Historical discourses and the science of man in the late eighteenth century: Separate Scottish and German paths?

This article examines eighteenth-century historical writing as political thought, as literary pursuit and as a branch of knowledge with the emerging claim to the status of a scientific discipline in a comparative Scottish-German context, taking William Robertson's works as a test of the possibilities and limits of inter-lingual and cross-cultural transfer within the enlightened republic of letters. These forms of history converged in Robertson's oeuvre, while each was equally relevant in the Scottish and German intellectual milieu. The contradiction between the avid response to Robertson in Germany and his relatively scarce 'impact' arises from and is explained by the different substance of each of these forms of cultivating history.