This chapter discusses MacCormick’s activities – literary, editorial, administrative, political – while he was a pupil at Glasgow High School and then a student studying philosophy and literature at the University of Glasgow (1959–63). It focuses on MacCormick’s playful and pleasurable explorations of language and the significance that language already then had for him, as was evident in the pieces he wrote and the editorial work he did both at school and at university. The chapter also discusses MacCormick’s participation in the remarkable debating culture of the University of Glasgow, where MacCormick was President of the Glasgow University Student Nationalist Association, and where he formed numerous life-long friendships (e.g., with Donald Dewar and John Smith). It considers the significance of his exposure – which was intense in Glasgow – to the norms and standards of debating.

This chapter discusses MacCormick’s childhood, growing up in a very political family in Glasgow. It examines the complex relationships between MacCormick and his father as well as his mother. It situates his father’s nationalist politics in the historiography of Scottish politics generally, from the 1920s to the 1950s. It describes the three main events in which MacCormick, as a boy, was exposed to his father’s particular kind of nationalism: the Convention (est. 1942) and Covenant (1949–51); the taking of the Stone of Destiny (1950); and the MacCormick v Lord Advocate case (1953). In focusing on MacCormick’s early family life, the chapter begins the process of seeking to explore his character – here, primarily by reference to his relationships with his parents.

This penultimate chapter turns to MacCormick’s institutional theory of law. This theory sought to answer questions about how law existed and how it was knowable. This chapter reads over four decades of this theory with character, doing so in two parts. In the first part, it explores the sense in which the very substance of the theory can be understood relationally, i.e., as underpinned by sensitivity to the dangers of domination, and a commitment to respect, decency, considerateness, and civility. The second part reads the institutional theory of law as a relational act in another sense, i.e., as mediating across what are otherwise often divisions or separations, such as between philosophy and sociology, or scholarship about law and the practice of law. The chapter tracks various changes in how MacCormick theorised law institutionally, from his early interest in law as institutional fact, to his later law as institutional normative order.

Following the completion of his law studies in Oxford, MacCormick took up his first job in Dundee (1965–67), lecturing in both English law and in jurisprudence, with a particular focus on legal reasoning. This chapter first briefly discusses his time in Dundee, before turning to focus mainly on MacCormick’s complex relationship with HLA Hart. Hart, the English-speaking world’s leading legal philosopher of his generation, was in Oxford at the time MacCormick was there – first teaching MacCormick (with lectures on rights and Kelsen), and later being his senior colleague. This chapter focuses on the second period, from 1967 to 1972, during which MacCormick got to know Hart via the debates over student discipline and university authority (both proctorial and academic). Hart wrote a famous report – known as the Hart Report (1969) – in those years, with which MacCormick was very familiar, especially as he then held numerous disciplinary positions in his College. This chapter discusses MacCormick’s readings of Hart (especially his 1981 book on him) in the context of the debates over authority in the University of Oxford in this period, and in the context of MacCormick’s broader interests in moral and political issues.

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s during which MacCormick confronted and developed his political philosophy, with a special focus on the essays that were collected in Legal Right and Social Democracy (1982). This includes how MacCormick crafted a middle space between liberalism and socialism, which he called ‘social democracy’. It also includes MacCormick’s work, in this period, on obligations and rights. This chapter discusses the sense in which this conceptual work can be read with character, e.g., how his concepts of obligation and rights relate to his basic commitment to respect for persons (including a concern for the temporally-extended quality of relations between persons). It also places this philosophical work in the context of the politics of the period, e.g., the SNP’s own eventual endorsement of a social democratic platform, and it discusses how MacCormick’s political interventions in this period (e.g., his actions with respect to the’79 Group) can also be understood as expressions and negotiations of his character. Overall, the chapter explores how MacCormick’s character is expressed and negotiated in his role as a jurist, making law as morally intelligible as he could, seeking to limit executive power legally, and also diffusing and decentralising power as much as possible.

This introduces the principal methodological and substantive arguments of the book, with a particular focus on what is meant by ‘character’ as part of a historiography of philosophy, and on briefly articulating MacCormick’s character in particular. The chapter also gives an overview of the chapters in the book and includes a note on the book’s sources.

