End of the Scottish Enlightenment in its transatlantic context: moral education in the thought of Dugald Stewart and Samuel Stanhope Smith, 1790-1812
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Date
30/11/2012Author
Bow, Charles Bradford
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Abstract
The thesis explores the history of the Scottish Enlightenment in its transatlantic
context and, in particular, the diffusion of Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy in
late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scotland and the United States. This project
is the first full-scale attempt to examine the tensions between late eighteenth-century
Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture and counter-Enlightenment interests in the
Atlantic World. My comparative study focuses on two of the most influential university
educators in Scotland and the newly-founded United States. These are Dugald Stewart
at the University of Edinburgh and Samuel Stanhope Smith at the College of New
Jersey (which later became Princeton University). Stewart and Smith are ideal for a
transatlantic comparative project of this kind, because of their close parallels as moral
philosophy professors at the University of Edinburgh (1785-1810) and the College of
New Jersey (1779-1812) respectively; their conflicts with ecclesiastical factions and
counter-Enlightenment policies in the first decade of the nineteenth century; and finally
their uses and adaptations of Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. The broader
question I address is how the diffusion and fate of Scottish Enlightenment moral
thought was affected by the different institutional and, above all, religious contexts in
which it was taught.
Dugald Stewart’s and Stanhope Smith’s interpretations of central philosophical
themes reflected their desire to improve the state of society by educating enlightened
and virtuous young men who would later enter careers in public life. In doing so, their
teaching of natural religion and metaphysics brought them into conflict with religious
factions, namely American religious revivalists on Princeton’s Board of Trustees and
members of the Scottish ecclesiastical Moderate party, who believed that revealed
religion should provide the foundation of education. The controversies that emerged
from these tensions did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. My research illustrates
how the American and Scottish reception of the French Revolution; the 1793-1802
Scottish Sedition Trials; Scottish and American ‘polite’ culture; Scottish secular and
ecclesiastical politics; American Federalist and Republican political debates; American
student riots between 1800 and 1807; and American religious revivalism affected
Smith’s and Stewart’s programmes of moral education. While I identify this project as
an example of cultural and intellectual history, it also advances interests in the history of
education, ecclesiastical history, transnational history, and comparative history.
The thesis has two main parts. The first consists of three chapters on Dugald
Stewart’s system of moral education: the circumstances in which Stewart developed his
moral education as a modern version of Thomas Reid’s so-called Common Sense
philosophy, Stewart’s applied ethics, and finally, his defence of the Scottish
Enlightenment in the context of the 1805 John Leslie case. Complementing the
chronology and themes in part one, the second part consists of three chapters on Smith’s
programme of moral education: the circumstances that gave rise to Smith’s creation of
the Princeton Enlightenment, Smith’s applied ethics, and finally, Smith’s defence of his
system of moral education in the contexts of what he saw as two converging counter-
Enlightenment factions (religious revivalists and rebellious students) at Princeton. In
examining these areas, I argue that Dugald Stewart and Samuel Stanhope Smith
attempted to systematically sustain Scottish Enlightenment ideas (namely Scottish
philosophy) and values (‘Moderatism’) against counter-Enlightenment movements in
higher education.