O Knox he was a bad man
He split the Scottish mind.
The one half he made cruel
And the other half unkind.
(Alan Jackson, from All Fall Down, 1965)
The 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, an unrivalled efflorescence of open-minded debate, speculation and daring propositions – now marshalled into service as one of Edinburgh’s many attractions to tourism – seemed to have vanished in the early 19th century.
Scots’ ingenuity did not, however. James Clerk Maxwell (b. 1831) developed the theory of electromagnetism, with multiple applications; Alexander Graham Bell (b. 1847) patented the first working telephone; Alexander Fleming (b.1881) discovered the first antibiotic, named penicillin; John Logie Baird (b. 1888) demonstrated the first working television – with many others, making up a proud parade of dedicated and practically useful research.
What had declined was the coming together of first-rate minds to examine and test the strength of social, economic and moral assumptions and institutions. The inventors tended to work solitarily, and to point their research in the direction of its usefulness to a country which – as Adam Smith had foretold – would pass from a peasant economy to an industrial and, bit by bit, a consumer society. The people of the Enlightenment talked and argued among themselves.
Those people included the best known – the philosopher and historian David Hume (b. 1711) and the economist Adam Smith (b.1723). Less celebrated were Adam Ferguson (b.1723) a historian, with some claim to be the forerunner of sociology (for good and ill); James Hutcheson (b.1694), a moral philosopher; Henry Home, Lord Kames, (b. 1696), a philosopher and agriculturalist; and Thomas Reid (b. 1710), founder of the ‘Common Sense School’ of philosophy…and more.
The St Andrews historian Colin Kidd, with fellow historian Aileen Fyfe, have in a collection of essays on Scotland after the Enlightenment, illuminated the neglect of 19th and early 20th century Scots cultural and intellectual life – and pointed to some reasons for it.
Among the most often cited of these is the possibility that “the social, ecclesiastical and economic concerns of 19th century Scotland came to overcome the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment”. Kidd instances the English historian and sociologist Henry Buckle, writing in the 1850s, who was fascinated by the contradictions in Scots society, above all the power of the Church of Scotland (and the splits from it, most consequentially, the large rupture which created the Free Church of Scotland). Buckle found it inexplicable that a country from whose people came world-shaking scholars should so humbly and submissively bend their necks to men who claimed an authority from God: “Why did the country of Hume and Adam Smith remain awed by a few noisy and ignorant preachers…[why did] a very advanced people holding enlightened views on politics display on all religious subjects such a littleness of mind, an illiberality of sentiment, a heat of temper and a love of persecuting others?”
Yet the Scots writers who confronted the power of the 18th and 19th century Presbyterians wrote more in sympathy with Buckle than with the Church. They, men of sceptical and moderate religiosity, were enemies of the severest form of Calvinism which provided its religious spine. More self-interestedly, they saw the dramatic possibilities in opposing the hypocrisy which the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, or antinomianism, encouraged. The doctrine endowed God with the freedom to save for eternity those who found favour in his eyes and left to eternal damnation those who did not. Burns, in his Holy Willie’s Prayer, written in 1785, created a hyper-pious elder of the church who, convinced of his election to paradise, freely confesses his sins of the flesh and drunkenness, and demands of his maker that He punishes his enemies – secure in the belief that none can deprive him of his place in heaven.
I am here, a chosen sample,
To shew thy grace is great and ample
I’m here, a pillar o’ thy temple
Strong as a rock
A guide, a rule and example
To a’ thy flock
In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), James Hogg conceived a nasty young man named Robert Wringhim, tutored by a radical Calvinist minister (in fact, though unknown to him, his father) to believe that “you are plucked as a brand out of the burning, and now your redemption is sealed and secure.” Wringhim, delighting in the certainty of everlasting life, falls into the clutches of a stranger named Gil-Martin, soon revealed to the reader (though not to Wringhim) as the Devil. He establishes complete suzerainty over him, and leads him into serial murders and other crimes, justified by Gil-Martin as necessary to rid the world of sinners.
Wringhim, tormented into committing murders apparently commanded by God via Gil-Martin, but still retaining vestiges of a secular/religious morality, goes mad, tries to flee, is pursued by devils and finally hangs himself. The book, shunned at first, gained a supporter in the French novelist Andre Gide who wrote a foreword to a 1947 edition expressing his amazement at the power of the novel and of its obscurity in its native land.
