Tamás Demeter, ed., The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment
DEMETER, Tamas, ed. The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 432 pages, ISBN 9781399512350.
Texte intégral
1This impressive volume originates from a workshop held at Corvinus University of Budapest on 28–29 January 2021, supported by the MTA-BTK Lendület “Morals and Science” Research Group and Corvinus University. The collection brings together an international circle of scholars, testifying to the vitality and breadth of contemporary research on the intellectual legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Published by Edinburgh University Press, the volume illustrates the editorial and intellectual coherence of the “Edinburgh Studies in Scottish Philosophy” series, directed by James Harris. Its high quality and rigorous scholarly standards confirm EUP’s continuing commitment to the ongoing research on the Scottish Enlightenment and its philosophical legacy.
2The editor, Tamás Demeter, defines the frame of the volume in his very first sentence: “The social sciences have been growing negligent of their own history.” This clearcut premise sets the tone of the project. Demeter’s introduction identifies what he calls a “broader culture of ahistoricity in the social sciences,” in which contemporary disciplines tend to overlook the historical conditions of their emergence. Against this prevailing trend, the volume offers a deliberate re-engagement with the prehistory of sociology, exploring how eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers anticipated or shaped key conceptual resources of modern social theory. In this regard, the collection may be read as an implicit and stimulating response to Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner’s History in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2022), though its emphasis lays less on the methodological justification of historical inquiry than on the philosophical and sociological fertility of the Scottish case. Moreover, as Demeter insists, “engagement with past sociological inquiry is a fertile source of inspiration for conceptual innovation,” thus highlighting how historical awareness can fuel contemporary sociological studies.
3The volume questions the naturalistic foundations of social inquiry in the Scottish Enlightenment. The contributors collectively examine a tension that lies at the heart of this intellectual moment: on the one hand, an evolutionary and sometimes agonistic understanding of social development; on the other hand, a form of providentialism that continues to frame the moral order of society in teleological terms. The complex nature of Scottish eighteenth-century thought can also be seen in the coexistence of “historical sensitivity,” as expressed through attention to the contingencies and developments of social life, and the various “conjectural histories” of the centuries. This reflects a core tension between empiricism and philosophical speculation that became a defining feature of the Enlightenment’s social imagination.
4The volume does not cover the social history of academic disciplines. It is rather an exercise in intellectual history, in which the questions of philosophical influence and the sociological stakes of Enlightenment thought are foregrounded. The fifteen essays (including Demeter’s introduction) are organised in three sections: the first one offers broad conceptual perspectives; the second one addresses the specifically sociological nature of Scottish Enlightenment ideas; and the third one — the most substantial, comprising eight chapters — traces their posterity and transformations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection revisits, with admirable density, the work and influence of major Scottish figures such as David Hume, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and John Sinclair. These essays illuminate how the sociological underpinnings of their thought — regarding moral judgment, economic order, and the evolution of manners — continue to resonate with modern theoretical paradigms.
5Part I, entitled “General Perspectives,” opens with a chapter by Christopher J. Berry, a distinguished authority on the subject and the author of Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and more recently of Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). It sets a high intellectual standard for the rest of the volume, combining remarkable precision with admirable synthetic depth. Berry examines how, in the stadial approaches to human history developed by thinkers such as Hume, Steuart, Kames, Smith, Millar, Robertson, and Dunbar, habitual patterns give rise to institutions through the formation of regularities and general rules. This perspective leads to a stimulating reinterpretation of Scottish thought through the study of the “natural history” of government and religion. Berry defines the scope of what he calls “historical institutionalism,” a category he has himself forged by combining moral and social approaches in order to explain differences in behaviour and values as products of distinct institutional contexts. Then Kenneth Macdonald’s “Adventitious Sociology: Dispassion and Insight in the Scottish Enlightenment” follows, exploring the role of observation and impartiality in early Scottish social analysis.
