About a decade and a half ago, I was asked to contribute / write materials for a “Scottish Version” of a UK-wide social science course (at a UK distance learning institution). The aim of these teaching materials was to address the growing divergence between Scottish society (including its laws and civil life) and the ‘rest of the UK’ following the establishment of political devolution in the late 1990s. A goal was to highlight emerging differences, and specifically with England, which made up the majority of ‘reference points’, case studies, and examples when it came to teaching social sciences in the UK. A typical cry of tutors based in Scotland was: ‘but that doesn’t apply here!’ What was desired were some course materials which demonstrated how social lives in Scotland diverged from ‘the rest of the UK’.
However, this task was more complex and perplexing than at first appeared; not least because such a task also (always) begs the questions: ‘what is Scottish social science?’ and ‘Is there such a thing as a specifically Scottish social science?’ These queries meant going beyond the superficial concern of ‘what is different about Scottish society?’ in an empirically-driven ‘case study’ sense. Of course, I could run up a list of ‘national’ social differences without ever getting to the heart of why Scottish society is, indeed, different. However, if Scottish society is unique – a special case – would it not also produce a specific body of social knowledge (a peculiar science or activity) out of this uniqueness?
Two distinct approaches to the problem then come to mind, and the distinctions between them highlight a quandary for any social scientist struggling to ‘make ends meet’ in Scotland. First, I could show students how the social science ideas and concepts expounded in the UK-wide course “apply” to Scotland. Second, alternatively and significantly, I could introduce them to Scottish social science, that is, to the practical activity of “doing social science” in Scotland, and how this activity first emerged and subsequently produced a distinct body of work which is recognisably Scottish (yet not parochial), such as Scottish Common Sense Philosophy or Edinburgensian Open Marxism. Both approaches would ‘fit the bill’ of a being a Scottish Version of the ‘introducing the social sciences’, however, only one of these approaches (the first – UK-wide ‘application’ of ideas) was eventually to see the light of day. This was the outcome given the practical side of me being ‘contracted’ to write some materials as a “Scottish Version” of the ‘given’ course.
Nevertheless, I did, at the time, turn my attention to the second approach in a ‘let’s see where it takes me/us’ fashion and what follows is my previously unpublished or ‘buried’ attempt to write about a peculiarly Scottish social science. It begins with a consideration of what is ‘wrong’ with the first (Scotland as a ‘case study’) approach.
I. Approaches & Methods
The first approach always carries the danger of reducing Scotland to a mere case study and, thus, an appendage to the ‘real’ course (or ‘real’ social science), where students could contrast and compare Scottish social inequality, government structures, and identities with a UK average, a global way of doing things, or colonial British identities. An epistemological claim in such a view is that social science methods and techniques remain constant and are merely being applied to different social objects. Obviously, such an application will produce different results for Scotland, but it is unlikely to discover a specifically ‘Scottish’ social science, or body of knowledge, which is distinct from England or anywhere else, and emerges in situ out of practical social life.
What the first approach can demonstrate is that social science is limited by the categories it defines and uses. For instance, looking at contemporary Scottish population statistics (which have very little projected growth) demonstrates the meaninglessness of a concept such as “UK population data” (a dataset dominated by massive population growth in England). The concept, therefore, entails problematic categories in trying to frame an ‘immigration policy’ which is suitable to Scotland. Such an approach lacks explanatory power with regards to understanding the internal evolution of Scottish society and, consequently, why rather than merely how Scotland is different! It may be a useful descriptive exercise in explaining how Scottish society differs from the rest of the UK, but predominantly gives explanatory power, or reasons and causes, to abstract forces sitting ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ Scottish society itself – the causes are capitalism, emerging globalisation, the rise of feminism, colonial history, or multiculturalism. Clearly none of these are peculiar to Scotland, so feminism in Scotland ends up being viewed as a branch of global feminism, and feminist theory notes how Scotland diverges from and converges with the theoretical and practical global norms of women’s position in ‘society’ (not ‘societies’). Thus, is Scotland ‘advanced’ or ‘backwards’? By how much is it ‘backwards’, or perhaps even ‘forwards’? The notion of a definitively Scottish social science (as an activity) addressing or contributing to problems unique to women in Scottish society is lost. It is for this reason that I want to concentrate on the second approach as a conscious counter-balance to the reductionism and abstraction found in top-down, centre-periphery ‘applications’ of social science.
