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Who formed the first modern nation?How the Scots Invented the Modern World reveals how Scottish genius for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life stamped the lives of a series of remarkable historical figures, from James Watt and Adam Smith to Andrew Carnegie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how Scottish heroes continue to inspire our contemporary culture, from William "Braveheart" Wallace to James Bond."I am a Scotsman," Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, "therefore I had to fight my way into the world." So did any number of his compatriots over a period of just a few centuries, leaving their native country and traveling to every continent, carving out livelihoods and bringing ideas of freedom, self-reliance, moral discipline, and technological mastery with them, among other key assumptions of what historian Arthur Herman calls the "Scottish mentality."
It is only natural, Herman suggests, that a country that once ranked among Europe's poorest, if most literate, would prize the ideal of progress, measured "by how far we have come from where we once were." Forged in the Scottish Enlightenment, that ideal would inform the political theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers who viewed "man as a product of history," and whose collective enterprise involved "nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge" (yielding, among other things, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1768, and the Declaration of Independence, published in Philadelphia just a few years later). On a more immediately practical front, but no less bound to that notion of progress, Scotland also fielded inventors, warriors, administrators, and diplomats such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Simon MacTavish, and Charles James Napier, who created empires and great fortunes, extending Scotland's reach into every corner of the world.
Herman examines the lives and work of these and many more eminent Scots, capably defending his thesis and arguing, with both skill and good cheer, that the Scots "have by and large made the world a better place rather than a worse place." --Gregory McNamee
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
How theScots Created The Modern World:
The book is a good read but perhaps dwells too long on some items that perhaps are irrelevent to his arguement.
Important connections:
There are some important points made in this book. For instance, that the basic social contract theory legitimizing government begins with George Buchanan instead of Thomas Hobbes. This is somewhat contrary to the way Preston King explains the difference in his book "The Ideology of Order" where he describes the difference as Hobbes, Spinoza, and others, are concerned about the structure of government and how it works, while Buchanan, Locke, Rousseau, and others were concerned with who should exercise... more info Scottish science:
After a radical rejection of that eras Roman Catholic Church, Scotland ambles into an era of greatly increasing literacy and community involvement. By the early 1700s things are really rolling. Herman describes the ideas of political correctness and Adam Smith very well.more info The Scottish Enlightenment!:
This is a very well-organized book on the intellectual influence Scottish culture has had on the western world, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom. Despite the misleading title, this is not one of those "ethnic pride" books. Instead, Herman focuses on the specific intellectual achievements of specific, Scots and identifies that they were successful not because of some miraculous Scottish gene but because they were brilliant thinkers who were committed to scientific inquiry, productivity... more info Similar Products:
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