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NEHEMIAS (SCOTUS) AMERICANUS: ENLIGHTENMENT AND RELIGION BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND AMERICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2011

GIDEON MAILER*
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
*
St John's College, Cambridge, CB2 1TPgam27@cam.ac.uk

Abstract

This review assesses scholarly attempts to synthesize various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America. It suggests potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, and then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. The ideological basis for American independence owed much to a tense counterpoise between Scottish moral sense reasoning and Presbyterian evangelicalism, rather than to their singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial American ideology.

Information

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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