However, I can see some immediate objections to this second approach. Is there such a thing as a specifically Scottish social science? Surely science is made up of universal ‘ideas’ spread across human consciousness (at least within the same language group) which cannot be contained or copyrighted? For instance, the concept of ‘materialisation’ (from Judith Butler) is hardly specific to Scotland! Similarly, Scottish social scientists do not sit in an intellectual vacuum, so an idea or policy thought up in Scotland may not be particularly Scottish as it will have many other influences (merely look at debates around Scottish school education which constantly cite comparative international research and practice). Further, if globalisation is producing a global society, in which everything is interconnected, this surely includes social science and the very social movements it theorises?
However, I would want and prefer my students (as part of their social science training) to gain an important practical insight by examining the historical specificity of Scottish social science, and rather than thinking of social science as a ‘theory making’ activity to examine what is involved in the practical activity of ‘doing social science’ within Scottish society – pecking one’s way out of the egg, as opposed to consistently ‘drilling down’ into ‘the data’. Agreed, Scottish social scientists do not sit in an intellectual vacuum, but neither do they sit in a social vacuum. We live somewhere.
The history of social science is littered with European professors attempting to understand the dynamics of Polynesian hunter-gatherer communities by temporarily living amongst them. But such researchers always remain on the ‘outside’ of those communities (hence, the need to ‘drill down’). They do not need to live by hunting for the rest of their lives and so never gain the insight of ‘so this is all there is’! The experiences they gain are actually of importance to themselves and their own societies (Margaret Mead’s discovery that adolescence is a social construct was of significance to American girls more than Samoan ones), and these experiences or exposures change conceptions (like ‘what is the meaning of life?’) within their own societies. Likewise, an American or English sociologist may look at statistics for Scotland and come up with a theory of Scotland’s relatively ‘poor global position’, and by living in Scotland they may even gain a partial insight to the society’s problems, especially if their material well-being (income) is dependent upon a Scottish university. But as an essentially external observer, independent of Scottish society for their social, emotional, and psychological, as well as material, well-being, they may / can remain ‘on the outside’ and develop external analytical theories of how Scotland appears to function or, most often, not function.
To develop a theory from within Scottish society (not just from within its borders) means something different – it means using social science, as an activity of internal social investigation, to change or develop Scottish society, and not simply ‘theorise’ it. Social science should have a practical purpose. This practical scientific activity comes about because social change is desired, wanted or needed, especially when Scottish society is no longer working for us – any or all members of that society. It does not arise from an academic exercise in theory ‘application’. Rather, the ‘science’ arises from the social need for it – its social context or form. But do all human communities require social science?
II. From where does the need for social science come?
Hunter-gatherer tribes and communities never developed a need for social science. They could not afford the time for some people to sit around theorising whilst others hunted, and life was immediate and therein transparent so ‘understanding the social’ was not required. Neither did pastoral nations nor agrarian states develop a need for social science. They developed a religious class of interpretative priests or oracles, and religious codes of behaviour, in line with the needs of a single ruling authority. The latter dictated without question (at least until one specific authority was overthrown and replaced by another via insurrection) from top to bottom how social relations were to be organised. Rather, it was modern civil society (or city-dwelling) that first required and developed specifically social sciences, or knowledge of how people of liberty (without masters or external authorities – tyrants nor gods) should relate one to the other.
The Roman (Latin) word civilis means ‘of or belonging to citizens’ (Gunn, 1995, p42), coming from civitas (Latin for ‘city’). Citizens are city dwellers. But it was not just city dwelling or urbanisation as spatial concentration that required the development of social science, it was that cities involved numerous centres of authority, of equal but qualitatively different power and might. In ancient Greece the terms polity, democracy, aristocracy and oligarchy were all developed (and reported in Aristotle’s Politics) to indicate various forms of government where no single person or authority was in overall control. A mix of polytheism (numerous gods) and polity (rule by all in the interests of all) produced constant internal squabbles and questions of where authority should lie – with the Gods, with Nature, with the Laws, or within each citizen (with their ethical behaviour)? Problems and debates about how citizens should relate to one another and, thereby, live together (since socialising was no longer immediate, natural or guaranteed) also gave rise to scepticism.
