The View From 1776

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding:
Locke’s Revolution

“[John Locke] believed that a constitutional monarchy with executive power, including the judiciary, in the hands of the monarch, and legislative powers in a parliamentary assembly elected by the people was the most satisfactory form of government.”
James Gordon Clapp, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Yet every schoolboy knows that Locke provided the Founders with the ideas and arguments that justified and explain the American Revolution.  But if that is so, why didn’t the Founders simply follow Locke and give us a constitutional monarchy?  After all, they had in George Washington the perfect choice for an American monarch.

Actually Locke’s thinking belongs to a different revolution.  His Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1689.  This famous work is clearly intended to justify Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, stating in the preface, “to establish the Throne of Our Great Restorer, our present King William; to make good his Title, in the Consent of the People.”

In fact, Locke was deeply involved in the Glorious Revolution.  He had fled the wrath of James II to Holland in1683, and he only returned in 1689 when he escorted the princess of Orange to England to become Queen Mary.  With the ascension of William and Mary, Britain had acquired Locke’s most satisfactory form of government. 

One difficulty for those who believe that the Founders were thoroughly Lockean in their thinking is that the Founders made war on this very form of government, in fact, on this very government.  Another difficulty is that when independence was won, the Founders did not follow Locke by creating an American constitutional monarchy along Lockean lines.

Clearly there was an intervening factor that explains why the American Revolution of 1776 had such a different outcome than the British Revolution of 1688.  A look into the colonial college named in honor of William and Mary can give us a clue about that intervening factor.  At William and Mary, Thomas Jefferson came under the influence of William Small who mentored Jefferson during his time at college and afterwards.  Small was a member in good standing of the Scottish Enlightenment.  He came to America to teach at William and Mary from 1758 to 1764—just in time to guide Jefferson’s studies there during the most intellectually influential years of his life. 

In the same way, John Witherspoon, another full-fledged member of the Scottish Enlightenment, mentored James Madison at Princeton.  In fact, the tutors who educated Jefferson and Madison before college were also Scots.  All these Scots were all part of a wave of scholars and clergy that brought the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to colonial America.  It was their impact that largely explains the fact that the Founders did not follow Locke’s prescription when it came time for them to design America’s government.

The Scottish Enlightenment had been galvanized into being by Locke.  The Scots believed that Locke had cut away the foundation for moral judgments and for knowledge claims.  The result was two philosophical schools that together made up the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment.  The focus on moral judgments gave rise to what became known as the moral sense school, and the focus on knowledge claims, the common sense school. 

The generation of the Founders had been rigorously trained in these ideas, and even after the Revolutionary era the combined common sense and moral sense tradition remained the standard philosophical school in America, confidently dominant in American colleges until the 1870’s and, according to Prof. Allen Guelzo, not finally eclipsed by pragmatism in academia until around the turn of the century.

The Founders had been convinced by the arguments the Scots advanced for the moral sense and for common sense.  It was those arguments that convinced them that man was capable of self-government, that convinced them to make the American Experiment in self-government and to leave Locke’s favored form of government behind.

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding: The Drama of the Constitutional Convention
By Robert Curry

“Discussion began on June 1 with the Virginia Plan, introduced by Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph and privately drafted by Madison …It would have resembled the parliamentary system of government that exists in much of the world today…[James] Wilson argued early on for a single President to be directly elected by the people…A small group of delegates, known as “the committee of detail”…produced a draft Constitution in early August.  Wilson, the consistent supporter of an independent executive, headed the committee, and it showed.  The Constitution now vested “the executive power of the United States” in one man.”
John Yoo, Crisis and Command

No doubt it is impossible to quantify the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on America’s founding.  This is the kind of question that can be endlessly debated by scholars. It simply is the case that many factors contributed and many streams of causation converged to make America’s founding possible.

However, it would be possible to dramatize the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment.  That is of course true because the dramatist’s task is in one sense much simpler than the task of the historian.  The dramatist is free to create characters and structure the action to convey his message; the historian must deal with stubborn facts, with what actually happened. 

Remarkably, the actual course of events during the Constitutional Convention, as if by dramatic intent, seems designed to draw our attention to the enormous importance of the Scottish Enlightenment in America’s Founding.

Conceived as a dramatic work, Madison and Wilson were given the roles that drive the action.  Madison opened with the Virginia Plan; Wilson played a central role in the debate and in the final decisive action, the drafting of the Constitution by the committee that gave it the shape we know today.  Remarkably, their central roles also dramatize the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the American Founding.  That is so because Madison and Wilson taken together perfectly symbolize that impact. 

