Texts, we have been told, are inherently ‘open’, they defy ‘closure’. Certainly interpretations of texts, thinkers, intellectual movements and the like are multivarious and change over time, and the Scottish Enlightenment is thus not remarkable in having produced a variety of readings. This concluding chapter - rather like the first - is an overview; it sketches the outlines of some of this variety. I make no claims to be comprehensive, but the readings can, for purely expository reasons, be divided into the explanatory and the significatory. The former is subdivided into the ideological, the cultural and the intellectual; the latter into the sociological and the liberal. These divisions and subdivisions are rough and ready, as we will see there is much blurring at the edges. My classificatory schema like the grid of a map is there as reference point to help the traveller. To continue the cartographic metaphor, the schema is a projection which can never be free of distortion as it attempts to represent the global reality on a flat surface.

A: Explanatory

i) Ideological

‘Ideology’ is a term that means different things to different people. The meaning I choose to use is the following: an argument is ideological when it presents as an impartial statement (of the truth) what in fact is the expression of a partial interest. Thus understood, an ideology is the object of criticism, where the strategy of the critic is to demystify or unmask or reveal the partiality ‘behind’ the impartial surface. Though Marx's views on ideology are not uniform, this critical perspective conforms to his basic usage. What underlies it is his materialist conception of history. The partial interest is a class interest, and that is formed around the ownership of the dominant forces of production. This owning class has a material interest in maintaining the status quo, and its ideology functions to legitimate this state of affairs by claiming that it is for the common (impartial) good.

When applied to the bourgeoisie, this claim expresses itself in two ways. First, it opposes the (feudal) landed aristocracy. The interest of these barons lay in keeping social mobility to a minimum in order to retain their own favoured position as the uppermost rung in a stable hierarchy. Examples of this putative aristocratic interest would include primogeniture, entails and sumptuary laws.