tuals of the Scottish Enlightenment belonged stood against the fanaticism of
all these religious parties. These were the Scots who were closest to English
political power. They were administrators of Scottish government under the
Union: Hume’s grandfather was Lord Chief Justice; Kames succeeded to the
high court; Adam Smith had strong connections in London; Hume intermit-
tently held English military and diplomatic posts in the 1740s and again in the
1760s and ended as undersecretary of state. The ruling political faction in
Scotland had structural reasons to take a secular outlook, since every church
faction, including the Episcopalians, was their opponent. The situation resem-
bles that of Hobbes, promoting a militant materialism in Royalist circles during
a religious-led rebellion; but it was more successful, since Hobbes became
disreputable when the Episcopalian Church was reestablished after the Resto-
ration, whereas in Scotland the government was essentially secular and bent
on keeping control over religious factions, all of which were potentially sub-
versive.
Once again illustrating the pathway from religious stalemate to an ideology
of moderation, the Scottish intellectuals in these ruling circles became Deists,
tending to go even further toward secularism. The opening up of the social
sciences followed from the concomitant rearrangement of the means of intel-
lectual production. Issues of value theory had been traditionally contained
within church doctrine; analysis of the social world was usually circumscribed
by the religious legitimation of political authority, or left without sustaining
networks because such analysis did not come into the province of church-con-
trolled university education. In Scotland the universities were bones of conten-
tion in politico-religious strife. As the secularizing government gained the upper
hand, by the 1740s the crown was making the majority of the faculty appoint-
ments, at least at the Lowland universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The
center of gravity was wrested from traditional theological subjects and shifted
toward law, history, and natural philosophy. Innovators such as Smith and
Ferguson turned chairs of moral philosophy into bases for economics, political
theory, and sociology. By the 1740s, Scottish graduates were shifting from the
clergy to careers in the civil service (Wuthnow, 1989: 254–260). At a time
when the universities in England and France, still under clerical control, were
moribund, the Scottish universities were flourishing with these new career
paths and the intellectual opportunities that opened up for the teachers of these
new subjects. The number of Edinburgh and Glasgow students almost tripled
between 1700 and 1770; Edinburgh alone in the latter year, with 1,100
students, was three times the size of Oxford and Cambridge combined during
this same period (Wuthnow, 1989: 252; Stone, 1974b: 91–92).
Hume was the first to see the intellectual space that was opening up.^28 His
detachment from religion fit the trend of university politics, but it was only
616 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths