Stewart, Dugald(1753–1828)
Dugald Stewart was an Edinburgh professor of moral philosophy who expounded the common sense theory of Thomas Reid and the libertarian political economy of Adam Smith. He taught from 1785 until illness forced his retirement in 1809. An eloquent spokesman for Reid and Smith rather than an original thinker, he left no legacy of his own but conveyed theirs. He provided his classes with a feast of psychology, ethics, and intellectual history and was the first professor in Britain to offer a course in political economy, which he began in 1800. A defender of academic freedom (see Brown [2004, 657] and Veitch [1858, lxxv–lxxix on the Leslie affair]), he both consoled and disturbed his audience by sustaining its metaphysical prejudices against Humean skepticism while revising its economic and political ones. He was no utilitarian yet advocated private liberty and the open market as the route to general happiness. His renown as a teacher was sustained by his books, which were translated into German, French, and Italian. He was honored by learned societies in Russia, Italy, and America, as well as by the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London. Poet Robert Burns summed Stewart up as four parts Socrates, four parts Nathaniel, and two parts Brutus.
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