This last word is wrongly interpreted as ‘belief in nothing’, but “the Greek term skeptikos means, not a negative doubter, but an investigator, someone going in for skeptesthai or enquiry” (Annas, 2000, p69). Thus, moral scepticism was the investigation of civil life’s stability, and very possibility, given the lack of a unitary authority or power. It was Socrates’ refusal to ever answer questions emphatically whilst always critically investigating the views of others that gave rise to the ‘believe nothing, doubt everything’ interpretation of the word. Hence, the ancient Greeks and to an extent the Romans are famous for their moral philosophy and science, and are seen as the cradle of Western ‘civilisation’. This last word encapsulates the idea that the Greeks and Romans exported their civil ways (city ways) to other nations under imperium (a political obligation to support the Empire through which nations civilised themselves). Civilisation simply meant the adoption or dominance of ‘city ways’ of doing things. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in 414 CE, Western Europe ‘fell back’ into a set of agrarian nations under tyrannical / monarchical protection and the authority of a single monotheist religion, Roman Catholic Christianity.
But what does this social history mean in terms of introducing Scottish social science? Two things. First, the way in which I have just summed up human social history, by dividing it into ‘stages of development’ based on a dominant mode of production (hunting and gathering, then pastoral or tending domesticated animals, then agriculture, and finally city-based trading and manufacturing) was a technique of explanation and justification (reasoning) first developed in Scotland, most notably by David Hume, William Robertson, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith in what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment (1730-1780). It is a technique called ‘philosophical history’ (examining and following the history of social categories, or variables or classes) which was later adopted by Georg Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, among others. Second, it should be of interest as to why this technique first emerged in Scotland. Was it chance? Or was it an intellectual or theoretical development, the next logical step in European philosophy, which Scottish moral philosophers just happened to discover and develop first? How much smarter the Scots must have been than everyone else! Or was this ‘idea’, of developmental stages (called a stadial theory), a product of a society which required it – Scottish society – to make social sense of itself?
Notice how my the theory of stages actually justifies itself. It explains the need for social science via a social scientific explanation of the historic need for itself. I brought myself (a Scottish social scientist) into being. At this moment, no doubt from what you have been told in the past about ‘science’ being ‘objective’, you may scream ‘bias’ or ‘cheat’. In response I would draw on a second development of the Scottish Enlightenment and say ‘of course, but all knowledge is socially biased, and cannot be otherwise without pretence!’ Here is David Hume’s most famous dictum on this issue, from his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739):
“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Hume, 1978, p415; also Ayer, 1979, p98)
What Hume highlights that, for centuries, people had tried to reason or justify their beliefs, system, or social authority on the basis that these corresponded with the stars, nature, will of God, and, eventually, theories of physical science and human nature (as biological and mechanical). That is, social authority found ‘objective’ justification outside of itself. Hume and the other Scots, by driving empirical investigation to its logical conclusion, discovered and started to argue that social authority had no justification other than what it itself came up with. A brilliant insight! Hence, explaining the past as a series of developments is simply one means of justifying what needs to be done today – or as Hume would put it, reason is used in the pursuit of the passions.
The corollary of this is that whatever we decide today we will be able to find some kind of justification for it. For Hume this does not mean that everything we or modern society does is right or morally correct, simply because we can always find justification for what we do, but that social science requires more than reason – it requires an investigation of what is right, just, or the correct thing to do.
Let us now put these two developments within the Scottish Enlightenment together. Adam Smith developed a very famous stadial theory, going from hunter-gatherer communities, through pastoral and agrarian nations, to manufacturing civil societies (Book 3 of the Wealth of Nations). But in undertaking this historical analysis he would have been aware of Hume’s dictum and that what he was trying to reason or justify was his own passion. (Hume, a friend of Smith, was reading Wealth of Nations on his deathbed). Smith’s passion was for a society freed from the yoke of privileges and trade barriers which simply aided the landed gentry and powerful merchants – he wanted a more equitable society. In this sense Smith knew and felt he had moral justification in making his argument and in his reasoning, and that the outcome (his envisioned good society) was not inevitable nor determined, precisely because there was no outside nor external reason for things to be one way rather than another. Hence, the new society had to be argued for and thus ‘reasoned’, or made reasonable in the mind of others, leading to the need for a new social science.
