In 1700 Edinburgh was a crowded, filthy, plague-scarred town of perhaps 40,000 people crammed onto a single ridge, in a poor country that had just lost a catastrophic sum in a failed colonial venture. By 1770 a visitor could stand at the Mercat Cross and, in the often-quoted phrase, take fifty men of genius by the hand within a few minutes.
What happened in between is the Scottish Enlightenment, and it is the most consequential thing this city has done.
Who
David Hume (1711–76), the most important philosopher to write in English, whose scepticism about causation and the self woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Buried in Old Calton Burial Ground under a monument bearing only his name and dates, at his own instruction.
Adam Smith (1723–90), whose Wealth of Nations (1776) founded modern economics, and whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is the book he thought more important. He is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard on the Royal Mile, and there is a statue of him outside St Giles’.
James Hutton (1726–97), who worked out from the rocks of Salisbury Crags and elsewhere that the earth was immeasurably older than scripture allowed, and effectively invented geology. His famous formulation: no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
Joseph Black, who identified carbon dioxide and latent heat. William Cullen, who made Edinburgh’s medical school the best in Europe. Adam Ferguson, arguably the first sociologist. Robert Adam, the architect. Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn, the painters. James Boswell, the biographer. William Robertson, the historian and principal of the university.
The first Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in Edinburgh in 1768.
Why here
Several things coincided.
Education. Scotland had a parish school system from the seventeenth century and four universities to England’s two, in a much smaller population. Literacy was unusually high across classes.
The Union of 1707. Scotland lost its parliament and, with it, one route to ambition. Talent went into the church, the law, medicine and the universities instead — and Edinburgh remained the centre of all four, a capital without a state.
Proximity. The Old Town was so cramped that a lord, a lawyer, a professor and a tradesman lived in the same stair. The clubs — the Select Society, the Poker Club, the Oyster Club — met in taverns and mixed people who elsewhere would never have argued together.
The kirk’s grip loosening. Enough for Hume to publish, not enough for him to get a university chair — he was twice refused, and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were held back until after his death.
Where to see it
Old Calton Burial Ground for Hume’s mausoleum. Canongate Kirkyard for Adam Smith and the poet Robert Fergusson, whose statue stands outside. Salisbury Crags for Hutton’s Section, where the geology was worked out — unmarked but for a plaque, and almost never visited.
The New Town itself is the Enlightenment as a building project: James Craig’s grid of 1767, laid out on rational principles, with streets named to flatter the Union. Charlotte Square, by Robert Adam, is the finest thing in it.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has the faces, most of them by Raeburn.
What became of it
It did not stop so much as disperse. Edinburgh’s medical and legal schools carried on, but the intellectual centre of gravity moved. Scots went into the empire, into London, into America — where Enlightenment ideas about liberty, property and moral sentiment had a considerable second life.
The city’s monument to it is oblique. There is a statue of Hume on the Royal Mile with a shiny toe, rubbed by students for luck, which he would have found ridiculous.
The Old Town it happened in
Worth understanding that the Enlightenment took place in a city that was physically appalling. The Old Town in 1750 held perhaps 50,000 people on one ridge, in tenements of ten and twelve storeys, with no sanitation beyond the cry of gardyloo and a bucket emptied from a window.
Hume lived in a flat off the Lawnmarket. Smith lived at Panmure House in the Canongate, which has been restored and is now used for economics seminars — you can visit.
The New Town was the response: Craig’s grid, drawn in 1767, built over seventy years, and explicitly a plan to escape the conditions the Enlightenment was being written in. The people who conceived the ideas mostly moved across the valley as soon as they could afford to.
Reading
Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World is the popular account and overstates its case entertainingly. James Buchan’s Capital of the Mind is the better book about Edinburgh specifically. Nicholas Phillipson’s biography of Hume is the standard life.
For the primary sources, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is far more readable than its reputation, and Hume’s essays are still funny.