Sabestiani, Silvia. The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress

Sabestiani, Silvia. The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress. Trans. Jeremy Carden. Palgrave Macmillian: New York, 2013.

Generally, the Enlightenment implies the height of human reason and humanity. Afterall, the Enlightenment was an attempt to reasonably explain the world by using both historical analysis and philosophical principles. Facing ontological and epistemological shock as a result of New Science, the Reformation, and the New Worlds, European elites sought to explain the nature of human development more clearly because classical and biblical explanations alone proved insufficient. The New World created a decisive fracture in the conceptual understanding of nature and the history of man. For this reason, Silvia Sabestiani situates the Scottish Enlightenment and many other Enlightenment thinkers at the center of intellectual debates on race theory and history. Arguing against the current historiographic trend, she argues that rather than seeing Enlightenment thinkers as racist, we should understand that “the same alienating perspectives that authorised the invention of race provided, at the same time, the tools for questioning a unique system of values, and supplied the arguments for criticizing that very ideology.” (167) In racist thought, in contrast to the above, “it is precisely this tension which disappears.” (167)

Despite its small size, this monograph is rather dense. While separated by chapters, the book is repetitive. She begins with an introduction which stresses the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment and its relationship with the English and French Enlightenments. Enlightenment thinkers sought to understand the nature of human development in relationship to nationhood and progress. This development was primarily theorized by utilizing conjectural historical analysis which based the reconstruction of the process of human nature on principles they believed to regulate human nature. Within this debate, the Scottish Enlightenment was focused on a framework of stages. Stadial theory was a system for classifying and describing creation as a process of civilization. Within this process, all humans progressed through stages which were dictated by nature. This process begins with the savage and ends with the civilized man, of which Western European elites were the classic example. While most Enlightenment thinkers adhered to stadial theory, the New World created ontological problems because rather than progressing at a similar rate or even at a slowed rate, the Amerindians and Africans seemed to be both held back and irregular. Thus, these elites often disagreed on the nature of human origins. While some adhered monogenism, which suggested that all humans were from a single origin, others adhered to a less religiously based theory, polygenism. With these debates in mind, she charts how different Scottish intellectuals disputed amongst themselves and with non-Scottish thinkers such as Montesquieu, on the question of how to explain difference.

Showing that the Scottish Enlightenment was unique, Sabestiani outlines the clash between Hume and Montesquieu. Montesquieu looked at factors such as climate, customs, religion, and laws to explain differences between people. He argued that only those in temperate climates could achieve full development, which he characterized as the ability to organize a cohesive and bureaucratic government. In contrast, Hume criticized this climate theory because it lacked applicability when examined on a global rather than European scale. Additionally, he suggested that all humans were governed by the same passions but that those passions took on different faces in different historical periods and geographic locations because of morals. Thus, Hume examined different forms of government, wealth, poverty, and revolutions in public affairs and suggested that these had a greater effect on human temperament and produced national characteristics that either sped up or slowed down development. Thus, natural inferiority was a result of moral difference between people. This provided a rational justification for exploiting non-Westerners. This theory allowed a paradox in which Hume could favor liberty and humanity but not impinge on his hierarchy of peoples.

Kames entered this debate by suggesting a polygenetic explanation for differentiation. He suggested that the difference between people lay in nature. This theory split humankind into multiple species, part of the same genus, and placed Kames discourse on race within conjectural historical analysis. To Kames, this theory was common sense based on immediate physical characteristic, habits, and customs. Kames’ polygenetic theory created a solution to the larger  ontological and epistemological questions that both the New World and the stage theory presented. Amerindians could exists on a separate stage of development than Europeans because they were created from a different stock. These stages were not automatic or inevitable to Kames and instead humans in some species would not continue to develop unless pushed by a powerful force or severe climatic change. Though most explanations were non-biblical, the Aberdonian response to Hume and Kames challenged the racial hierarchy created by polygenism and stadial theory on the basis that slavery and exploitation were unethical and against the Christian principle of equality.

Although the book’s title suggests an equal treatment of race and gender, the book severely lacked a serious discussion on gender. The fifth chapter was the only chapter that address gender. Sabestiani understands genders in terms of its relationship to race and the development of the human species. Civil society was considered a feminine one, as opposed to the more masculine savage state However, an overly effeminate society would limit progress, like those of the Amerindians. Sabestiani’s Scottish Enlightenment successfully navigates the complex discourse on race within the Scottish and non-Scottish Enlightenment. By referencing natural history, this book integrates natural science and social theory rather successfully.