Later uses of the stadial theory in social science simply lost sight of Hume’s dictum. Thus, in the late 19th century, Social Darwinism and, in the 20th century, Nazism used stadial theories to ‘justify’ eugenics and cultural superiority, but they could not do this without recourse to, or falling back into, ‘natural’ reasoning – a pretence and folly according to Hume. They had to say ‘I am superior because nature intended it that way’, rather than ‘I am superior because I think / believe I am superior’. The latter sticks to Hume’s dictum (no external justification) but has no morality, and therefore no moral justification, which would have been paramount in the aims of both Hume and Smith. But why does saying ‘I am superior because I am superior’ have no moral justification? Here we can refer to the German philosopher Kant – namely, a moral activity is something everyone can partake of. Hence, we may all be able to drive small cars so this is moral, whereas we now know we cannot all drive 8 litre turbos without massive environmental damage, so driving the latter is immoral. Clearly, saying ‘I am superior’ means others are ‘inferior’, and this goal of superiority breaks the boundaries of moral justification. So the Scottish moral philosophers – with moral philosophy being an old fashioned term for social scientist, from a time when all sciences were deemed philosophical (Ayer, 1979) – developed both a new form of reasoning (openly based on social requirements) and the technique of ‘philosophical history’ (as a form of social justification) – that is, telling the social story of how we got to where we are at. But, again, why did this happen in Scottish society, why did it turn to the need to openly justify itself? We should go back to ‘philosophical history’ but with the proviso that this is a much harder question to answer.
The modern activity of social science re-emerged in Europe when cities began to grow, undermine and eventually dominate, through trade rather than military might and mediaeval agrarian tyrannies, leading to the Renaissance (or Rebirth) of civil culture around 1450. It was political science which first emerged, during civil wars between and within burgeoning Italian city-states (Machiavelli, Campanella). Think here of the Capulets and Montagues in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliette. Civil war then remained a key stimulant to the investigation of the best form of government during the Protestant Reformation (More, Calvin), the Thirty Years War (Grotius), and English constitutional wars of the 17th century (Firmer, Hobbes, Locke). The very notion that there could be different forms or modes of government was a novel one, and awareness of such constitutional options gave rise to the term ‘modern era’ in opposition to the dogma – blindness to the existence of modes – of the middle ages (the era between ancient and modern civilisations). As such, early modern European civil societies developed the ‘political sciences’ for the first time since Aristotle, opening up works of the ‘Classics’ (Plato, Anaximander, Plotinus) which had been ignored for centuries.
However, it can be claimed that it was the Scottish Enlightenment that first gave rise to a ‘science of social life‘ as opposed to the investigation of legal and constitutional structures or modes of government. The Scottish social scientists took a new and very different approach, giving significance to the investigation of everyday, informally connected lives (moral sentiment, sympathy, fellow feeling, but also the low and dirty matter of trading, production, commerce, and laws of economy) in preference to that of formally structured ordered lives (obligations, allegiances, treaties, governments, declarations, constitutions, contracts, political and legal laws). This difference is something you may know about already with regards to the society you live in – there is a widespread belief that social life can and should be left to what Adam Smith described as an “invisible hand” and does not require governmental, military or political intervention. Though that particular epithet is only part of the story, and does the Scottish Enlightenment a great disservice in any crude interpretation, it does sum up a change in approach to investigating social relations.
Why Scottish social science took the direction it did is hard to answer and I admit to being speculative here. We have noted that civil war gave rise to the need to examine constitutions and contracts, but could a ‘distancing’ of government have given rise to the realisation that it is not just government nor constitutions nor contracts that hold or bind people together? When Scotland’s parliament signed the Treaty of Union in 1707 its parliament literally went away, moving 400 miles south to London. The country was not dominated in a ‘traditional’ way – under the feudal or Norman method of creating a chain of subordination from top to bottom which kept political agents of the central authority in close proximity to those being ruled. Neither did the Scottish parliamentarians sign individual contracts with the English commonwealth to become part of it, something which should have been essential and required under John Locke’s contract theory of political obligation. Something never before seen was taking place. A nation state had never been known to voluntarily ‘sign away’ its independent political authority. With government moving to London, shouldn’t Scottish society have collapsed into anarchy without the presence of a government? That the society did not collapse introduced the concept of a new model of social life, where social unity rested on things other than formal government (and social contracts with a sovereign power), such as society and the mass recognition of equal rights and obligations towards one another. I am only giving this as one possible reason, to sew ideas rather than ‘give facts’. The one thing I can state is that the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were interested in morality more than government. Now morality may be rephrased as ‘self-government’, and from this we can see that the extent to which each person ‘governs him or herself’ will largely determine the shape, form and need for big government. Adam Smith sums up this relation of connected / material lives to ordered lives as follows:
“The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary (Book V, Chp1, Sec 2, para 2) … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all (ibid., para 12)” (Smith, 1999)
Thus, civil government arises from property relations (what is deemed ‘fair’ in the acquisition of property), not the other way around, and the ability of civil government to act at a distance rests on the ability of the rich and poor to self-govern. This says a lot about the formation of Scottish social ‘character’ in the 18th century, which came out of a Calvinist religious tradition. It is no wonder Smith and the other Enlightenment thinkers became interested in the latter, of how civil society morally justifies itself (without authority from above) by using authority from within. The Scots in-formed themselves about how their society should work. But rather than being an external ‘investigation’ of something that was already there (already in existence), Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) was part and parcel of that information and moral justification – rich and poor can get along, with minimal government interference, so long as the poor are given the opportunity to become richer, and this, according to Smith, comes about through the liberation of trade and growth in national wealth, a goal which his book passionately argues for. This is not the place to go into how right or wrong Smith was, it simply shows the ‘origin’ of social science ideas and concepts from within Scottish society, rather than the notion of having them ‘applied’ like ointment.
