How the Scots Invented the Modern World

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They were Whigs (Shaftesbury’s father had even been founder of the Whig Party), not just because they were strong Protestants but because they believed, contrary to Berkeley, that men were born with a desire to be free, in their own lives and in their political arrangements. There are so many books I have read in paper form and later in audiobook format and usually I am either disappointed in the audiobook, or I find it much improved over the original version.

This is the sort of view we are used to ascribing to John Locke; in fact, it belongs to a Presbyterian Scot from Stirlingshire writing more than a hundred years earlier. The “Scottish invasion” of the first three decades of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the great triumphs of the Victorian age. It will show how that idea transformed their own culture and society in the eighteenth century, and how they carried it with them wherever they went.Herman continued this type of theme with his next book, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, published in 2004. If Hutcheson was arguing that the most important instinct human beings have in common is their moral sense, Kames was saying that it is their sense of property and desire to own things. Almost one hundred years before Karl Marx, Kames and the Scots had discovered the underlying cause of historical change: changes in the “means of production. In 19th-century Britain, the Scottish Enlightenment, as popularized by Dugald Stewart, became the basis of classical liberalism.

Robertson and the rest saw the doctrines of Christianity as the very heart of what it meant to be modern.In The Scotsman, reviewer George Kerevan wrote that Herman may have successfully proven his thesis but does not satisfactorily account for "why Scotland? I first read this book in 2002, shortly after publishing and found it so informative and well written, I have referred to parts of it several times in the past. But in all the areas that came under his influence, the Kirk created a new society in the image of Knox's utopian ideal.