Britain.

The English and Scottish Enlightenments might be looked upon as complementary halves of a whole. English thinkers supplied very little philosophical importance to the Enlightenment, being mostly concerned with the development and application of technological and scientific ideas. Scottish thinkers, by contrast, made some of the most original and lasting contributions to philosophy in the eighteenth century. Unlike France, where the philosophes developed Paris into a center of literary ferment and glittering social life, the Enlightenment in England had no center, produced very little literature of note, and spawned a very different social venue for the exchange of ideas. Through their written works, the French Enlighteners hoped to encourage their country's government to adopt social reforms. In England, by contrast, Enlightenment thought concentrated on what could be done in the private sector to bring about progress. In France the...