If I return to the question of ‘from where does the need for social science come?’ I can now provide several answers. First, political and social sciences arise out of social need, the need of a particular society to know how it is, can or should be held together. Second, Scottish society made a unique contribution in developing the technique of ‘philosophical history’, in questioning traditional forms of reasoning, and in shifting the emphasis of investigation away from ‘constitutional government’ and towards everyday life. Before Hume, the English political theorists had responded to the post-Reformation collapse in religious authority by seeking new ways in which to ‘fix’ the constitution, in both senses of the word ‘fix’ – to mend and to set (with glue or in a mould) – largely by recourse to examining the ‘nature of man’ and showing this to have physical causes. Hume’s demonstration that such reasons are simply forms of self-justification – that individualist greedy man justifies himself by claiming to be an animal – opened the door onto a world of true ‘social science’, one in which a work like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations could argue its case against fixed notions of human nature (his stadial theory of development) and for social change (against existing political and social privileges).
II. Nation, Civil Society or Civilisation: Some Definitions & Consequences
I will now turn to another issue at the heart of Scottish social science and its society’s self-understanding. Is Scotland a nation, a civilisation, or some complex mix of the two? I would argue that during the Enlightenment, Scottish philosophers and other citizens thought more about building a civilisation, in contradistinction to what had gone before, even though Smith clearly uses ‘nation’ in the title of his main work. However, by the early 19th century, and in Scotland specifically through the work and efforts of writers and intellectuals like Sir Walter Scott, the concept of a ‘Scots nation’ had been definitively revived and revitalised in the wake of the French Revolution. Whereas nationalism (especially English nationalism and Highland pastoralism) had been a threat to the Scots 18th century programme of civilisation, to extend the power of trade and commerce and therein cities, the French Revolution, which was in many ways the democratic outcome of an emerging civil society, demonstrated the potential threat which lay within civilisation itself. But did that mean Scotland ‘once more’ became a ‘nation’ as it had been in the past? Was there continuity?
Note that in all of the above I have been careful not to use the word ‘society’ when talking of hunter-gatherer, pastoral or agrarian communities and nations. This is because I prefer to reserve the use of the word ‘society’ specifically for reference to ‘civil societies’. Strictly speaking ‘nations’ are tribal and based on kinship, family loyalties, blood ties and birth rights. The Highland Clan of the 18th century is an example of a small nation, where even non-related families (by blood) become part of a Clan Chief’s ‘family’ in return for protection from other Clans. In exchange for the Clan protecting cattle essential to communal life (from raids) a peasant gave military service to the Clan, so helping to protect the Clan. The modern nation hangs on to such notions with regards to the analogy of the state being a ‘family’, which is useful in times of war, but the notion of blood ties and birth rights can also be found in the persistence of racism, sectarianism, ethnic scapegoating and ‘cleansing’. To get round these negative connotations of the term ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, prominent in Nazi Germany and the 1990s Balkan wars, contemporary nation states and nationalist political parties (like the Scottish Nationalist Party) refer to their brand of nationalism as ‘civic nationalism’, where blood ties play second fiddle to pride in national civic institutions which are free (in principle) from racism, familial nepotism, sectarianism and ethnic supremacy.
