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THE CASE FOR THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Case for the Enlightenment is an important and -
parative study of the emergence of Enlightenment in Scotland and
in Naples. Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlight-
enment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments,
John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two
societies at the opposite ends of Europe mon intellectual
upations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future
as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of mer-
cial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers, led by David
Hume and Antonio Genovesi, were in the van of those advocating the
cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. By study of the
social and institutional contexts of intellectual life in the two countries,
and the currents of thought promoted within them, The Case for the
Enlightenment explains this transformation. At its centre is an exami-
nation of Giambattista Vico’s New Science and David Hume’s Treatise
of Human Nature and Natural History of Religion as works informed by
a similar, Epicurean moral philosophy, and as responses to the notori-
ous argument of Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists was as plausible
as a society of idolaters. Unexpected contemporaries, Vico and Hume
illuminate mon intellectual foundations of Enlightenment in
the two countries, in which Epicurean philosophy was the midwife of
political economy.
john robertson is University Lecturer in Modern History and a
Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
ideas in context 73
The Case for the Enlightenment
ideas in context
Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully
The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of
related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated
will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary
frameworks of ideas and insti