The Institutional Basis of the Enlightenment

This is from a new history of Scotland by Murray Pittock, excerpted at Marginal Revolutions. Like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Pittock thinks the transformation of Scotland from violent backwater to Enlightenment powerhouse began in the 1600s under Charles II and James II, who had strong ties to the French court, and who built up Edinburgh as a second capital partly as a counter-weight to London, where people hated them. I put this here as a reminder that intellectual progress doesn't just happen on its own, it happens when insitutions exist that support intellectuals and bring them together. 

Both Charles and James carried out extensive building in the Scottish capital and supported civic redevelopment; indeed what was eventually to become the New Town development was first envisioned under James. James created or supported many of the institutions which underpinned the Enlightenment: the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1681), the Edinburgh Merchant Company (1681), the Advocates’ Library (1682) and the Order of the Thistle (1687), as well as the offices of Historiography and Geographer Royal (1681-82). In the aftermath of Union, new institutions were developed to defend and preserve Edinburgh’s capital status, such as Allan Ramsey’s theatre (1736) and the Academy of St. Luke, Scotland’s first art school, in 1729. A large number of clubs and associations for improvements were formed, such as the Society for Endeavouring Reformation of Manners (1699), the Rankenian and Associated Critics Clubs (1716-17), the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (1723), the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge (1731) and the Philosophical Society (1737). The University Medical School (where over three-quarters of students in the eighteenth century were not Scots) was founded by the support of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1726. Like the other Scottish universities, Edinburgh went on to benefit substantially from the addition to the student body of English and Irish dissenters, who were unable to attend Oxford and Cambridge because of their religious affiliations.

A good modern example of this sort of thing would be the resurgance of political conservatism in the US and Britain after its nadir in 1964, which had much to do with founding new magazines, new conferences, new think tanks, and so on. Ideas don't think themselves.