This final chapter considers Burke’s relationship to what may loosely be termed ‘enlightenment thought’ with an emphasis on Scotland. The Scottish thinkers particularly relevant for Burke were the usual suspects, including Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson. Following the work of Isaiah Berlin, Burke is often read as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. But Burke was not the only ‘enlightenment’ luminary to be confounded by the French Revolution. Edward Gibbon was equally appalled, and it eventually disappointed even the likes of Paine and Sieyès as well. This chapter demonstrates that the differences between Burke and Hume were diminished when Burke was freed from partisanship. He now advanced a sceptical defence of party: it was not exclusively the Whigs, but the old Whig and Tory parties alike, which had sustained the British mixed and balanced constitution ‘by their collision and mutual resistance’. This chapter also considers Adam Smith’s thought on party and faction.

Driven above all by the desire to reconcile aesthetic and moral value, Scottish philosophers, poets and artists made essential contributions to eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory. This essay examines some of the key moments in the history of Scottish aesthetics from the 1720s to the early years of the nineteenth century. In particular, it surveys the ways in which Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Turnbull, Allan Ramsay, Lord Kames, William Duff, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid, Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart debated the respective roles of the senses, reason and the imagination in the appreciation of beauty; asked whether beauty is in the object or the subject; pondered the relationship between virtue, wealth and aesthetic judgement; and considered the existence of a universal standard of taste.

Interest in what has been called a ‘moral sense’ originated in the late 17th century, as part of a philosophical debate about humans’ moral nature. Participants in the debate agreed on rejecting four views of human morality commonly held at the time. They found (1) the Cambridge Platonists’ moral rationalism and (2) Gershom Carmichael’s (and others’) natural law theories of morality too remote from actual processes of moral judgment and decision making; (3) they rejected Thomas Hobbes’ psychological egoism as excessively reductive; and (4) they found moral relativism objectionable on normative grounds, since they were committed to the defence of moral universalism. The article provides an overview over the history of moral sense theories. It briefly presents the versions developed by Thomas Burnet, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, and Henry Home Lord Kames, and then provides a brief account of the moral theories by David Hume and Adam Smith who, while adherents of moral sentimentalism, rejected the assumption of a moral sense.