Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist
Andreas Rahmatian
Abstract
Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696–1782) is one of the best known figures of the Scottish Enlightenment by name, and one of the least known in relation to his actual writings. He was a Scottish judge, jurist, philosopher of legal history, moral philosopher, reformer. He was the example of an erudite Enlightenment man and uomo universale. The purpose of this book is to further the understanding of Lord Kames's thought, his thought processes, his lines of argument, and, most importantly, his conceptual connections of the areas of aesthetics, moral philosophy, social theory (including political philoso ... More
Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696–1782) is one of the best known figures of the Scottish Enlightenment by name, and one of the least known in relation to his actual writings. He was a Scottish judge, jurist, philosopher of legal history, moral philosopher, reformer. He was the example of an erudite Enlightenment man and uomo universale. The purpose of this book is to further the understanding of Lord Kames's thought, his thought processes, his lines of argument, and, most importantly, his conceptual connections of the areas of aesthetics, moral philosophy, social theory (including political philosophy and anthropology), and law. The book seeks to extract the lines of thought between aesthetics, moral philosophy, legal history and law, disciplines which Kames regards as being placed on one underlying conceptual framework. Previous monographs about Kames appeared over forty years ago and were mostly biographies. The rather few specialist studies which have dealt with Kames in detail have essentially interpreted his works in isolation and within one discipline. The present book tries to do justice to the universalist and multi-disciplinary approach of the polymath Lord Kames. It shows Kames's own influences and his underlying framework of moral philosophy which connects aesthetics, political philosophy and ideas of commerce, anthropology, legal history, property, equity and criminal law.
Keywords:
Henry Home,
Lord Kames,
Scottish Enlightenment,
Moral Philosophy,
Property,
Equity,
Legal History
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748676736 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: January 2016 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676736.001.0001 |