Scottish Enlightenment, Civil Society, and the Europe We Can Dream About

Abstract

This article is an attempt to recover the Scottish Enlightenment in order to understand in a fruitful way the new Europe we are building today. Instead of continuously trying to reconstruct our present either from the perspective of the French Enlightenment or from that of Modernity that began with Locke, I think we will obtain better tools for our contemporary hopes if we take the Scottish legacy. Scotland supposes a peculiar mixture between the concerns for a «republican» citizenship and the proclamation of the liberal claims. From this point of view, Scotland affirms that the values and rules that regulate our social life come from agreements that are obviously contingent, but become part of human nature when they are adopted by our civil society.