Yet, the word nation and nationalism remains tinged with ‘blood ties’, as if simply ‘being born’ or ‘coming from’ somewhere is superior to ‘being or becoming civil’. Being born somehow makes a person automatically civil (a citizen) without recognition that civility needs to be learned. But as noted above, being able to adapt to civil life is crucial given the on-going mix and remix of peoples that cities and trading involves. Socially active citizenship is about having the ability to change yourself and your social life; it is about civilising yourself in the presence of others, such that life / things may be shared equally amongst fellow citizens and injustices confronted, thereby making civil life ‘belong to all’ no matter where they come from, what gender they are, or colour of skin they have. It is definitely not about sitting a ‘citizenship test’, as if once passed things are ‘fixed’.
In his first book The Theory of Moral Senitments (1759), Adam Smith gives the example of someone waking up with toothache and howling their head off until they meet a friend in the street, at which point they temper or adapt their behaviour to the social situation – and not wanting to seem childish or feel embarrassed they stop howling and ‘cope with’ the pain. It was this notion of active change or malleability which interested the Enlightenment philosophers. By contrast, national identity is peppered with fixed concepts of ‘national character’. So how should we refer to Scotland in our social science descriptions? From the above I consider the term ‘nation’ is not only dangerous but quaint, a bit like saying betwixt rather than between, choo-choo instead of train (we have electric trains now!). Nation is simply inadequate to capture what Scotland is, but remains socially important. However, the phrases ‘civil society’, ‘society’ and ‘civilisation’ also carry negative connotations.
There is one (poor and incorrect) interpretation of Marx’s work which sees civil society as a mere edifice to cover up the exploitation of the worker which lies beneath. This is an easy enough objection to address. If I were to rearrange your face would you be the same person inside? The edifice (face) and what lies beneath (internal being) are inextricably connected and bound together. I think women understand this better than men with regards to dress sense and the clothes they choose to wear. Wearing certain clothes do not simply give off an image or appearance, they also change how you feel inside – unfeminine, feminine, sexy, drab, or confident. In social terms changing the edifice or what society thinks about itself also brings about changes in what lies beneath, the exploitation of the worker. Hence, the establishment of women’s suffrage and then a right to equal pay has brought about a change in the way women are subordinated and exploited at work, even though it has not brought an end to this exploitation as such. The problem is that voting and equal pay ‘rights’ are now part of a woman’s ‘private property’ within the realm of civil society and it is this form of civility (or civil being) which disconnects her from other women and citizens (we can see this with regards to Monderman’s traffic experiments – see below).
Thus, the term civil society refers to connections between citizens but, more particularly, in the modern era these connections are shaped by an underlying social recognition and constitution of private property rights (one means of distributing goods in material life, and the one ‘we’ moderns are most familiar with). These connections and rights, following the tradition of Scottish social science, then underpin the need for the modern political state (the ordering of life), but are, therein, essentially ‘untouchable’ by government and its policies. Thus, government policy cannot tackle inequality in so far as it is incapable of removing the source of that inequality, namely, the recognition of every citizen’s equal right to hold property free from social interference. And the reverence in which these private rights are held in society vis-a-vis other social entitlements may well demonstrate why certain societies (like Scotland) are more unequal than others (Norway).
However, Scottish civil society, or civilisation, in its inception was not destined to be permanently constituted by such private property rights – especially given Hume’s concept of reasoning as self-justification – and the Scottish Enlightenment’s concept of an ideal civil state carried within it two revolutionary notions: (i) the possibility of social equality between citizens (going beyond the private right of material possession) and (ii) that private property, far from being inalienable, is merely one ‘stage’ in social development. Both of these concepts are actually found in Adam Smith’s work – justice and social change (see Richard Gunn’s work on the latter).
Some of the above, for illustration purposes, can be related to Monderman’s radical reformation of town traffic controls, namely, the act of removing traffic lights, speed restrictions, and pavements in Drachten (Friesland, the Netherlands) in 1978, as cited by Silva (2009). The example can be summed up in terms of two civil modes of being, before and after the removal of the traffic lights:
- I am hurriedly driving at 35mph towards lights when they go red. You are old and start to cross the road. Before you cross, in the legally recognised allotted time, the lights go green. Your private right to cross the road has been suspended. You are now infringing my private right to speedy travel. In annoyance I rev my engine, beep the horn, and gesture for you to get off the road. In my haste I then run over your leg, crushing it. We end up in court and the judge (arbitrator) rules that in this clash of private rights your infringement on my property (loss of time) has been less than my infringement on yours (loss of limb) and that I must, consequently, compensate your loss of property (loss of limb minus loss of time = cash amount). Throughout our connection or engagement has been one of private property holders exercising private rights.
