An Enlightened Duke the Life of Archibald Campbell (1682-1761), Earl of Ilay, 3rd Duke of Argyll

Roger L. Emerson spent most of his career at the University of Western Ontario where he taught European and British social and intellectual history and is now an emeritus professor. An Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopeaedia of the Enlightenment(2002) he is also the author of: Professors, Patronage and Politics: The Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (1992); Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (2008); and Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment:'Industry, Knowledge and Humanity' (2009).

Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll and 1st Earl of Ilay, lived a long and very active life as soldier, lawyer, politician, patron and businessman. History remembers him on the one-hand as courageous, good-natured, learned and accomplished - and, on the other, as 'a man of little truth, little honour, little principle'. His substantial political career, driven by gaining and increasing his power and that of his friends, is poorly documented, since many of his private papers have vanished. The author's interest in Argyll as a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment - which became a thirty-year-long quest to piece together the fragmentary evidence of his complex life into a coherent story of the contradictions within his personal, intellectual and business activities - has given us the first major study of a fascinating man, shown as having changed the nature of Scottish culture.