In John Buchan’s Witch Wood, (1927), set in the 17th century, a young Presbyterian minister, David Sempill, appointed to a rural parish, meets hidden witchcraft, more performative than profound, in a wood regarded by all as haunted – and more seriously uncovers the grossest hypocrisy in the town’s most devout citizens. The leader among these, Ephraim Caird, reveals himself to Sempill as one “secure in his election to grace, secure against common fear, likewise secure against common reason…to him the foulest sin would be no sin – its indulgence would be part of his prerogative.”
The foremost critic of the town’s holy hypocrites, seeking to bolster Sempill’s growing disillusionment with the extremists of his faith, tells him that “’the Cities of the Plain’” (Sodom and Gomorrah) were less of an offence to almighty God than this demented twist of John Calvin that blasts and rots a man’s heart…if it makes here and there a saint, it is like a dung heap to hatch out sinners”. Though in these poems and novels, the false pieties are revealed, Calvinism in various forms pressed heavily down on society and culture, with ministers who saw themselves as entitled, indeed bound to correct the sins of the people.
Antinomian Calvinism was only one part of Scots Presbyterianism and was often reviled by other devoted Christians such as Lutherans and Methodists. It made for good fiction, since it gave to a novelist or poet characters already fashioned for hypocrisy. But the passion for faith, and fear of Hell, were strong, living, openly displayed emotions in Scotland, the strength of which diminished slowly in the later 19th century, and more rapidly in the 20th. In its full flood, it occupied much of the public sphere, appealing strongly to the middle and upper working classes, acting as both a discipline and as a proof of virtue, including personal and business honesty, fusing with capitalism (with not a little of its own brand of hypocrisy) to produce a highly successful mix of industrial vigour and commercial success, especially in banking.
The historian of education Robert Anderson argues in his essay in this collection that “the European Enlightenment is often seen as an anti-religious movement which sought to place politics and ethics on a rational, secular basis and to demolish priestcraft and superstition…there was nothing like this in Scotland, where the Enlightenment was closer to Germany, Holland and other northern European countries in seeking to reconcile religion with reason and the state with the church.”
Thus, the power of the Scots church was not confronted by a full blast of Enlightenment scepticism (especially that of David Hume) but channelled into a partnership between secular reason and divine revelation, in which both held to separate spheres. This de-fanged Enlightenment rationalism, and it also protected the high honour (and fear) in which most Scots ministers were held.
The answer to Colin Kidd’s introductory question – “did the social, ecclesiastical and economic concerns of 19th century Scotland come to overshadow the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment?” – may be that its most active citizens took from it what was useful – above all Smith’s endorsement of the benign self-interest of the butcher, the brewer and the baker, which guaranteed food on Scots tables. Less was likely taken from his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its opening declaration that “how selfish soever man be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it”.
The Union with England, controversial as it was when mooted and passed in a divided Scots parliament, was popular with Enlightenment intellectuals, seeing it as a means of modernising Scots agriculture, industry and society, at least in the lowland belt, where the largest part of the population lived. But it was challenged, bitterly, by the country’s two leading modern poets – Hugh McDiarmid and Edwin Muir. McDiarmid had developed a passionate dislike, not just of England but of the English, going so far, in unpublished poems written in the early years of World War II, to hope for London’s destruction, then under the Blitz. One stanza runs:
The leprous swine in London town
And their Anglo-Scots accomplices
Are, as they have always been
Scotland’s only enemies
Another, this time published, poem – First Hymn to Lenin (1931) – rationalises the millions killed or sent to the Gulag by the Soviet secret police, arguing that capitalist society, a system of the “foulest murder”, must be destroyed, and the killing of perceived enemies of Stalinism was necessary to that end. McDiarmid moved between nationalism and communism, inhabiting the most militant parts of both.
