Scottish Enlightenment and the civilising process

Such a categorisation as ‘ the Scottish Enlightenment’ was not and could not be conceived by the intellectuals at the time, even if they had a strong collective sense of themselves as a relatively small, interrelated group of people working at the leading edge across a number of fields of knowledge. While the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of their given national context, they ventured further than other milieus to self-consciously develop an empirical theory of long-run processes of unplanned transition from ‘rude’ to ‘civilised’ nations. In short, they were engaged in a collective endeavour to understand what Norbert Elias called the civilising process to ‘improve’ the morals, manners, productivity and self-knowledge of society. In this, they made a beginning that Elias further elaborated as a process of advancing self-restraint under the external compulsion of lengthening chains of social interdependencies, state centralisation and increasingly complex functional differentiation and integration, requiring more even, more universal and more stable self-regulation. In neither case was civilisation conceived as a normative goal or a final condition.