Clubs and Associations

The importance of clubs and associations in generating the intellectual climate of Enlightenment Edinburgh has been taken as a given ever since the pioneering work done by David McElroy in the 1950s. The mechanisms by which they initiated innovation and promoted its diffusion have been less well explored, though networks and an imprecise alignment with that useful but inexact concept, ‘the public sphere’, have formed much of the basis for evaluating the importance of associational life, both in Edinburgh and elsewhere. The exploration of the nature of Edinburgh clubs and societies, and the reasons for their significance, soon brings us back in fact to ground already familiar from earlier chapters. Many clubs and associations provided cross-fertilisation between the nobility, the professions, merchants and trade: indeed, ‘democratic rules of membership’ were a persistent feature of Edinburgh clubs, for ‘all citizens had a role to play in power games … political influence was by no means confined to the elites and it certainly did not flow only in one direction’. Edinburgh was not alone in this: in London, too, ‘the metropolitan hierarchy … proved permeable at every level, and permeability was lubricated by foreign influence’. The two capitals were very much alike.

As we have already seen, the professions which were central to the strength of Edinburgh's innovation and development from 1660 to 1750 were also to the forefront of the intense intellectual and associational life which came to characterise the city. They formed an early alliance with the patriotic impulses of the native nobility in the development of organisations which would come to transform themselves into the clubs and societies of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. At least one antiquarian club seems to have been active in the 1690s, and this was followed by Scottish Jacobite and Whig clubs (such as the ‘Society for Endeavouring Reformation of Manners’ (1699), and the Associated Critics and the Rankenian, both dating from 1716–17), then by intellectual organisations such as the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (1723) and, lastly, quasi-academies such as the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge (1731) and the Philosophical Society (1737).