- The planning department now remove the traffic lights, speed limits and raise the road to pavement level. Now I must clearly take care when driving through town. I have to actively negotiate with others, recognising their abilities and needs. Seeing you I slow up, gesturing you to cross. You reciprocate gesturing me to go first. In this second civil mode we are both exercising sympathetic care not private rights, and have to connect with each other as people with needs and abilities and not just ‘property’.
We should not be too rosy-spectacled about this second mode of being, but in analysis it can be seen that people can, and do, live with / within both civil states, or modes of being, simultaneously, Each modern society has its own mix of property rights and sympathetic care within people before government gets involved. If you got the impression in the original example (from Silva) that it is government intervention (the ordering of life) that shapes the particular mix of civil modes (connections between citizens) I should be clear that this relation gets reversed in the tradition of Scottish social science.
It may well appear as if legal rights and the law (traffic lights) force people to connect with (show care towards) each other rather than disconnect (walk around in private property bubbles). In other words, under this model, government brings about civil society. However, in what has been called “a distinctive school of Scottish philosophy” (Skinner, 1999, p12), or ‘tradition’ of social science, it is civil society (recognition of private property rights) which is taken as the starting point. It is the particular societal mix of how we connect with one another (sympathetic care), or disconnect from one another (private rights), which gives rise to the need for government (traffic lights) or not (no traffic lights). To do social science in this Scottish tradition means starting with an investigation of civil society (the way people recognise and constitute each other as ‘human’ and ‘entitled’ at an everyday level) rather than the investigation of government (formal parliamentary constitutions, ‘bills of right’ and policies). We saw this above with Smith’s criticism of privilege. Put it this way, if people in Drachten could not connect with one another without the intervention of government then the experiment in removing traffic lights would have failed. But, interestingly, it didn’t. This approach, of prioritising the study of civil connections, is not only the basis of the Scottish tradition or ‘school’, but of Hegelianism, Marxism, and existentialism, as well as classical and neo-liberal economics.
The term ‘civilisation’ has been equally problematic, often understood as a means of covering up the extension of capitalist exploitation under the auspices of ‘progress’. But an alternative interpretation of Marx is to see him investigating the failure of civilisation to date. It is now apparent that civilisation has not overcome tyranny, and that tyranny resides within civil society and civilisation – as the anarchist Kropotkin would point out, more forthrightly than Marx, the private property owner (the capitalist) is nothing but a monopolistic despot whose ‘freedom’ to control others and everything within their property space ruins the potentiality of communal co-operation and interdependence (actions which define the modern mode of production). That is, you live in a democracy but would you describe your workplace as democratic? Marx’s point was that the public realm of civil society is still subordinated to the privatised realm of the workplace – especially as the latter generates the ‘private’ wealth which the state then taxes to retain public order. Yet, it is mistaken to think that this situation should be the other way around (a public workplace subordinating the freedoms of civil life sounds like the old Soviet Union); rather the workplace needs to be made one (a common singularity) with the realm of civil life, to be made ‘of or belonging to citizens’. From one respect those representing the interests of social or civic ownership (Marx called them the proletariat) have made massive strides away from despotism in the 20th century, with civil legislation determining what can and cannot be done in the ‘private’ realm of work (working hours, industrial tribunals, health and safety, pensions, sickness benefits, holiday pay, equal pay, the removal / questioning of race and other forms of discrimination as grounds of employment and dismissal). However, as these are typically packaged up by the state into ‘private rights’ to be exercised ‘privately’ by individual civilian ‘mini-despots’, they are also equated with the employers right to private property. Citizens are reminded to recognise and respect all private rights (to make this reasonable connection) if they want to retain their own private rights and have these respected by others – despite the obvious inequalities in what those rights provide by way of material life. People fall back into the security of privacy and turn their backs on active citizenship, of the need to engage or connect with others as citizens and not simply as owners of private rights. It appears as if private property rights are inalienable or set in stone, but they have only been reasoned as such from habit and custom, and as such are derived from a living sense of social justice.
The tyranny within civilisation is not all it has been about, and the process carries forward a contradiction, a struggle to regain active citizenship (real social life) beyond a set of property rights (individual material gains). Central components of this struggle are the very ideas that people are firstly social and then individual (expounded by the observation that people are most passionate about other people) and that change remains possible, the very malleability of both the individual and society being a key theme of the Scottish Enlightenment.
