Doing Sociology and Understanding the Enlightenment in the Stateless Nation of Scotland

Alex Law, The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process, Routledge 2026.

Reviewed by David McCrone

The first professor of sociology in Scotland was Tom Burns (1913-2001) at the University of Edinburgh. Tom was fond of saying that ‘society is more interesting than sociology’. By this he meant that social scientists ought to more interested in making sense of the world ‘out there’ than contemplating their navels, a useful metaphor in terms of worrying about where, and who, we have come from; what our intellectual roots are. 

You may not care very much about where sociology, or the social sciences, came from in terms of its intellectual origins, but there is, at heart, a Scottish dimension to all this. Alex Law’s excellent book brings us back to who we have turned out to be. 

Sociology as a university subject came to Scotland quite late, in the 1960s, first at Edinburgh, then Aberdeen, followed by Glasgow. There was, though, something odd about it. It had crossed the border with all sorts of cultural baggage, which took two forms. The first assumed that everywhere was much of a muchness in terms that all modern societies were or were becoming ‘the same’: hence, terms like industrial society, capitalist society, modern society, and so on. 

The second assumed that sociology was the intellectual creature of the ‘nation-state’ in the post-war period. In this island, the creation of sociology and the welfare state were closely aligned. What we got was an implicit version of ‘methodological nationalism’ – that ‘Britain’ was a homogeneous nation-state which defined the parameters of this new-fangled sociology. There simply could not be ‘a sociology of Scotland’. Some of us begged to differ.

And so what was taught under the rubric of sociology from the 1960s fell into the two modes: that there was something ubiquitous about ‘modern society’, and that you could do a sociology of Britain, America, France and so on. The foundations of this new study lay in something called ‘social theory’, the writings of a holy trinity of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Later on, other theorists were added to the panoply, too many to mention here, but disparaged as the writings of dead white men. Even later on, the notion of a common set of theorists fell away, and was replaced by a cafeteria system of letting students pick up what they wanted off the shelf, and put together their own root book should they want such a thing. 

Back to the Scottish Enlightenment and its enduring influence

Why tell you this? Because the major lacuna lay in the neglect of even longer-dead Scottish writers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and William Robertson, and many more besides: all belonging to the Scottish Enlightenment, a term dreamt up in retrospect. Law’s book is one in a line of rehabilitation studies, to reclaim our ancestors as the originators of sociology as the science of society. Truth to tell, convention treats them as ‘philosophers’ in the main, or in the case of Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics as a free-market science. Recall Mrs Thatcher’s commendation that Smith was ‘a jolly good Scot’; not, one suspects, that she had read The Wealth of Nations, or The Theory of Moral Sentiments. She believed what she was told by the likes of the Adam Smith Institute (sic) and the Institute of Economic Affairs. 

We are in the presence, then, of what Law calls a process of ‘habitual forgetfulness’. The time has long come to recover our ancestors. What they had in common was framed by the question: how is society possible? We are acquainted with Thomas Hobbes’ war of all against all, but even a passing acquaintance with the likes of Smith, Hume et al., shows that the key to social relations is sociality, that people are held in common bond by systems of mutual support, however much they differ in material terms. 

Lest it be thought otherwise, ‘the Scottish Historical School’, as it was sometimes called, with its commitment to a theory of social stages was a major influence on Marx and his mode of production notion. As Law observes: ‘Certain aspects of Marx’s interrogation of the assumptions of the Scottish Enlightenment have entered the canon of classical sociology’ (p. 60). 

Furthermore, the concept of ‘civil society’ emanates from Ferguson, Smith and Hume among others, as a relatively autonomous self-regulating unit distinct from the political society of the state. There are good grounds for this, because post-1707, the state had departed for London, and Scotland was held together by something essentially social, which morphed eventually into another holy trinity of institutions: religion, law and education. 

Ancestor Worship and the Importance of Civil Society

Trying to make a living out of the space left by the Union, between the aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, ecclesiastical disputes between Calvinists and ‘Moderates’ in the Kirk, and the patronage of universities notably in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow (St Andrews seems to have little or no presence in this account) is what the Enlightenment ancestors had to contend with. 

So why bother with long dead men, either in an academic subject like sociology, or more generally in social thought? For a start, as the sociologist John Hall has observed elsewhere, ‘far too little attention has been given to Scotland, as compared to France and Germany, in accounts of the Enlightenment’ (p. 294 in Demeter (ed.) The Sociological Heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment (2024)).

Hall argues that Smith is a crucial interpreter of the character of modern societies; that Hume’s genius was to show that knowledge rests on habit and convention rather than reason; that social life is ‘other-directed’, for we are constantly aware of others, just as they are aware of us. The upshot of all that, Hall observes, is that to write one of the iconic texts of social theory, Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, first published in 1971, without including Adam Smith ‘is to imagine Hamlet without the prince’ (p. 293).

The reader of this review may be wondering: what’s the point of this resurrection of Smith, Hume et al.? For a start, sociology has become a very broad church with lots of unbelievers and heretics. There is no need for ‘Founding Fathers’ (or ‘Mothers’). Writers attributed to the Scottish Enlightenment are philosophers, and historians of thought, and of little use in understanding modern societies. Is there not a sense in which this is raising the dead for little purpose other than for ancestor worship, and possibly recovering Scottish self-respect while burrowing into intellectual roots? Was Tom Burns not correct in averring that society was more interesting than sociology? 

True, to a degree, that rooting about in intellectual ancestors can become a bit of a displacement activity. Worrying about how many angels you can get on the head of a pin seems a pointless exercise. Except, that was an early modern jibe made against the likes of theologians like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, by Protestants thirled to a theology of redemption through good works. Bear in mind too that the angels’ comment had a deeper meaning as regards corporeality; what did or did not exist. 

One defence in favour of digging up ancestors is to discover our intellectual DNA, an over-used metaphor these days, and little to do with the science of genetics. If sociology owes far more of its roots to the Scottish Enlightenment, shouldn’t we say so? Might it explain why sociology and social sciences generally aped Anglo-American forms in the post-war years, and why so many students were bewildered by so much of the subject having, seemingly, so little to do with people like us? 

Maybe excavations have a point. They help to account for ‘civil society’, that social and intellectual space between what Ernest Gellner called the tyranny of kings, and the tyranny of kin, between the political state and family life. Certainly, arid scholasticism has its pitfalls, but Law’s book avoids that, by showing both how sociology has been underpinned by Enlightenment thought, and how it itself can be subject to social and intellectual analysis back in the day. We ignore what we have come from at our peril.