Madison perfectly symbolizes one half of the story of the Scots in America.  He represents the Revolutionary generation of Americans trained by the wave of Scots who brought the Scottish Enlightenment to America.  As Gary Wills observed, “At age sixteen Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton were all being schooled by Scots who had come to America as adults.” Madison’s tutor, Donald Robertson, was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment at its peak, but the great intellectual influence on Madison was John Witherspoon, also a Scot.  When Madison entered Princeton in 1769, under the leadership of Witherspoon it had become the American university where the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—Hume, Smith, Hutcheson, Reid, Ferguson and Kames—were studied most intensely. 

As for Wilson, he is a perfect symbol for the other half of the story because he was actually a part of that wave of Scots in America. A member in good standing of the Scottish Enlightenment, educated at St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was also a signer of the Declaration—one of only 6 men who signed both documents. On stage, in our Constitutional-Convention-as-drama, we would be constantly reminded of the Scottish influence by Wilson’s strong Scottish accent.

Giving Madison and Wilson the roles that drive the action highlights the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Seen as drama, the action becomes a debate between the two characters who symbolize the story of the Scottish Enlightenment in America.

In addition, the design of the drama includes another device that brilliantly highlights the significance of Madison and Wilson.  Each is elevated by being closely associated with one of the two most esteemed men in the room—George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.  Everyone in the room knew that Madison spoke for Washington; he was even seated to Washington’s right and beside the dais from which Washington presided.  Only Washington and Madison faced the other delegates.  Wilson was paired with Franklin, and Wilson read Franklin’s prepared statements for him.

For these pairings to succeed dramatically, we only need to keep in mind just how much Washington and Franklin were the very symbols of America.  Washington, “the Father of the Country,” and Franklin, “the First American,” were for Americans of that time America’s two iconic figures. 

The dramatic impact of Madison and Wilson’s pairing with Washington and Franklin is greatly enhanced by the comparative silence of the two icons.  Washington rarely spoke, confining himself to the role of president of the Convention. Except for the prepared statements that Wilson read for him, Franklin also limited his remarks to a few critical moments when his enormous prestige was needed to make a way forward.  Their brilliant junior associates conducted the campaign. Madison and Wilson, our symbols of the Scottish Enlightenment’s impact on America, are given center stage.

Considered purely as drama, pairing Wilson the Scot and Madison the Scottish-educated American with the two great icons of America, and giving Wilson and Madison their key roles in the debate seems designed to send us today a powerful message about the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment to America’s founding. 

Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, Obama’s former consumer protection agency administrator, epitomizes the smarter-than-thou, “caring” liberal-progressive who is demanding, for your own good, the right to run your life.  As Bill Clinton reportedly said about cutting income taxes, the problem is that the rest of us would spend the money on the wrong things.  As his press secretary said, only government has the power to improve people’s lives. 

So, we should just imagine ourselves as inmates in a society-wide prison, where in return for following orders, we are all treated with liberal-progressive equality: equal housing in our cells, equal clothing (i.e., uniforms), equal food, and equal access to the prison library.  After all, in Professor Warren’s paradigm, collectivized society created the societal prison and the rest of us, by definition, owe our lives and fortunes to the prison and the sustenance it provides.

George Will exposes the nonsensicality of the Warren paradigm, the liberal-progressive quest to submerge individualism under the flood of socialism.

In the long battle between the English monarch and his subjects, beginning with Magna Carta in 1215 and extending to our 1776 War of Independence, the thrust was to restrain the rulers within a framework of checks and balances that tended toward fairness.  One term - arbitrary - was frequently used to characterize unfair exercise of political power.


Political structural safeguards against arbitrariness were essential aspects of our Constitution.  Increasingly since the 1930s New Deal, under socialist Franklin Roosevelt, those safeguards have been destroyed. Ever more power has been taken from states and local governments and usurped by the Federal government.

That process has reached new depths of degradation in the Obama administration.  Treatment of bondholders in Chrysler and GM was of the same order as arbitrary seizures of money and property by monarchs, from King John to James II.  The effective take-over of Wall Street by Federal bureaucrats is more of the same.

Professor Warren wants to exert arbitrary power over our everyday lives, with Obamacare and consumerism as the bludgeons to batter us into submission.

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding

The View from Windsor Castle
By Robert Curry

George III was not far wrong…when he called the [American] Revolution “a Presbyterian Rebellion.”

