Il contratto sociale nell’Illuminismo scozzese: percorsi della ricezione e della critica di un'idea moderna

This essay analyses the influence of modern natural law, and particularly the theoretical elaborations made by Grotius and Pufendorf, upon certain thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. It focuses on Gershom Carmichel, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid – who held, at different times, the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow – in order to highlight the peculiarity of the reception of the contractual theory by the manifold trends of the philosophical, political and moral reflection of the Scottish Eighteenth century. The episode of the Scottish interpretation of the doctrine of the “duo pacta et unum decretum” is significant for its deformations and simplifications, in that it testifies to the great circulation of texts and ideas in protestant countries during the first decades of the Eighteenth century. Scottish intellectuals, who are anything but closed within a provincial dimension, reformulate conceptual heritage coming from different cultural traditions, re-elaborating it in the most unlikely bedfellow fields of research on human nature. Theories will offer a distinct framing of the theme of natural rights and consequentially of that of their limitation of an associated life.