Robert Curry’s latest essay links our Constitution to the Scottish Enlightenment’s moral philosophy. James Madison, the most influential delegate to the Constitutional Convention, was a pupil of Princeton’s John Witherspoon, who had been educated as a Presbyterian minister at the University of Edinburgh (see The Scottish Enlightenment).
The Scottish Enlightenment & America’s Founding
by Robert Curry
Adam Smith’s Third Masterpiece
Adam Smith’s insight was that we human beings not only pursue our self-interest but seek the approbation of others, and the combination makes freedom work. .....Charles Murray
Adam Smith’s first masterpiece was the Moral Sentiments. In it Smith presents his version of the theory of human nature according to the Scottish Enlightenment: man the social being, endowed with a moral sense. Like his teacher Francis Hutcheson and his friend David Hume, Smith argued that the virtues arose from moral sentiments. Smith grounds social behavior and ethics in the human capacity for sympathy with others: “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard.”
Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, but that is not the reason Sentiments was the first book. For the Scottish thinkers of the era, moral philosophy was primary, and Smith always thought of himself primarily as a moral philosopher.
The second masterpiece was the Wealth of Nations. Here Smith invents the science of modern economics. Defining wealth as economic productiveness, not gold or silver, and sounding a note that seems to describe with perfect accuracy our current American circumstance, he writes [t]he natural effort of every individual to better his own condition…is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations.
The third, the promised book on political theory, was never written. However, we can, with Charles Murray, safely assume that it would have extended the arguments of Sentiments and Wealth, applying the same principles to the theory of political liberty.
I would like to propose a masterpiece not written by Smith as a candidate to occupy the place of the missing third masterpiece—the Federalist. The timing is about right. Sentiments was published in 1759, Wealth was published in 1776 (!), and the Federalist was completed in 1788. In addition, we know that the Founders were steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition. The American Enlightenment was rooted in the Scottish one, and, as I have argued, the Americans surpassed their teachers in one area, that of applied political theory.
In addition, the Federalist fits the pattern suggested by Murray. As Samuel Fleischaker has pointed out, the direct way to understand Madison’s most famous argument in the Federalist is to see it as an extension of an argument of Smith’s. Following Smith, Madison expected political competition, like economic competition, to benefit society.
Of course, an excellent objection to my nominee is that the Federalist does not make explicit its connections to Smith’s two masterpieces. That is understandable. As we have seen, the authors of the Federalist were focused on the future. Theirs was the urgent task of convincing their countrymen to ratify the Constitution. They were not concerned with the scholarly task of making connections of this kind, nor would doing so even help them in their urgent attempt to persuade.
An even better objection is that the Federalist is too tied to our Constitution to be the kind of general work that Smith intended. Of course I agree. To meet that objection and yet continue the game of proposing a candidate book to take the place of Smith’s missing one, I propose F.A. Hayek’s magnificent The Constitution of Liberty. This great book makes explicit the connections with the writings of Smith, Hume, Ferguson and the rest. In fact, it forces the reader to come to terms with how much the cause of liberty owes the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Fittingly, Hayek dedicates his book to America--and you have to admit that the title is just about perfect, too.
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