Paul Johnson, A History of the American People

George did more than blame the Scots for inciting rebellion among his American subjects.  He took aim at a specific Scottish institution as the real source of the trouble, an institution that had vexed so many monarchs before him—the Kirk [ed. - Scottish and Scandinavian for church, by way of 8th century and later Viking raids]. 

John Knox, the Martin Luther of the Scottish Reformation, founded the Presbyterian Church in 1560-1561.  Long before the Founders began to make their argument for popular sovereignty, he preached popular sovereignty as a matter of doctrine.  Political authority, Knox and the Presbyterians believed, ultimately belonged to the people.  According to Knox, the people had the right to choose those who would manage their political affairs, and it was the people’s right to remove them at will.  Knox famously treated the sequence of monarchs with whom he had to deal during his lifetime with undisguised impatience and contempt, and the Kirk was often at odds with the monarchy. 

According to King George, we need to look to the Scottish Reformation to locate the original source of the American Revolution.  How so?  We have seen that the Founders relied, to a very great extent, on the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment for the theory of the Founding, for the philosophical arguments and ideas they used.

Of course, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment attempted to provide a philosophical foundation for natural rights and moral judgment, developing the twin philosophies of common sense and the moral sense.  But we may ask why they took the direction they did.  After all, their contemporaries in France took a very different direction.  The French exalted reason instead of common sense.  Instead of popular sovereignty, Voltaire and Diderot placed their political hope in enlightened, reforming monarchs.

Hitchhiking on King George’s insight, we are in a position to understand that Knox’s enormous influence had already set the direction for the Scots when they entered the great philosophical project of the 18th century and began to work out their own version of the Enlightenment.  Subsequently, the Founders learned from the Scots and applied those ideas to the great task of creating a representative system of government for America. 

Even the Kirk itself offered a model of such a government.  It had from the beginning a representative system of government.  As Arthur Herman describes it:

Even the minister was chosen by the congregation’s consistory of elected elders…The elders also sent representatives to their local synod, who in turn sent representatives to the Kirk’s General Assembly.  This meant that the members of the Kirk’s governing body really were representatives of the people.

Both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and a functioning governing body that embodied the doctrine of popular sovereignty were unique to Scotland during that time. 

Two centuries later the Founders fought a revolution to establish the right of popular sovereignty in America.  Then, when it came time to design a system of government by and for the people, James Madison proposed a design that bears a remarkable, though generally unnoticed, resemblance to the Presbyterian system.  Called “the Virginia Plan,” it was the original proposal written by Madison and presented by Edmund Randolph.  This initial proposal opened the discussion and became the basis of the debate.  David O. Stewart describes the Virginia Plan like this:

“The people would elect the “first Branch” of the legislature…That “first branch” (the future House of Representatives) would choose the “second branch” (the future Senate).  Together, those two houses would select the president and appoint all the judges.”

Although the Virginia plan is the subject of much discussion, its striking resemblance to the Kirk’s system of representative government is consistently overlooked.  Yet it is a fact worthy of note that Madison initiated the Constitutional debate with a plan that could have been taken directly from Scottish, even Presbyterian, history.

Though it is remarkable, it is not inexplicable.  We know that Madison was steeped in the Scottish tradition.  His education was so strongly Scottish in its character that he even spoke French with a Scottish accent, and Princeton, his alma mater, had been founded by the Presbyterians to provide for the education of their American clergy.  Because of Madison’s involvement with what Garry Wills calls the “Princeton/Presbyterian network,” we know that Madison was very familiar with the workings of the Presbyterian ministry.  Wills writes:

“In his close circle of friends at the school were several who entered, or considered entering, the Presbyterian ministry, and he admired and kept in touch with them for years…Madison even went to Philadelphia in 1774, when the Presbyterians’ annual synod was taking place, to see the friends assembling there.”

Americans were committed to having a government by and for the people.  Madison’s problem, and the Founder’s problem, was finding a design for representative government that was likely to succeed and endure.  It would have been very much in character for Madison to propose something like the Presbyterian system. After all, that system was at hand, had been tested by experience and had stood the test of time.

Madison and the other Founders relied on the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century to justify the theory of popular sovereignty and for the intellectual tools they needed to design the system of government that would replace monarchy.  In our desire to understand America’s Founding, we do well to take note of the fact that we find both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and an example of the system of representative government in Reformation Scotland—more than two centuries before the American Revolution.