Context
Edinburgh is a great city of institutions. The Royal Bank of Scotland (founded 1727); the National Library of Scotland, whose formative collection the Advocates Library achieved Copyright library status in 1709; St. Cecilia’s Hall (1763; the oldest concert hall in Scotland); The New Club (1787); the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1780); the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783 ) – many of these are either products of Enlightenment, or took their modern shape during the eighteenth century. Between 2005 and 2008 a series of key institutions will commemorate important anniversaries: these include the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2005, the tercentenary of Law at the University of Edinburgh in 2007; the Act of Union in 2007, which removed a seat of national government from Scotland for nearly three hundred years.
This last reminds us that institutions may be laws or events, as well as buildings and organisations; they may be practices and processes (the Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791), regulative principles, and forms of thinking. In addition to the obvious ‘establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of some object, esp. one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, educational, etc.’, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘Institution’ includes ‘The giving of form or order to a thing; orderly arrangement; regulation…. The established order by which anything is regulated; system; constitution…. An established law, custom, usage, practice, organization, or other element in the political or social life of a people; a regulative principle or convention subservient to the needs of an organized community or the general ends of civilization…. Something having the fixity or importance of a social institution; a well-established or familiar practice or object.’
Description
This IASH research theme addressed the institution of modernity during the Enlightenment through the study of rule-governed practices. The formation of new orthodoxies across Europe and America (for example, in relation to universities, legal structures, and religious establishments), and the forces that opposed or challenged them, were a major focus of attention, as well as such issues as
- radical transformations of education and the emergence of modern disciplinary configurations
- rule-governed practices of the Enlightenment, whether institutionalised or oppositional
- changing rituals, habits and customs in the Enlightenment, and their study by contemporaries
- ‘alternative conversations’: the challenge, for example, of erudite sociability to institutions during the Enlightenment.