The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680 - 1760

Ideas in Context

by John Robertson

Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest thinkers in each country, David Hume and Giambattista Vico.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction

476 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

John Robertson is Professor Emeritus of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge University. He is also Emeritus Fellow of Clare College.