Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment

Tamás Demeter is Professor of Philosophy at the Corvinus University of Budapest and Senior Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest. He has published widely on David Hume, the connections of Scottish moral and natural philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge in Monist, Synthese, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of the Human Sciences, Early Science and Medicine. He has contributed chapters to collections Newton and Empiricism, The Oxford Handbook of Newton, and the forthoming Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II (all OUP). He is editor of Intellectuals, InstInequalities and Transitions, co-editor of Conflicting Values of Inquiry and (both Brill), and special issues of Synthese on “The Uses and Abuses of Mathematics in Early Modern Philosophy” and “Humeanisms”. He is author of David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism (Brill, 2016).

Social scientists these days often attempt to identify ideal types that can be described by mathematical models. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, in contrast, have found the foundations of inquiry in “the experimental method”, in the practice of empirical reasoning that would become the foundation of various social sciences – or as they back in the eighteenth century called them comprehensively: the “science of human nature”. In their hands, human nature turns out to be the product of society that varies with history, and whose understanding requires imagination and a study of actual processes. This book is recommended to social scientists who intend to go beyond the elegant, but infertile, mathematical modelling of human behaviour.

• Notes on ContributorsAbbreviationsChapter 1. The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment: An Introduction - Tamás DemeterPart I. General perspectivesChapter 2. Human Nature and Social Change: Historical Institutionalism in the Scottish Enlightenment - Christopher BerryChapter 3. The Adventitious Sociology: Dispassion and Insight in the Scottish Enlightenment - Kenneth MacdonaldPart II. Sociological Ideas in the Scottish EnlightenmentChapter 4. Adam Ferguson as Founding Father of Sociology - Craig SmithChapter 5. "Partly social, partly selfish": The Social Evolutionism of Henry Home, Lord Kames - Robin MillsChapter 6. Pre-Weberian Theories of Charismatic Leadership and the Aesthetics of Deference in the Scottish Enlightenment - Spyridon TegosChapter 7. Sociology within the Statistical Account of Scotland - Kenneth MacdonaldPart III. The Sociological Afterlife of the Scottish EnlightenmentChapter 8. Hegel and the Notion of Retroactive Necessity in the Scottish Enlightenment - Dirk SchuckChapter 9. Traces of Hume in Sociology - Angela CoventryChapter 10. Hume and Durkheim: Common Views on Sociality - Catherine DromeletChapter 11. Westermarckian Evolutionary Perspective on Scottish Moral Sentimentalism - Otto PipattiChapter 12. In Praise of Adam Smith, or the Workings of Commercial Society - John A. HallChapter 13. John Millar and Sociology: Disciplinary History and Its Discontents - Nicholas MillerChapter 14. ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’: A Sociological Reassesment - Aldo Mascareno and Leonidas MontesChapter 15. The Foundational Document of the Sociology of Knowledge - Tamás Demeter