ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the socio-cultural development of the Scottish Enlightenment during the eighteenth century provides an illuminating case study for Habermas's model of the bourgeois public sphere one which usefully focuses attention on the central institutional elements of intellectual modernity mapped by these scholars. In order to more fully engage with the ideological dimension of cultural leadership in the Scottish Enlightenment public sphere, need to examine the most deeply held beliefs of its intellectuals, both themselves and their rapidly changing society. The literati of the Scottish Enlightenment benefited handsomely from the status-quo of Hanoverian capitalism. As the most privileged inheritors of a cosmopolitan identity fashioned out of the Union settlement of 1707, they capitalized on their self-made status to become the new cultural leaders of North Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. The characteristic enlightened history of manners simply has been pursued in order to reveal the causes and moral implications of cultural and intellectual development.
