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James Macpherson and "Celtic Whiggism"

James Macpherson has proved as diffi cult and troublesome a fi gure within recent revisionism as he was back in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand he has been portrayed as a perfi dious Scottish chance, an “insolent pretender” and “sensual bully” (in the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper) who “forged” a Scottish past in order to make up for Scotland’s complete barbarity before 1707.1 Such an interpretation forms part of a tradition within English scholarship that extends from Samuel Johnson right through the 1990s in the more subtle and sophisticated work of Howard Weinbrot.2 Yet on the other hand, there is deep unease about Macpherson amongst “four nations” revisionists who see his “invented tradition” of the Highlands not as Scottish cultural nationalism but as AngloBritish cultural imperialism. This apparent sellout enables Weinbrot to talk about the rise of a “British” — by which he avowedly means an English — literature and national culture.3 Both camps see Macpherson as in some way responsible for the “museumalizing” of Scottish history, for the tartaned Disney world of the Royal Mile. But where one side attacks him in order to demolish his perceived nationalism, the other seeks to debunk his nationalist potential, its damaging false consciousness about Scotland and its past. The one thing both camps share is a disdain and suspicion regarding Macpherson, the charlatan Scottish (crypto-)Jacobite nationalist who is also a totem of Anglocentric suppression and incorporation.