This book analyses in depth the distinctively Scottish themes in the work of Sir Neil MacCormick, the world-renowned legal philosopher and prominent Scottish public intellectual who died in 2009 after holding the Regius Chair in Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at Edinburgh University for 36 years. MacCormick's work, and works about MacCormick, attract both a domestic and an international audience. Readers will gain an understanding of how MacCormick's Scottish roots, interests and commitments coloured his work - both his distinctively Scottish writings and the overall intellectual outlook that informed his broader legal and philosophical writings.The book provides a well rounded appreciation of the Scottish dimension in MacCormick's thinking and writing. It focuses on a number of prominent Scottish themes in MacCormick's work and life and is structured around four key themes: 1) the nature and identity of a legal system; 2) sovereignty, European integration and Scottish independence; 3) the legacy of the legal and political thought of the Scottish enlightenment; and 4) the role of the academic in the Scottish public sphere.

Professor Meek traces the prehistory of the four stages theory, with emphasis on the influence of literature about savage societies.

Time is the crucial ingredient in history, and yet historians rarely talk about time as such. These essays offer new insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of “modernity” as a new epoch in human history. Are the Gregorian calendar, world standard time, and modernity itself simply impositions of Western superiority? How did the idea of stages of history culminating in the modern period arise? Is time really accelerating? Can we—should we—try to move to a new chronological framework, one that reaches back to the origins of humans and forward away or beyond modernity? These questions go to the heart of what history means for us today. Time is now on the agenda.