined by Luigi Turco. Scottish thinkers, Christopher Berry explains, “combined a ‘scientific’ appreciation of the complexity of social life with an evaluative assessment of the relative worth of forms of social experience” (243). Murray Pittock details the intellectual debt owed to the Scots for crafting the modern ideas of historical progress, developmental state building, and British empirical history. In the closing chapters, Michel Malherbe and Samuel Fleischacker assess the impact of Scottish philosophy across the Atlantic Channel and Ocean, respectively; while Gordon Graham covers its demise during the 1800s. The Scots deeply influenced continental philosophers and were sought after by the reading public from ca. 1760 to ca. 1840, but their popularity ebbed and flowed according to political and intellectual developments in France and Germany. The American founders, meanwhile, were likely more affected by Hutcheson and Smith than has been typically acknowledged, but not to the exclusion of Lockean principles of natural rights and individualism, which were also components of Scottish political theory. The growth of rational theology during the mid-1700s is explored in M. A. Stewart's doctrine-heavy study of Hume and his peers’ reaction to his skeptical doctrine.

The seven remaining essays emphasize the Scots’ adaptation of foreign intellectual currents to suit specifically domestic needs, including its economic poverty and lack of natural resources. Indeed, this is the main theme of Roger Emerson's informative opening essay, which provides a broad overview of the Enlightenment's various cultural, religious, and socioeconomic contexts. His observations about the central importance of developments between the Restoration and the 1740s also manifest the need for greater attention and research into this area. Fania Oz-Salzberger examines the “scientification of politics,” whereby Scots configured continental philosophy to address specifically Scottish exigencies, such as their own loss of sovereignty at a time when statehood was gaining importance (162). Andrew Skinner also notes the key role of Newtonian and European ideas, especially those of the physiocrats and Montesquieu, on the development of Scottish political economy, while outlining the ideas of Hume, Smith, and Sir James Steuart. Two essays on natural jurisprudence, by Knud Haakonssen and John Cairns, successfully complement one another. In Scotland, where justice was interpreted primarily as a personal, rather than social, virtue, the distinctive feature “was the concern with empirical studies of human nature, and for this reason [university] courses in natural jurisprudence became the seedbeds for empirical social science and especially for political economy” (218). Cairns's contribution is refreshingly broad and comparative in scope. He seeks to explain why Scotland diverged from the Continent by not embracing “codification projects, but to piecemeal incremental reform of the law through the operation of the courts in elaborating law in their decisions” (235). Science receives its proper dues in Paul Wood's chapter, which traces the rise of medicine and natural knowledge from its important Restoration foundations to 1815. His account convincingly suggests that science was “instrumental in shaping modernity in Scotland as elsewhere” (95). In tandem, Broadie's first of two essays demonstrates how Scottish intellectuals treated the study of the mind as a science no less subject to empirical analysis than other natural sciences, such as botany and physics.

The essays that comprise the Cambridge Companion are generally very interesting and informative, particularly in expressing the concurrent range and unity of the most renowned Scottish philosophers. Though the volume's purpose is to reclaim the “Scottishness” of the Scottish Enlightenment, the strongest handful of essays are those that also illustrate the nation's cosmopolitanism. Given the long-standing tendency to marginalize Scotland in favor of France or Holland, it is necessary to keep a broad lens trained simultaneously on Scotland's domestic and international setting.

My primary concerns with this collection, however, center on what is missing rather than on what is present. First, I greatly applaud the conscientious attempt to move beyond a narrowly philosophical definition of the Enlightenment and to place the history of ideas into socioeconomic and political contexts (1, 5)—but both concepts need to be emphasized more fully in practice than they are here. By focusing largely on a handful of Scottish thinkers, we rarely get a glimpse into the Enlightenment's institutional mechanisms and social arenas within which they operated (Emerson, Wood, and Cairns provide notable exceptions). What about the booksellers and the proliferation of print culture or the vast correspondence networks that linked natural scientists with clergymen, lawyers, and improvers from the mercantile and landed classes? Second, the volume purposefully excludes any area outside of Edinburgh, Glasgow, or Aberdeen (24), yet Scots also frequented coffeehouses in the Highland towns of Fort William, Oban, and Inverness (not to mention St. Andrews or Lowland provincial towns like Dumfries). Though some elite thinkers overlooked the importance of population, land, and labor in the Highlands, a significant number of local and Lowland improvers did not. Third, the natural sciences and political economy receive far less attention than they merit. Finally, a chapter on the emergent body of secondary literature would have been helpful, particularly given that only a few authors establish their historiographical context. Overall, the Cambridge Companion makes a highly valuable contribution to the field of Enlightenment studies and will be of great importance to scholars of philosophy, history, and literature.