Capital of the Mind

"September 1745 and the walled City of Edinburgh surrenders to a handful of Highlanders in farcical circumstances. Never have things looked bleaker for the ancient capital of Scotland. Yet the next two generations catapult this small, windy and dirty city to the centre of the modern world." "David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Cullen and James Hutton transform the way we treat our perceptions and feelings as well as mechanical processes, sickness and health, trade, money, relations between the sexes, the purposes of existence and government. In just fifty years, Edinburgh makes more mental history than any town of its size since the Athens of Socrates. On the hard causeway of the High Street, in high and cramped apartments, surreptitious dancing assemblies and underground taverns, the modern world is born." "How did this come about? How did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and unhygienic town consisting of just two long streets and forty thousand inhabitants make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote, with more than a dash of malice, that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'. In an account of exceptionally close focus, James Buchan resurrects the look and feel and smell of eighteenth-century Edinburgh and shows how a succession of disasters demolished old systems of thought and behaviour, and set Edinburgh men and women off in strange new directions. An odd and brilliant civilization comes to life, Capital of the Mind is the indispensable guide to the most beautiful and philosophical city in Europe."--Jacket