A study of the changes of economic thought and policy in the late Scottish Enlightenment

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Scotland was dramatically industrialized and urbanized from the late 18th to 19th century. This means that a problem of the poor took place in the expanding cities. The Scottish intellectual actives, which had been blooming as the Scottish Enlightenment during the latter of the 18th century, were forced to tackle this problem. This study is concerned with how Sir John Sinclair and Thomas Chalmers coped with the problem, and will make clear their historical significance. Sinclair advocated his own 'statistics' by which he meant an inquiry into the habitants' conditions of a country and the means of their 'future improvement' by investing and analyzing their factual conditions. In fact on such statistical data as The Statistical Account of Scotland edited by himself and so on he insisted that the problem was responsible for the dissolution of a small community, the urbanization caused by the rapid industrialization, and the urban population's loss of prudence and frugality brought about … More by the urban circumstances. However, the measures that he proposed were not the reconstruction of a small community but the improvement of the urban population's manners and independence through providing an education for them, encouraging them to join a friendly society. After graduation from the University of St Andrews Chalmers wished to continue his scholarly work but at a moment begun to become conspicuous as an Evangelical minister in a country parish, while he evaluated more Malthus's economics than Smith's, and pointed out the importance of the natural check on economic activities. He thought that this natural check was the final cause for the poverty problem, and argued that in order to solve the problem there was no way without keeping population within the limitation of food production by laborers' birth-control, which would be, he thought, possible because their innate 'prudence and principle from within' could have restrained a childbirth. Based on this theory as well as his experience as an Evangelical minister in a country parish he made 'an experiment' in a new parish of a large city, Glasgow. Both Sinclair and Chalmers, though they were theoretically deferent from each other, were looking for the way of the shaping of adequate actors in the industrialized and urbanized society. This seems to be their historical significance. Less