ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses of intellectual politics in the Edinburgh Review, however, it concerns Duncan's conception of the city's post-Enlightenment metropolitan status and his contention that the Review established the authoritative forum of cultural commentary for the age. Duncan highlights the Scottish capitals post-Enlightenment identity through, as he puts it, the rise of an Edinburgh publishing industry and the reorientation of Scottish writing to periodicals and fiction, and divides the city's post-Enlightenment cultural history into three distinct phases in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle, the moral contradictions of this post-Enlightenment project are laid bare, and then confronted, with a new discourse of Romantic cultural criticism intended to counter the spiritual alienation increasingly apparent in industrial society. His essay would challenge the discourse of social progress intellectual, economic, and political at the heart of Scottish philosophic Whiggism, embodied in both Stewarts inspirational notion of liberal political economy as well as in the Reviews vision for national political and cultural reform.
