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The Scottish Enlightenment: Sex and the Public Sphere

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The Scottish Enlightenment: Sex and the Public Sphere CHAPTER 8 THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT: SEX AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE INTRODUCTION In the last chapter I outlined Lindsay Paterson’s thesis that the Scottish Enlightenment bequeathed a dual legacy to the modern world: on the one hand, a thoroughly moral public sphere in the institutions of an autonomous civil society, on the other hand, a deep suspicion of the state. Starting from ‘within the frame’ I suggested that the reason nationally minded educationalists in Scotland find Davie’s notion of the democratic intellect so attractive is because it resonates with Scotland’s strong tradition of professionals as custodians of the public good. I presented this notion from the point of view of class. In this chapter I move on to applying to Paterson’s (and Davie’s) highly moral public sphere a ‘hermeneutic of critical suspicion’ from the point of view of sex. Civil society certainly looks different examined through the lens of sex – a viewpoint not practised much in Scottish debates. Like all fundamental re-organisations of society, the one that created civil society was concerned with re-allocating power between classes and between men and women. But first and foremost the ‘practitioners of the Enlightenment’ sought primarily to recast relations among men, maintains Isabel Hull, in her striking study of Enlightenment Germany, entitled Sexuality, state and civil society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Hull, 1996). Hull points out that a highly bureaucratised intelligentsia dominated in Germany during the Enlightenment. ‘Men of the nation’, shapers of public opinion by virtue of their education (as well as their wealth and leisure), their goal was to wrest a new social position in the public away from the Church and Court. As members of the intelligentsia, they saw themselves as trustees of the less fortunate, holding civil society in trust for the future, until they too through education could become active citizens. Hull’s book concentrates on Germany, yet much of it bears on the Scottish case. Indeed, if we adopt a historiographical approach that views the European Enlightenment as an inter-cultural rather than ‘flatly cosmopolitan’ movement, as Oz-Salzberger recommends, a persuasive case can be made for a significant passage of political ideas between the Scottish and German versions of the Enlightenment. The passage of ideas is far from smooth, of course, and Oz- Salzberger shows that in the translation of Scottish civic concepts (of virtuous active citizenship) between Scotland and Germany in the late eighteenth century these were read through a German vocabulary of inner spiritual perfection that was more in tune with German notions of bildung (see Oz-Salzberger, 1995). 115 CHAPTER 8 PRACTISING CIVIL SOCIETY In the last chapter I also made reference to John Robertson’s contention that the identification of the Enlightenment with the emergence of a new ‘public sphere’ in eighteenth century societies, a notion which in its original formulation was developed by Jürgen Habermas with reference to eighteenth century England, is especially applicable to the Scottish case (Robertson, 2000, p. 45). For Habermas, it is important to note, the eighteenth century public sphere was bourgeois not by virtue of an exclusive class composition (since aristocrats played leading roles in constituting it) but because ‘society’ was itself bourgeois and this created a distinct form of public interaction. The public sphere depended on the new spaces of sociability that opened up, such as coffee houses, clubs and voluntary organisations (including literary and scientific societies) where the new male professionals met to do deals and to discuss the news, politics and ideas, relatively autonomously from the economy and the state (see Habermas, 1989). The notion of ‘civil society’ is central to Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere and indeed he speaks of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere as the sphere of private people coming together as a public separate from the state. However, this notion can mislead, Hull maintains. Many of the Enlightenment ‘practitioners of civil society’ in Germany were state officials: whether they were university professors or court administrators or something else, they were first and foremost government officials. In a parallel way, although the Enlightenment Scots were not members of the state apparatus in any significant way as in Germany, they did however have strong ties with the Scottish administration and its system of patronage. They were, as Sher has argued, ‘establishmentarians’, seeking to defend the existing order against a dying Jacobite ‘right’ and incipient radical ‘left’ (see Sher, 1985, p. 327ff). Perhaps more importantly, both sets of Enlighteners, despite significant differences, saw the Enlightenment as primarily a form of education. The differences are significant: the Germans distinguished between education for active members of society (such as upper and middle class men) and passive subjects (women and the lower orders) whilst the Scottish thinkers wrote mainly for the next generation of ‘gentlemen’ participants in British political and intellectual debates – educated laity as well as holders of office. Germans often felt the only scope for human association was private and family life, comments Oz- Salzberger, unlike the Scots who were not alienated from political life despite loss of their specifically political institutions in 1707 as a result of union with England (Oz-Salzberger, 1995). Nevertheless, argues Hull, public usefulness was the criterion forming their opinions, and the necessity to reform the social order as a whole: the German practitioners were engaged in creating and legitimating a well-defined private sphere from foundations set in the state and community. Habermas sees it precisely in reverse. He believes that the patriarchal family – the ‘intimate sphere’ – founded the ‘public sphere’, made it possible. But, says Hull, his use of the term ‘intimate sphere’ obscures a number of things: First, that women’s exclusion from the public was not peripheral but a consciously pursued goal. In their public writings, 116 .
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