Review of Antti Lepistö's The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 261. Cloth $40.00.

The complicated reception of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy underpinned the longuedurée intellectual history of the United States. This legacy transcended the late eighteenth-century development of early American intellectual culture through to the more recent culture wars between neoliberal and neoconservative thinkers during the final two decades of the twentieth century. However, Americans never applied original versions of moral sentimentalism. Nor did they simply translate common sense philosophy, which took shape as a formidable alternative to David Hume’s mitigated skepticism, in precisely the same form as it was originally conceived. Scottish philosophical systems had always been adapted to American contexts....