Pictures of Scotland.org Canadian Amazon Store

Herman takes both to task for forgetting the evangelical sources of our modern world. Herman starts his story with crusty John Knox and his blend of revolutionary violence, predestination and universal literacy. Knox's reliance on the whirling dervish of 'revival meetings' and individual study of biblical sources provides Herman with all he needs to found the enlightened modern world in foggy Scotland. He is not shy about introducing Christian roots to what became an atheist philosophy. The transition from spiritual epiphany to materialist enlightenment might have been an interesting thread, but Herman avoids the issue. It is enough to boost the Scottish role and leave it at that.

Personally, I found this all a bit more intriguing then convincing. The leap from Knox (1505 - 1572) to Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) required a detour from church history into the foggy bottom of British politics before emerging with a secular history of the Enlightenment. While I enjoyed getting a Scottish view of the 'English' civil war and detailed account of parliamentary debate over the Treaty of Union (1707), the story is simply too brief. All this takes place in the first 60 pages, one third of it devoted entirely to the Treaty of Union. To make a case for Hutcheson and Lord Kames inventing the 'Enlightenment', a bit more would be required regarding English and French developments.

Don't get me wrong, I really didn't mind a great deal. The story moves pretty quickly and the Scottish boosterism is hardly threatening. Just read it with a skeptical eye, as any Scot would advise you.

Others might say that the book is a much needed hurrah for the Lowland Scots. Given the 19th century's romantic obsession with the Highland clans, the Lowland Scots get ignored or labeled traitors. Herman enjoys debunking these delusions. The Highlanders are simply barbarian holdouts from the feudal age, the truly unenlightened. He gleefully recounts the adulteration of highland kilt into royal mini-skirt, and describes the rising of 1745 as little more than suicidal lunacy. Most tellingly, the highland clans are Lord Kames' model for 'primative man' and thus the model for later notions of 'hunter-gatherer' societies. The lowland Scots provide the heroic model of social elevation from 'hunter-gather' to 'farmer' to 'merchant' to 'enlightened'.

I enjoyed the way Herman connects Knox to Hutcheson, then Hutcheson to Hume, Witherspoon and the American revolution. It is a good story and fine corrective to the conventional academic blather about Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. The story of Sir Walter Scott would have made a good ending, but Herman presses on with an unnecessary history of steam engines, public health and any Scot that made a bundle of cash.


More than just Bobby Burns   February 19, 2003
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

Reviewing Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization evoked a nagging question: "Why hasn't someone done this for the Scots?" Now, someone has, and a highly worthwhile read it is. Herman tears down a few misconceptions about the Scots as he rebuilds their image as original thinkers and practical achievers. Herman is not the first to consider John Knox as the taproot of the Scottish expression. Knox's Calvinist severity, however, often clouds the fact that the Scots severed from the Catholic church only a generation after Henry VIII achieved that for England. And they accomplished it without the power of a monarch. Herman sees Knox's thinking as planting seeds leading to a flowering of democratic ideals.

These ideals weren't lofty theoretical flights, however. In an excellent summary over two chapters, Herman outlines the Scottish Enlightenment and the men who created it. Unlike the Continental Enlightenment, the Scots version had a deep religious base. They sought their deity through rational investigation, searching for its expression rather than pushing it to a distance as did the Deists. These Scots saw "the proper study of mankind" as a practical question leading to social betterment. Education became a universal in Scotland at a time when most schooling remained under the cloak of religious authority.

Herman contends the Act of Union as of immense benefit to Scottish society at many levels. The chief result was the elimination of prejudicial economic policy. As long as they remained independent, the Scots were unable to compete with English mercantilists. While many Scottish nationalists see the Act of Union as a subversion of local values, Herman, along with many Scots, view it as providing new opportunities. He stresses the opened doors to trade led to rapid enrichment of the port cities of Scotland and world-wide contacts. Ships meant shipbuilding and many Scots later brought their talents to the New World resulting in the speedy clipper ships.

Herman follows the exodus of Scots around the globe - North America, Australia, India. Each place they entered, they left a mark. Most of it seems positive today - strong commercial enterprise, extending education, uplifting political ideals. Herman paints a glorious picture, deftly omitting a few blemishes. His descriptions of the Highland clans verges on the romantic, but fails to note their signal of the burning cross emigrated to become the image of America's Ku Klux Klan. Scots driven from their home lands resulted in many becoming the slave overseers of the South's plantations.

These are minor points. The scope of Herman's book, as he states, is global, both physically and intellectually. He has assembled a wealth of material, presented it forcefully and cogently. There's much more to deal with here than simply learning something [more?] about the Scots. Too often portrayed as backward romantics, Herman has shown the Scots to be an essential foundation for today's intellectual, commercial and political environment.