Edwin Muir, writing in a less venomous vein, was one of the finest poets of 20th century Scotland, and one most deeply troubled by the “loss of a nation”. Though not a Scots nationalist, he saw – in the end of a separate kingdom, coupled with the malign effects of a severe Calvinism and an Enlightenment which privileged material values – a huge spiritual and social loss. The Scots language was a dialect of English, with many words taken from French and Gaelic; it had been, Muir believed, eroded from the 16th century on, so that by the 20th century, Scots ‘thought’ in English and ‘felt’ in Scots and Scotland lacked a homogeneous language. According to Gerard Carruthers, professor of literature at Glasgow, who contributes an epilogue to this new book, “Muir was unequivocal about the guilty parties: Calvinist puritanism in the first instance, and the capitalism and imperialism which had beguiled Scotland with the promise of material benefits which accompanied incorporation in a British superstate”.
For Muir, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, though lauded today, were fake heroes, Burns especially. Their fame irritated Muir, who dismissed them both as “sham bards for a sham nation”, a people ruined, not strengthened, by the Enlightenment and the fatal (to thought and speech) passage from bucolic wholeness to post-enlightenment, post-national fragmentation.
Muir also saw loss in the thinning out of the Scots in the Scots language – at least potentially a more widespread sense of loss than confined to literary folk, since Scots speech remains (even today) the speech of the working and lower middle classes, shorn as it is of much of the old vocabulary.
McDiarmid took issue with Muir in his insistence that a viable literary Scots was impossible (he was, after all, engaged in creating it). But both men hated the anglicisation consequent on the Union, and, for Muir, the replacement of Catholicism by Calvinist puritanism. Yet poetic keening over the loss was all that was possible: a Union which had brought modernisation, industry and an empire in which Scots across the class spectrum were over-represented would not, they recognised, be possible to overturn. Large figures in literary and nationalist circles, they had little purchase on both popular and elite opinion. Nationalism was no longer a sensible strategy (that would have to wait for the 21st century).
These obsequies for a ruined culture were fleshed out by a sustained campaign against the shift in Scots universities from a generalist, philosophically-based approach to one where the student is confronted with various academic specialisms, the rule for teaching in the universities of England. The campaign was led, with some passion, by the moral philosopher George Davie: in his dense and closely argued 1961 book, The Democratic Intellect, he wrote that generalist teaching had been progressively denied a place in the Scots universities.
Davie saw this as a battleground, deploring the advance, assisted by Scots academics who agreed with the English system, of an “anglicising party” well-armed with proof that students required a knowledge in depth of subjects which would ensure a successful career. He also framed the retention of generalism as more democratic than specialisation, arguing that there is “a perpetual tension between the demands of a specialised expertise and those of the common interest”. Employing Thomas Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, he argued that it allowed for a bridging of “the gap between the university elite and ‘ordinary people’” – a tension which has only increased in our time.
Davie’s argument influenced several subsequent thinkers – notably Lindsay Patterson, Professor of Education Policy in Edinburgh, whose book Scottish Education and Society since 1945 was published in 2023. Patterson sees a decline in the Scots academy, and questions why ideas, as encouraging people to think for themselves on the basis of evidence and reason, are now regarded as old fashioned. But specialisation has been seen to chime with the needs of an advanced economy – even if not, according to Davie and Patterson, with the workings of democracy.
Beyond the Enlightenment does not go beyond the beginning of the 20th century – when, as Kidd notes, there was an accelerating drift of Scots intellectuals to England and abroad. The growth of the nationalist movement in the hundred years from the 1920s to the present day has been accompanied by a decline of intellectual probing and debate, to the extent that only one name comes up in answer to the question ‘who are the Scots intellectuals today?’: that of Tom Nairn.
Robin McAlpine, founder of the social NGO Common Weal, says of Nairn that he was the “last Scots intellectual”. The much-awarded journalist Julie Davidson wrote that “there are four intellectuals in Scotland and they are all Tom Nairn”. In The National, the daily paper of the SNP, Nairn receives the accolade of the “intellectual godfather of the modern Scottish independence movement”. Gerry Hassan, a well-known nationalist writer, wrote of him that the “One man who has spent his life cutting through the national mystique, hyperbole and veneer of tradition is Tom Nairn”, and endorsed his contemptuous dismissal of the British state as a “backward, Ruritarian creation, one which had come to fruition in the age before democratic republicanism or modern day nationalism… and didn’t, at the political dimension, ever become a full democracy, with a half-elected Parliament and an unelected head of state.”