6Part II, entitled “Sociological Ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment,” addresses individual figures and their contributions. Craig Smith’s “Adam Ferguson as Founding Father of Sociology” and R. J. W. Mills’s “‘Partly social, partly selfish’: The Social Evolutionism of Henry Home, Lord Kames” shed light on the emergence of systematic social theorising. Spyridon Tegos focuses on pre-Weberian forms of leadership and the aesthetics of deference, while Kenneth Macdonald’s second contribution, “Sociology within the Statistical Account of Scotland,” shows how statistical surveys informed early sociological understanding.
7Part III, entitled “The Sociological Afterlife of the Scottish Enlightenment,” traces the receptions and transformations of these ideas. Dirk Schuck’s “Hegel and the Notion of Retroactive Necessity in the Scottish Enlightenment” and Angela M. Coventry’s “Traces of Hume in Sociology” explore the philosophical and methodological influences on later thinkers from Auguste Comte to Erving Goffman. Catherine Dromelet’s “Hume and Durkheim: Common Views on Sociality” analyses connections between Hume’s insights and Durkheimian sociological approaches. Otto Pipatti, in “Westermarckian Evolutionary Perspective on Scottish Moral Sentimentalism,” demonstrates the Scottish roots of Westermarck’s moral theory. John A. Hall, in “In Praise of Adam Smith, or, The Workings of Commercial Society,” along with Nicholas B. Miller “John Millar and Sociology: Disciplinary History and its Discontents” and Aldo Mascareño and Leonidas Montes “‘Das Adam Smith Problem’: A Sociological Reassessment,” explore the sociological dimensions of Smith and Millar, examining their enduring relevance.
8The volume closes with Tamás Demeter’s chapter, “The Foundational Document of the Sociology of Knowledge.” The title itself alludes to Jerry Fodor’s Hume Variations (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), where Fodor described the Treatise on Human Nature as “the foundational document of cognitive science.” Demeter extends this claim by showing that Hume’s philosophy may equally be regarded as foundational for the sociology of knowledge. Starting from Hume’s September 1739 letter to Francis Hutcheson – in which Hume explicitly rejects providential explanations – Demeter underlines that, for Hume, knowledge is a natural phenomenon, determined by the same causal and affective mechanisms that structure social life. Through this lens, Demeter re-examines Hume’s thought in dialogue with David Bloor’s reading within the Edinburgh “Strong Programme” in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), developed at the University of Edinburgh in the 1960s. Drawing in particular on Bloor’s The Enigma of the Aerofoil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), he argues that Hume’s analysis of “moral causes” — that is, social causes — anticipates a sociological understanding of knowledge production. Whereas Reid’s epistemology sought to separate knowledge from its psychological, social, and historical determinants, Hume’s naturalistic attitude integrates cognition within the very fabric of human sociability. Demeter thus demonstrates that Hume’s conceptual network not only prefigures modern sociological thoughts on society but also lays the groundwork for a genuinely sociological understanding of knowledge — one that sees institutions, communities and emotions as mutually constitutive dimensions of it.
9Taken together, these essays reveal the enduring relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment for understanding the conceptual foundations of social inquiry. Far from offering a unified narrative, the volume embraces the contradictions inherent in its subject matter. It acknowledges — and indeed reconstructs — the creative tensions between providentialism and secular evolutionism, between moral philosophy and empirical observation and between conjecture and history. The result is not a flattening of these oppositions but a nuanced restoration of their philosophical complexity.
10The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment thus stands as more than a collection of scholarly papers; it is a coherent research project in its own right. It invites readers to reconsider the Scottish Enlightenment not as a closed historical episode but as a living reservoir of sociological inventiveness. By doing so, not only does the collection deepen our understanding of eighteenth-century thought but it also offers a timely reflection on the self-understanding of social sciences today. Its intellectual ambition, methodological sophistication, and interdisciplinary reach make it an essential resource for historians of ideas, for philosophers of social sciences as well as for all those interested in the Enlightenment’s legacy in modern social theory.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Louis Pichot, « Tamás Demeter, ed., The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment », XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 14 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/16080 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffz
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page


