"Great Reformation in the Manners of Mankind": Utopian Thought in the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment *‪.‬

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS much comment has been made about the allegedly "unfashionable" nature of utopian thought. Davis has commented that in the second half of the twentieth century utopias, and thoughts about ideal societies in general, passed out of intellectual fashion (L. Davis 56-57). On the face of things this appears to be an assertion with much to support it. From George Orwell's dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the liberal critiques of utopianism provided by Berlin, Hayek, Popper and others, the focus in the recent past has been on criticism of the notion of utopia and the project of utopia formation. The main reason that utopian thought went out of fashion was the link drawn between utopianism and the totalitarian regimes that blighted the twentieth century. Berlin and Popper argued that utopian thought necessarily opened the door to totalitarianism because the very act of imagining an ideal society created the temptation to reach it at any cost (Berlin 15; Popper 357). It is not the aim of this article to take issue with this view, or plunge into the debate surrounding it. Rather what it will attempt to do is to show that this passing from fashion is not without precedent. Indeed the reason why utopias passed out of favour in the twentieth century, namely their being tainted by association with a totalitarian desire to implement plans for an ideal society, is paralleled by a previous passing from fashion of utopian thought which occurred in Scotland in the century between 1640 and 1740. As a result it is possible to draw a parallel between the criticism of utopia by a twentieth-century figure such as Popper and that of an eighteenth-century figure such as Hume. Perhaps the most famous group of political thinkers produced by Scotland are those who have come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others represent a distinct school of Scottish moral and political thought which operated within the broader European Enlightenment. They also represent a distinct branch of the Scottish tradition of thinking about politics. The Enlightened Scots' immediate predecessors in Scottish political theory were the writers of the Scottish Reformation. (1) Part of this article's argument is that there is a break in the tradition of Scottish political thought, a disjuncture between the thinkers of the Reformation and of the Enlightenment, and that a key feature of this break was their differing attitudes to the notion of an ideal society.