Rating: 
Summary: The Scots Enlightened the world
Review: The book might be better titled 'The Scottish Enlightenment and its influences on the modern world.' It is divided into two sections, 'Epiphany' and 'Diaspora'. Few will need an introduction to notions of a Scottish diaspora, but 'epiphany' is an interesting twist on 'Enlightenment'. The conventional academic gloss on the Enlightenment focuses on French appeals to 'reason' culminating in Kant's categorical truths. The followers of Edmund Burke generally dismiss the 'French Enlightenment' as a corruption of the British Enlightenment which focused on 'compassion' rather than 'reason'.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 than convincing. The leap from Knox (1505 - 1572) to Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) required a detour from church history into British nationalism 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), I was left wondering if the emphasis on Knox was merely Scottish boosterism, i.e. the Scots invented everything, so we need a 16th century Scot founder. . The genesis story is to short. 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 the boosterism. The story moves pretty quickly. 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 emphasis on continental philosophy. The story of Sir Walter Scott would have made a good ending, but Herman presses on with an unnecessary history (but mercifully short) of steam engines, public health and any Scot that made a bundle of cash.
Rating:
Summary: Scotland Forever!
Review: What a warm and revealing book. For so many of us in America of Scot descent, too many of us had no idea of the importance of this poor and ignored nation that produced such a revolution of new ideas in law, philosophy, government, economics, education, and religion that are with us today and taken for granted. Scotland overcame every adversity and stands proud today as a grand part of our heritage.
Rating:
Summary: The Scottish Epiphany
Review: A more conventional title would have been 'The Scottish Enlightenment and its influences on the modern world.' The book is divided into two sections, 'Epiphany' and 'Diaspora'. Few will need an introduction to notions of a Scottish diaspora, but 'epiphany' is an interesting twist on 'Enlightenment'. The conventional academic gloss on the Enlightenment focuses on French appeals to 'reason' culminating in Kant's categorical truths. The followers of Edmund Burke generally dismiss the 'French Enlightenment' as a corruption of the British Enlightenment which focused on 'compassion' rather than 'reason'. 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.
Rating: 
Summary: More than just Bobby Burns
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Book title belies the insights contained within
Review: 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).
Rating:
Summary: Not what you might be expecting... more.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Bonnie Disproportion
Review: Arthur Herman has created an exaggeration. Nevertheless there have been periods when Scots have been very influential in world affairs. What Les Murray calls "The Bonnie Disproportion". As, unlike Scots in Scotland, Australian Scots own and run large chunks of it. And there is more evidence of modernity in Sydney than in Stornoway [or Dundee] - as yet. How fares our modern world? Stirling Newburry is a determined advocate for the Constitutional Republic. He writes: "We have neither socialism nor capitalism - the entire idea of subscribing to an ism is very 20th century - whether in music, art or politics - people rushed into the arms of isms to control what they saw as an out of control world. What we have is a new system - one which relies on the stability of institutions in ways that neither socialism nor capitalism conceived of. The question is whether this system is going to be a closed corrupt self-perpetuating set of interlocking oligarchies - largely favoring those who run the large corporations - or whether some other structure will be used. There are two problems to face - corporatism has shrouded itself in the myth of being meritocratic and capitalist - when it is neither, merely very able to reward those it likes - and the opposition to corporatism uses archaic terms and archaic thinking. The way out of corporatism isn't socialism - because corporatism is, in fact, quite socialistic in its structure, and is therefore capable of coopting enough of any socialist critique to maintain power. The way out of corporatism isn't radical decentralization, because radical decentralization can be defeated in detail by concentrated power. What is crucial is a mechanism powerful enough to level the playing field. If one needs an example - look at the Windows monopoly. Illegal by any standards, MS clears 85% profit margins - and that is what they are willing to admit to, the truth is higher still - on a OS whose primary advantage is that it is entrenched. On the other side of the coin is the open source movement, which, without centralized funding is rapidly rising to challenge a monopoly which is backed by the current US Government with the full force of the law. It is a David and Goliath story which should tell people that radical decentralization can work - but there must be some adjudicating power which is strong enough to go one one one with the most powerful corporations. That entity can only be government." There is no culture without literature, remarked David Hume. While contemporary English efforts tend to the negligible, add to the dross pile - in contemporary Scotland we appear to publish mere haver-spheres of prose rising miasmically aff our bed of apathy. That is: having invented the modern world, we're not offering or proposing or experimenting remedies or cures for it, are we? The "Bonnie Disposition" originated from a s-ketch on the back of an envelope and was sailed fictionally W of the Hebrides. Yok Finney now favors the modern schooner rig for a lower center of effort and better airflow catamaraning. For a 40' catamaran wingsail schooner to guide future developments of the Pictish Navy...
Rating:
Summary: Super Read
Review: I found this book most interesting and informative to read . I am an Irish person living in Scotland for over 30 years , and it did more to give me an accurate view of Scottish history between 1600 and 1900 than everything else I have read . Its just a pity Scotland has lost so much of this " invention " in the last 100 years , and even of late , when the world has become so much more competitive . Maybe the book should become compulsive reading in secondary school , thus inspiring a confidence in our childern that they can really make a difference , and stop looking over their shoulders expecting the state to do anything for them . Also it would not be a bad thing for every MSP's to also read , and also stop blaming the English for all of Scotlands ills .
Rating:
Summary: Not Just for Scots
Review:
Don't let the title turn you away! This book operates on three different levels. On one level, as the title indicates, it will give any Scottish descendant in the United States (or anywhere for that matter) a real "warm and fuzzy" about their heritage. At another level, it is a great summary of the history and foundations of Scotland from an intelectual an economic perspective. I found, however, that the most compelling reason to read the book is to listen to the arguments made by the Scottish (and other) philosophers and writers about man, government, commercialism, and their interrelationships. The issues that they argued are with us today and may be more pronounced than ever. Perhaps this little review of how we got here will help us understand where we need to be going -- Scottish or otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: Required reading for history enthusiasts
Review: Arthur Herman writes a convincing portrayal of the Scottish people as coming from a financially poor but intellectually rich country. In the early 1700s the Scottish Enlightenment began and with it came a greatly enhanced understanding of our world and breakthrough philosopies in economies, physics and many other sciences. From the economic principles of Adam Smith, and philosophies of David Hume to the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and financial empires of Andrew Carnegie there seems to be no area of modern life where the Scottish influence was not felt. In relation to other countries the people and contributions presented in this book show a disporporationately larger contribution by the Scottish society to our modern life than any other single nationality. One of the significant contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to the United States was the teachings of Hutcheson that oppressed people have a right to rise up against their oppressor and establish a free society. In addition, many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were either Scottish or descendents of Scots. In many ways the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment period formed the underpinnings for the basic philosophies of the United States. Herman goes on with example after example of how the Scottish Enlightenment and the concepts born there significantly influenced the modern world. A thoroughly fascinating read that kept surprising me with the magnitude of the contributions of the Scottish people to our modern world, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history.
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