An enlightened figuration

As the avant-garde of a national civilising offensive, the Scottish Enlightenment was confined to small coteries of interconnected male elites and middle-class professionals. They shared a certain trajectory and dispositions oriented to a common set of problems, schemata of perception and modes of communication, particularly ones that valorised knowledge of historical and social processes, with the aim of bringing abstract philosophical speculation under the control of empirical observation. This chapter reconstructs the habitus formation of overlapping generations of intellectuals born between 1680 and 1770. They inherited a stock of knowledge, perceptions and dispositions that enabled them to anticipate and adjust to the probabilities of power chances in a world in the process of transformation. In this process, they functioned as a double-facing stratum, simultaneously adjusting, on the one hand, to the field of power with the demands of political patronage and ideological reliability and, on the other hand, to the demands of intellectual proficiency in the field of symbolic capital.