Book title belies the insights contained within   February 5, 2003
Provides a gripping insight into the environment and thinking of the period around the Scottish Enlightenment. For those who are familiar with Scottish history, this book may change your view of that history. The romantic notions of events created after the fact are debunked by this text. The impact on modern society is highlighted masterfully. However, the title may be titilating to some, but I think it detracts from the value of the book. (Sounds more like a Guiness Book of records claim).


Not what you might be expecting... more.   January 17, 2003
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

This book will surprise you more than once, and in doing so surprise again since, from the outset, it sure looks like the sort of book you wouldn't expect to offer any surprises at all - its just history, right?!

This fascinating volume will provide its surprises to readers with a desire for more substance in their understanding of the Scots, but also to those exploring the broad notion that there's more than dry old dust to be raised from looking back to "the Enlightenment" for meanings important in assessing a difficult and dangerous future for "the West."

Some reviewers have suggested that "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek treatment - hinting that it appearance following on the heels of Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" is merely a consequence of some sort of publishing industry templating. I could find nary a tongue nor a cheek. This is a quite serious history written by a quite serious historian who states a compelling case for considering the substantial, possibly preeminent contributions of the Scots to the European enlightenment. That he does so in a way that is convincing is a credit to his skill as a writer as much as to unique power of the underlying theme.

I am not a reader, hardly even an appreciator, of History. I am, however, Scottish by descent and brought up, as were so many American Scots in the 50's and 60's, with a regular exposure to the trappings of the culture set up as a colorful surround to a vague sense of the history of a people somehow grand but sad. This has drawn me to more than a few 'histories' of the Scots over the years but I don't think I've finished a one of them. All those battles - with hardly a victory to be found... all those kings and queens - with hardly a Scot among them!

If, like me, you have been drawn by the feeling that there must be more beneath the mere skirl of pipes (or was it kilts that skirled?), but found that somewhere around Culloden or the Clearances it was just too indigestible a haggis of depressing detail, then this is a book for you. It will cleanly but convincingly detach you from some of the more romantic simplifications lodged in the popularized image of the Scottish people. But it will balance the amputation with the attachment of a quite interesting prosthetic, a history that is one of ideas - and big ideas at that!

This book will gently but firmly disperse your romantic notions of the culture of the Highlands. While giving gracious due to the Highlanders ancestral values of clan as family and honor through battle, Herman makes it clear that by the time the clans had entered the era where modern historical consciousness pegs them, they were mostly just conveniences through which a primitive, feudal social and economic structure was maintained by wealthy and distant "chiefs."

Herman does not set out, explicitly, to remove the kilted and piped 'noble Scot' from the picture, but by effectively doing so he opens the story to his more intriguing theme. That is the story of how cultural and religious change, often energized and honed by the conflicts with England, led to the creation of a vastly literate populace with a deep sense of the rightful role of the individual in structuring the institutions of society. It is the story of how that populace elevated ideas and individual to a conjoint prominence that became manifest in the major institutions of learning and commerce which, together, supported a mutual defining of what Herman asks us to agree is truly "the modern."

As an example of the subtle but deeply convincing surprises the book parses out of this history, consider the role of fundamentalist religion. Who would have imagined that the Scots embracing of a rigid and quite rabidly fundamentalist religion would lead, within barely two generations, to an explosion of ideas about individual and intellectual liberty that gained root in the founding documents of our country?

Why should we care? Does this book merely provide an alternate lens through which to view the distant history of a rather obscure people? If that were the case, we might just as well stick with the kilts and pipes.

I would argue, instead, that this book brings important ideas to very contemporary debates. I've often found sweeping critiques of capitilism, colonialism and imperialism to be compelling - critiques of "the west" which seem to root its failings in the very era which Herman celebrates and attributes to our worthy Scots. But the attacks of September 2001 have done much to crystallize these often merely academic debates. If the "critique of the west" finds its final roost in mass murder, one cannot so glibly embrace that censure.

Reading Herman's book I surprised myself by coming, for instance, to view Adam Smith's ideas in a substantially positive light. I gained a balance - a positive appreciation of what was added to the human species' ways of comprehending and organizing our habitation of the earth, of why it was honestly labeled an "enlightenment" in its day and how it might still inform our thinking about contesting the darkness of ours.

Does this view ignore past and present? colonialism? the depredations of GATT and NAFTA? Nah. But we sure do need more of a stance to stand up against these forces than identity politics; and we need more of an alternative than the return to pre-capitalist forms that is implicit in condemnation of the commercial revolution of the 18th century. Not for this Scot, anyways; no return to pipes or kilts - but also no return to mud huts and bloody servitude. We can gain much by acknowledging that the Enlightenment was a positive historical movement. Herman's thoughtful analysis of that movement, albeit through a plaid lens, re-invigorates history by reminding us how much we have to learn from its (re)-reading.