Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty—a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of “enlightenment” and “democracy.”