The Scottish Enlightenment : Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History)

The Scottish Enlightenment shaped a new conception of history as a gradual and universal progress from savagery to civil society. The Scottish Enlightenment's legacy for modernity emerges here as a two-faced Janus, an unresolved tension between universalism and hierarchy, progress and the limits of progress.