Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture
- 1 Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture
- 2 Women and Intellectual Culture
- 3 Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh
- 4 Enlightened Violence? Elite Manhood and the Duel
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture
- 1 Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture
- 2 Women and Intellectual Culture
- 3 Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh
- 4 Enlightened Violence? Elite Manhood and the Duel
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If we limit our view of Enlightenment to a published canon and disregard its social contexts, we ignore the conditions in which ideas were formed and disseminated. We also forfeit the possibility of recognising and understanding the full scope of women's contribution. In this book the Scottish Enlightenment is understood as an often disparate ideological and cultural movement unified by a discourse of improvement.
Improvement should be understood as an imperative to achieve and maintain social progress. This imperative underpinned Scottish Enlightenment thought, not least the philosophy of two of its most influential protagonists, Adam Smith and David Hume. More than a philosophical movement, the epistemological changes wrought by Enlightenment cannot be separated from the economic and social developments that occurred in eighteenth-century Scotland, from the establishment of a theatre in Edinburgh to the building of planned villages in the Highlands.
During the eighteenth century, Scotland experienced massive economic and demographic change. Agricultural modernisation and post-Union access to the markets of the British Empire increased urban commercial wealth and funded early industrialisation. This in turn encouraged urbanisation. In 1750, only one in eight people lived in towns with populations of 10,000 or more, but during the next century Scotland underwent urbanisation at one of the fastest rates in Europe, so that by 1850 one-third of the population lived in towns. These emerging urban centres were key sites for the enactment of a Scottish politics aimed at the economic and moral improvement of Scotland in the context of the country's membership in the British state.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014