Robert Curry, continuing his examination of our heritage from the Scottish Enlightenment, makes the case that John Locke’s role was less significant than that of the Scottish moral philosophers.
It’s only fair, however, to note that Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government articulated the underlying justification for the Declaration of Independence and, in that respect, was a powerful influence. Written in 1689, the Second Treatise established a legitimate basis for ousting tyrannical king James II, namely that a sovereign is answerable to a higher law, from which flow God-given natural rights; that when a sovereign contravenes those natural rights, he forfeits his right to rule.
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams employed Locke’s argument in creating the Committees of Correspondence among the thirteen colonies, the agency that brought together the first Continental Congress.
Locke and America’s Founding
By Robert Curry
A philosopher may be a perfect master of Descartes and Leibniz, may pursue his own metaphysical inquiries to any length, may enter into the innermost recesses of the human mind, and make the noblest discoveries for the benefit of his species; nay, he may defend the principles of liberty and the rights of mankind with great abilities and success; and, after all, when called upon to produce a plan of legislation, he may astonish the world with a signal absurdity.
John Adams
Does it shock you to learn that the object of Adams’ scorn was John Locke?
Isn’t it a truth universally acknowledged that the Founders simply revered Locke? If you are sufficiently interested in the story of America to be reading this, no doubt you have read many times that the ideas of the American Founding are derived directly from the philosophy of John Locke. Yet Adams wrote this just prior to the Constitutional Convention, and he was commenting on the constitution Locke had written for the colony of Carolina. We may take it as beyond dispute that John Adams was not impressed by Locke’s example in the matter of constitution-making.
James Madison, too, was not overawed by Locke’s constitutional authority. Locke first made his mark with the publication of Letters on Toleration in 1689. By 1776 the young James Madison, though a very junior member of the committee that wrote the constitution for Virginia, was ready to argue against the Lockean notion of religious toleration. He won the committee over to a view that was based on a critique of Locke’s thinking, a critique developed by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. (For more, see my earlier posting, Understanding Madison.)
When Madison later played the lead role, under the aegis of his political mentor George Washington, in the drafting of the American Constitution, he was guided not by Locke’s ideas but by the thinking of Locke’s Scottish critics.
Well, if not the Constitution, then what about the Declaration of Independence? Wasn’t it largely derived from Locke’s doctrines? The Declaration, on close examination, actually turns out to be quite consciously anti-Lockean. This is true even of the Declaration’s most famous phrase. Jefferson deviated from the Lockean triad of “life, liberty, and property” by substituting “the pursuit of happiness.” Yet this is not simply a change of one term out of three. For Locke property is the foundation of all our natural rights. By taking property out of the triad of natural rights, Jefferson removed the very foundation of natural rights according to Locke. (For more, see my earlier posting, Locke and the Declaration of Independence.)
What then of the role of Locke in the Founding? Stated briefly, Locke had gotten things started, but there had been many developments in the meantime—and it was those developments that defined the outcome for America. By 1776 and 1789, Locke’s thinking had been the focus of a sustained criticism by the brilliant thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The American Enlightenment took the form that it did because of a remarkable series of historical developments that brought the generation of the Founders and the Scottish Enlightenment together.
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