Dissertation Information for B. Barnett Cochran NAME: - B. Barnett Cochran
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1997)
ADVISORS: - Robert H. Stillman
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - James Van Horn Melton - Robert Smith
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Grace, virtue, and law: Political discourse and the search for national identity in the early Scottish Enlightenment
Abstract: Once understood as a programmatic search for a "science of man," recent historiography has reformulated the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of two persistent ideological traditions, natural jurisprudence and classical republicanism. Some have traced the Scot's interest in political economy to an effort to modernize natural law theory. Others have sought an explanation in the Scot's need to answer the stark, agrarian, civic humanist and nationalist Andrew Fletcher, who opposed the Union of 1707 on the grounds that the loss of Scottish independence would mean the loss of her virtue. In neither "paradigmatic" approach is it clear how the Scots' interest in the "moral sense" and "common sense" philosophy might be integrated. I explore these problems by recovering the social thought of two important but now underappreciated figures, George Turnbull and Robert Wallace.
Sons of Presbyterian ministers, Turnbull and Wallace entered the University of Edinburgh shortly after the Union of 1707. As students they came to believe that the traditional Presbyterian national ideology, of Scotland in national Covenant with God, was no longer viable in their "British" context. Both attempted to construct a new national identity out of various intellectual and ideological resources, including the languages of Newtonianism, classical republicanism, natural jurisprudence and political economy.
I argue that for both men, public or civic virtue remained the critical ideological and moral issue, a point of view at odds with the prevailing literature. For Turnbull the pressing problem was two-fold: how to construct a science of virtue that would prove unassailable to the moral skeptics; and how to harmonize the essential elements of an agrarian-based republicanism with the emerging system of commercial capitalism. Wallace's concerns were broadly similar, but focused particularly on the problem of associating "Britain" with "liberty," both in the jurisprudential sense of limited government and in the civic humanist sense of a particular moral capacity to seek the common good. This study indicates the persistence, resiliency and adaptability of the classical republican paradigm, and suggests that the Scot's concern for a "moral science" was integral to the project of constructing a viable national identity after 1707.
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calculated 2008-03-24 10:53:27
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