According to Whig accounts of historical change the French Revolution passed a democratic baton from a radical Enlightenment to a new era of greater liberty, rights and progress. James Mackintosh (1765–1832) has been a reliable exemplar in this strain of historiography, as a liberal archetype and perpetual friend of reform, from his defence of the French Revolution, Vindiciæ Gallicæ, to his final speeches supportive of the Reform Bill. In this chapter Mackintosh's sense of his own times is reconstructed to emphasise the sharp disjunction between the Enlightenment era and the period that followed; a disjunction which had little to do with positive evaluations of democracy and everything to do with adjusting to a world in which expanding commerce became the dominant reason of state. This meant that large states, in order to compete with their rivals, prioritised the economic domination of weaker states. The example of Scotland became significant because this small state appeared to have bucked the trend. Mackintosh was a unionist who believed in the fundamental importance of Scotland's former independence. While he supported the Anglo-Scottish model of union for Ireland and ultimately for India and Canada, he continued to argue that Europeans were failing to address the Enlightenment legacy, which, following Burke, he termed the collapse of ‘the European commonwealth’. This process had endangered small states, and the problem was so acute that Mackintosh held it to be impossible thereafter to articulate a convincing liberal philosophy.

In the crisis period of the British constitution in the 1770s and 1780s, when the empire appeared to be collapsing and Adam Smith labelled the whole a corrupt mercantile system because self-interested businessmen and legislators made money at the expense of the public good, there was a worry across Scotland about the impact upon the Union of 1707. For numerous commentators, the Enlightenment era of strategies to prevent wars of religion from breaking out anew was replaced by one in which international peace was buffeted by the need of states to expand their markets; civil peace too was under threat from populations seduced by luxury goods, which were held to be corrosive of the national mores necessary for the maintenance of states. At the Union a bankrupt Scotland gave up its parliament and national sovereignty in return for union with a rapidly commercialising England.