I'm John Batchel. I welcome my colleague, Arthur Herman, a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, writing most recently for Civitas Outlook.

Also, the author of many books that I've enjoyed over the years, but what I'm looking forward to is book on the Scottish Enlightenment.

We introduce a understanding of why it's important here in this essay that Arthur has published at Civitas about the Scottish Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment, the Scottish understanding of individuals, of governments, of liberty, and the French understanding of the same.

Remember, there's an important word in France, egalite, will come to that.

Arthur, congratulations.

My eyes have been open.

I understand now why I have this unfortunate prejudice towards the Scottish and away from the French.

Now, it was influenced by the fact that

I studied seminary in Scotland. And so I was on the high street. I was at New College. I

walked the walk. Still, I was never sure why it was that Rousseau didn't appeal to me. He was so

famous. And he was always everywhere I read in the 18th century.

Contrast the Scottish system with the French system and Rousseau is at the center of the

dispute. Good evening to you, Arthur.

Hey, good evening, John. Yeah, I'm glad to hear it, and I'm cognizant of your own Scottish background

on the theology side. But in my book, How the Scots and Then of the Modern World, in this

essay about is the Scots more on what we would call the social sciences side. The thinkers who reshaped how the English-speaking world thought about issues of history,

issues of economics, issues of sociology, what we would call sociology,

and of the idea of democracy or of representative government as being a system

by which works best when it protects the rights of the individual and individual liberty,

as opposed to the French approach, which, as you mentioned, springs from, particularly from the hugely

influential writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the government functions best when it looks

to the interests of the whole, of the entire community,

...