Abstract
The study of particular human lives was fundamental to the aim of founding a general science of human nature on empirical observation. Identifying the methodological achievement of Scottish Enlightenment historians and philosophers in a retrospective assessment of the life and writings of Adam Smith delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) in 1793, Dugald Stewart coined what would become a famous phrase: “conjectural or philosophical” history.1 The power of this method lay in acts of imaginative sympathy that connected particular pieces of evidence across gaps of knowledge to produce a coherent narrative with general applicability Imaginative projection came into play in history as in Humean epistemology when “[i]n [the] want of direct evidence,” as Stewart put it, “we are under a necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are likely to have proceeded, from the principles of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation” (10:33–34). For the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, individual biography stabilized conjecture by permitting the reader to enter into the subjective interiority of historical process as experienced “by actual men…on particular occasions.”
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Notes
Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 11 vols., ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable; London: Hamilton, Adams, 1854–60), 10:33–35.
On the various meanings of “conjecture” in this context, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 218–19.
James Gregory, Philosophical and Literary Essays, 2 vols. (1792; repr., Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), lxcxcvi.
On proximity and distance, see Mark Salber Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,” PMLA 118, no. 3 (2003): 436–49.
David Hume, “Appendix 2. Of Self-Love,” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 296–97.
Boswell, Life of Johnson: Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: And, Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, 6 vols, ed. George Birkbeck Hill; rev. ed. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64), 3:404.
William Robertson, Miscellaneous Works and Commentaries, ed. and intro. Jeffrey R. Smitten, The Works of William Robertson, 12 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), 7:58–62 (60).
Geoffrey Carnall has pointed out that many of the work’s first readers did have such an evangelizing response. See “Robertson and Contemporary Images of India,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217–18. Modern historians differ on the relationship between stadialist historiography and Christian providentialism; see, for example, Nicholas Phillipson, “Providence and Progress: An Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson,” in Brown, Expansion of Empire, 55–73; and Colin Kidd, “Scotland’s Invisible Enlightenment: Subscription and Heterodoxy in the Eighteenth-Century Kirk,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 30 (2000): 28–59.
Francis Russell Hart’s phrase, referring to J.G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819). The culture in question is romantic Edinburgh of 1819. See Hart, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 46.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, vol. 4 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. J.C. Bryce, gen. ed. A.S. Skinner (1983; Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), 55.
James Boswell, Boswell on the Grand Tour: (i) Germany and Switzerland 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1953), 296.
Boswell, Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1936), 8.
Bruce Redford, Designing the Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 75.
See Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992; repr., London: Routledge, 1993), 56–57.
Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed., Letters of James Boswell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 2:340.
On biography as a rhetorical performance of character, see Anthony J. LaVopa, “Doing Fichte: Reflections of a Sobered (but Unrepentant) Contextual Biographer,” in Biographie Schreiben, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 107–71.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144–45.
James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1971), 40.
Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 60ff.
See also John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Constable, 1902), 1:193.
On Charles V as a manipulator of character and the “penetrating eye,” see Neil Hargraves, “Revelation of Character in Eighteenth-Century Historiography and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V,” Eighteenth-Century Life 27, no. 2 (2003): 38.
Walter Scott, Quentin Durward, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10.
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Manning, S. (2011). Historical Characters: Biography, the Science of Man, and Romantic Fiction. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_12
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