Of course, Edinburgh, it was said, was built on hypocrisy. It was the city of Hume, the home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but then what had happened? Petty Calvinism had flourished in the nineteenth century and the light had gone elsewhere; back to Paris, to Berlin, or off to America, to Harvard and the like, where everything was now possible.
Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004)These musings of the fictional Edinburgh resident, moral philosopher and eponymous protagonist of Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie novels neatly encapsulate the conventional portrait of the intellectual transformation of post-Enlightenment Scotland. Scholars commonly identify a turning point in the early nineteenth century with the steady decline of the Moderate Party of the Kirk, whose members had actively participated in the Scottish Enlightenment, held prominent roles in the universities, emphasised morality over dogma and forged friendships with as notorious a sceptic as David Hume. A new chapter in Scottish intellectual life is traditionally associated with the rise of the Evangelical Party, which discouraged the combination of ministerial and professorial roles and championed the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy. Yet by painting the landscape of post-Enlightenment Scotland in such broad brushstrokes, several interesting features of its religious and intellectual transformation are omitted from the frame.
Strikingly, it is seldom recognised that insurgent Calvinist Evangelicalism was mirrored by the concomitant appearance of
freethinking circles and communities, most notably the ‘Zetetic’ societies in Edinburgh (1820) and Glasgow (1824).1 Taking their name from the Greek zētein, ‘to seek’ or ‘enquire’, these radical groups met weekly on Sunday evenings to debate controversial philosophical and theological topics, attracting audiences of three to four hundred at their peak. Dominated by male members of the middling and working classes – including retailers, shop owners, artisans, skilled labourers, apprentices and factory workers – they provided a hub for unbelievers of various stripes, including atheists, deists and sceptics. Despite periodic waves of persecution, in which several individuals affiliated with these groups were prosecuted for selling or circulating blasphemous books, descendants of the 1820s freethinking societies remained active into at least the early 1840s. Although the surviving reports of their debates and activities are patchy, extant lectures and newspaper articles preserved in the freethinking press provide a remarkable window onto forgotten dimensions of intellectual change in the post-Enlightenment period.