This short epilogue concludes the book, with a brief reflection on MacCormick’s final book, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (2008), where MacCormick confronted his own impending death from cancer, and where he once again articulated a relational approach to ethics, politics, and law.

This chapter tackles MacCormick’s lifelong engagement with and reflection on nationalism, including both in terms of how he lived it politically and how he philosophised it. It situates MacCormick’s nationalism in the historiography of Scottish nationalism, resisting attempts to frame the field on the basis of either pro- or anti-independence views. MacCormick’s nationalism cannot be shoehorned in this way. Instead, the chapter explores MacCormick’s particular kind of nationalism by reference to its relation to time – e.g., in the form of gradualism – as well as how he reflected on the constitutional importance of the Union of 1707. It also considers how MacCormick conceptualised nationalism – as liberal and civic – and how this was explored both in his philosophical work as well as in his political life, e.g., in his various campaigns as SNP candidate in Westminster elections. The chapter also considers MacCormick’s contributions to the SNP’s Constitutional Policy Committee, and in particular his work on the Draft Constitution for a Future Independent Scotland. In so doing, the chapter examines how MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism can be read as a matter of character.

MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism are inseparable from his theorisation of Europe as holding out political promise for stateless nations, like Scotland. But MacCormick’s interest in Europe also yields conceptual innovation of its own kind, with MacCormick characterising Europe as ‘a post sovereign commonwealth’ governed by ‘subsidiarity’, also embracing ‘constitutional pluralism’ in Europe. This chapter examines MacCormick’s philosophical engagement with Europe, alongside his direct, political involvement in it, first as a Member of the European Parliament (1999–2004) and, at the same time, as a Member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, where MacCormick made important contributions to the writing of the European Constitution. Emphasising MacCormick’s sensitivity to the quality of political discourse, this chapter reads MacCormick’s approach to Europe as a matter of character, e.g., how he deployed a conceptual language – speaking of subsidiarity rather than sovereignty – that he thought could facilitate better relations between political communities.

This chapter examines the intellectual, especially philosophical, context of MacCormick’s education as a philosopher, including his relationships with his teachers and their ideas. MacCormick’s own education is placed in a broader historical context, mainly by reference to the influential history published on it while MacCormick was studying: George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect (1961). While at the University of Glasgow, MacCormick was taught by a number of philosophers who had a considerable impact on his interests and orientations, including Robin Downie, David Raphael, and WD Lamont. This chapter discusses the work of these philosophers and considers how MacCormick related to them. There is a particular emphasis on Lamont and his concept of authority, as well as how he related law and morality.

This final chapter turns to the other basic question that MacCormick asked himself, again exploring it for over four decades: is reason practical, and if so how? MacCormick engaged in this question in the form of a life-long dialogue with his Enlightenment predecessors, and especially Stair, Hume, Smith, and Kant. This chapter tracks this dialogue, while also keeping in mind the contemporary interlocutors of MacCormick’s theory of practical reason, which included not only the dominant voices in Anglo–American jurisprudence, such as Hart and Dworkin, but also philosophers in the European Continent, such as Perelman and Alexy. The first part of the chapter focuses on what may be called MacCormick’s meta-ethics, showing how MacCormick adopted perspectivalism about value. The second shows how, particularly in his theory of legal reasoning, MacCormick discusses the importance of constructing an inter-subjective space (via universalisation) and how he explores the complexity of deliberation as well as the defeasibility of decision within that space. Throughout, the chapter reads MacCormick’s account of the limited practicality of reason as a matter of character.

Following his studies in philosophy and literature, MacCormick won a Snell Exhibition to study in Balliol College, Oxford (1963–65). He studied law, and this chapter explores both his studies – including the teachers who influenced him, such as Donald Harris and Alan Watson – as well as the influence of Richard Hare, whose work on moral reasoning was important for MacCormick. Alongside this, MacCormick participated in student politics at the time: he became President of the Oxford Union and, as he did in Glasgow, participated in the Union’s debates. Following his studies, in the summer of 1965, thanks to a Balliol Pathfinder Scholarship, MacCormick toured the USA, and recorded his observations, especially with relation to race and civil rights issues. This chapter thus discusses both the legal and the political formation MacCormick received in and thanks to Oxford and considers what impact this had on his character.