Nairn, who died in January 2023 at the age of 91, had in his book The Break-Up of Britain (1977) described what he saw as the inevitable “slow foundering” of the British state. In doing so, both in “The Break-up” and in the later After Britain (2000), he cast aside all attempt at analysis, Marxist or otherwise, and laid into Britain as “a sinking paddle-wheel state”, “an indefensible and inadaptable relic, neither properly archaic nor properly modern”. “Great British chauvinism [was] dragg(ing) the state from imperialism into a dead end”, “lurch(ing) downward on the road to relative under-development (with) rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay and cultural despair”. It is a rant of which he, a man of great intelligence, should have been ashamed. While not as bloody as McDiarmid in his desire to see Englishmen and women slaughtered, he is at least as contemptuous of English culture, seeing its only hope for revival in an association with the European Union (choked off by Brexit).
Remarkably, Nairn’s status on the left in and beyond Scotland has not declined: he has been taken as a model commentator on the irredeemable imperialist racism of a country – England – which routinely receives tributes for its relative lack of racism and indifference to imperialism. That status, however, does point to one probable explanation of the Scots dearth of intellectuals: Scots nationalism.
A militant nationalism seeking public majority backing for Scots secession from the UK had been, until the 1980s, much mocked as an irrelevance in kilts. But the last two decades of the 20th century saw it, largely shorn of kilts, grow rapidly, and win the Scottish Parliament elections in 2007 with Alex Salmond as the country’s First Minister. It has never lost its majority in the Edinburgh parliament since.
In the 21st century, the SNP remained politically dominant – forcing Scots to make a fundamental choice, never before put to them in over three centuries of Union: a choice for or against independence. Though the referendum on that issue was lost by 55 to 45 per cent in 2014, it showed a strong base on which to build for a later, successful, push. Scandals involving Salmond, who died in 2024, his successor Nicola Sturgeon, and the arrest of her former husband, Peter Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive, on charges of embezzlement, only temporarily produced a drop in support. Only one opinion poll in 2025 shows support for independence dropping below 40 per cent, and in three polls it has led with 50 per cent or more.
The national question has squeezed out space for reflection on everything but itself, and no intellectual dominates the debate. Almost every issue must, at some point in its development, account for itself to the question of secession. The Salmond-Sturgeon period has given way to a quieter leadership of the long-time deputy John Swinney and his deputy, Kate Forbes. She was once spurned by a majority in her campaign to lead the party because of her membership of the devout Free Church of Scotland, but is now welcomed as evidence of the party’s diversity. The SNP are said to be concentrating on producing good governance which their predecessors had casually put to one side while the elusive prize of independence was so eagerly sought.
Nairn had been seen as Scotland’s only intellectual because of the force of his argument that a rotting England was dragging down a potentially vital Scotland. No high-profile competitor chose to oppose him by standing with the Union Jack – or perhaps did not dare, given the short shrift SNP members have given active unionists. Nor has anyone reflected that his place in the Scots pantheon depends heavily on a barrage of abuse.
“Nineteenth century Scottish intellectual history is in part a story of dwindling cultural authority and a slow retreat into provinciality”, writes Colin Kidd: that judgment could be extended into the 20th and 21st centuries. Scottish nationalism has been, and presently remains, a struggle for power in a nation presently dependent on mainly English taxpayers to guarantee its high standard of living, with no oppressor from which to escape, no plan for a radically different economy, society or culture, no preparation for a period of belt-tightening if secession is granted and it is cut loose from its economic moorings in the UK. Nationalism clings to a manifestly deluded view of a welcome and major assistance from an EU which itself is battling to retain its liberal and neoliberal policies in the face of a rising new right. Scotland’s weak business class remains terrified of the consequences of independence.
If a responsible case for independence were to be made it would, if true to intellectual responsibility, be required to describe the steep and stoney path Scots would have to tread in order to even approach the wealth and stability of the Scandinavian states which its former leaders constantly held up as goals easily attained. Intellectuals, for and against independence, capable of researching in depth and promoting open, honest debate could help both sides of the independence question to clarify how they, and their fellow Scots actually wish to live. But so far, no-one has taken down the ‘help wanted’ sign.