David Hume was born at Ninewells, in Berwickshire in 1711. He was brought up by a strict Calvinist mother but by the age of 18 had become an atheist. How had he managed this transformation, or what had ’caused’ him to do this? In terms of your own life and the changes you have been through, ask yourself if you are the same person you were 10 or 20 years ago? Are you, as a being, consistent or always the same? Maybe you have been through a change in beliefs or ideas. Have you become a different person? With questions such as these we often think of external influences and things that have ‘happened to’ us and others. Alternatively, we may think of ourselves as being in control of what we do and who we are. This kind of dualism can be found in Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s political treatise, where biologically driven selfishness (external cause) is to be overcome by conscious consent to join a mutually protective commonwealth (an expression of free will or voluntarism). Yet, Hume, I believe, would have been interested in the interaction between these two points, that it is not the cause (selfishness) which leads to the effect (political constitution) but the effect (individuality which then requires good government) that produces (belief in) the cause (the reasoning that people are ‘just like that’, namely, selfish).
The problem is that early political science just accepted the individual person (you) as a single consistent entity (not a bundle of interactions or relations), as if you don’t actually change but are always just ‘you’. Hume notes that we think of ourselves as such a consistent entity merely out of habit and custom – we presume and reason ourselves to be consistently the same person. But empirically we aren’t – we grow older and change, we ‘grow up’, you may become a Christian or a socialist. You change your beliefs, perhaps out of an accidental happening, and then your beliefs change you. You may well believe that God is now in charge of your life, or that socialism is inevitable, but these are still your beliefs. You changed yourself – you changed you. Thus, you are your own cause and effect, and you make sense of how you got to where you are by reasoning to yourself that it all makes sense. But you need confirmation that you are accurate and reasonable in your assessment, and cannot avoid but turning to someone else. If they are like you (the same) you will be confirmed; if they differ in their opinion the difference may produce conversation, questioning and, thus, social change. This is the level of interaction the early Scots social scientists were interested in, and interestingly they looked for the same principles in economic transaction as well as psychological interaction. How is the value of (your) labour confirmed? Is its value always the same? How can its value be increased?
Conclusion
Perhaps I have not covered the issues many would expect to be covered in a discussion of Scottish social science – the role of devolution in Scotland, how does Scottish inequality compare to Norway and the rest of the UK, or how important is Scottish identity in peoples’ lives? I have left these to subsequent ‘parts’ (possibilities / writings) because I thought it would be better to concentrate on the fundamental issue of what contribution Scotland has – the Scots in their situation have – made to social science. The ramifications of what I have outlined above are, I believe, important.
Take a question such as what role devolution has played or may play in Scottish society and life. According to Adam Smith’s analysis “the acquisition of extensive and valuable property … necessarily requires the establishment of civil government” (Bk V, Chp 1, Sec 2, para 2). If so, to what extent can a Scottish government do anything different from a British government? Is it not beholden to the same powerful property interests? There is not the space to go into the issue of land ownership here, but despite 25 years of devolution Scotland remains one of the most unequally owned countries in the world – in 2000 just 343 people own 66% of all rural land, with rural land making up 80% of the total (Wightman, 2000), and little has changed since. Admittedly, the devolved parliament has passed a Land Reform Act – but to what effect? As Andy Wightman notes, it has the potential to make matters worse. Feudal controls, whereby the Crown (or government) retained rights over land ownership were removed in favour of ‘freehold’, a form of land tenure used in England which gave landed barons ‘outright’ ownership as opposed to feudal stewardship. Community right to buy is inadequate because the community can only buy when estates come up for sale, and most have never been ‘for sale’ in 400 years! Consequently, a devolved act has set back the movement for real land reform. Wightman’s work is excellent in examining the underlying causes of social problems, such as lack of land reducing the availability of rural housing, rather than the effect of such problems (disaffection with one form or mode of civil government in favour of another). Now, I am being purposively dismissive here, letting my passions dictate my reasoning! This is because I want readers to be good critical social scientist in Scotland, for the improvement of Scottish society (its progression towards social equality). And this starts with some appreciation of what has been done in the past and an examination of the social science it produced. If Adam Smith’s social science failed then what should we do about this? Rethink it or abandon it?
Socialising Sense 