The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and many other disciplines were immense; and its influence has hardly, if at all, been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas—men such as David Hume and Adam Smith who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.