The View From 1776

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.

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. 

The Strategic Debate We Need To Have
By Jeff Lukens

The U.S. federal debt is our nation’s greatest strategic weakness.  As the debt continues to grow, our military posture around the globe is threatened.  Defense cuts are coming, and with that reduction must come a reduced mission.  In this environment, what our nation’s strategic mission should be, and what the corresponding defense funding should be to meet that need, are open questions.  They are questions that need to be openly explored by politicians and the American people alike.

In a recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “A smaller military, no matter how superb, will be able to go fewer places and do fewer things.” Ever the public servant, Gates seeks to kindle a debate the country seems reluctant, but needs, to have.  It would be an invitation to disaster if we kept the same mission with reduced funding, or a reduced force.  By bringing the issue to the public forum, Gates apparently seeks to avoid that calamity.

The core Pentagon budget is now about $530 billion, and accounts for roughly 20 percent of federal spending, and roughly half of discretionary spending.  Defense cuts are coming, that much we know for sure, and the easiest of them have already been made.  Gates acknowledged that over the past two years, “more than 30 programs (weapon systems, etc.) were canceled, capped, or ended that, if pursued to completion, would have cost more than $300 billion.”

After a comprehensive review, the Pentagon hopes to find additional savings.  Whatever those might be, however, they will not be enough to meet their goal of saving $400 billion over 10 years.  The pressure on the Pentagon’s budget is part of the GOP’s larger effort to cut the overall budget deficit by $4 trillion over the same time period.  To meet that goal, the Pentagon is already suggesting that military missions and troop levels be reduced.

For a historical perspective, our defense budget hit a postwar high of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 during the Korean War.  At the height of Vietnam in 1968, it was 9.5%, and it was 6.8% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup.  In 2000, military funding reached the lowest point on 3.0%.  Today, 10 years into the Global War on Terror, we are spending 4.7% of GDP on defense.

In the 1980s, the Army had 18 combat divisions.  Today they have ten.  Many of the Army’s weapons have already missed several rounds of modernization.  Many of its soldiers are on their fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.  And the Army Reserves have been on repeated deployments overseas since 9/11 as well.

The Navy has been reduced from 600 ships in the 1980s to fewer than 300 today.  They now have fewer ships than at any time since the First World War.  In that same time, the number of tactical air wings in the Air Force has fallen from 37 to 20.  And their planes are the smallest in number and the oldest in age, ever.  The useful life of the tanks, artillery, planes, ships, and missiles that date to the Reagan buildup is ending, and the cost of replacing them is now far greater than it was back then.

Going forward, the challenge for Washington is to reach a political consensus that transitions our military capability and alliances, and meets the realities of the decades ahead.  As a nation, perhaps the first question we must ask ourselves is what is so critical to our security that we are willing to go to war to defend it?  Upon the answer to that question lie answers to how much military strength we need, and at what amount of funding will be needed to achieve it.

Once the Afghan War is over, we would hope to see U.S. troop levels reduced in the Middle East.  In Korea, the South has twice the people, and many times the economy of the North.  Moreover, Pyongyang has no Soviet Union or Maoist China backing them as in the past.  We may also have an opportunity to reduce our commitment there.

And what is the necessity for a U.S. troop presence in Europe?  The Red Army withdrew from Germany and the rest of Central Europe long ago.  Our European allies are as wealthy as we are.  And while they would rather push their defense responsibilities off on us, perhaps it is time for us to step back from there too.  Should we really have U.S. troops stationed in places like Kosovo?  Maybe we should let the Europeans handle these places on their own.

Our military footprint is shrinking because we are broke, and we must make hard choices about what is important to our nation’s security.  Some have said we should not partake in any more wars where we must endlessly explain our reasons for being there to the American people.  In this time of austerity, perhaps that is the right approach.

The old axiom that peace comes through strength has not changed.  When a crisis comes, we could be forced to pay in blood and treasure many times over what we save today in downsizing our military.  Clearly, we must be smart about downsizing our military and optimizing its strength while undergoing this process.  Our decisions today will be consequential to when that day of crisis inevitably comes.

In his AEI speech, Gates said:

I am determined that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, where the budget targets were met mostly by taking a percentage off the top of everything, the simplest and most politically expedient approach both inside the Pentagon and outside of it. That kind of “salami-slicing” approach preserves overhead and maintains force structure on paper, but results in a hollowing-out of the force from a lack of proper training, maintenance and equipment - and manpower. That’s what happened in the 1970s - a disastrous period for our military - and to a lesser extent during the late 1990s.

The biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security, Medicare, and Defense.  It is unlikely we will reach any long-term bipartisan budget deal without cuts to all three.  So Defense cuts are coming, and the 2012 campaign season is as good a time as any to air this issue publicly.  As Gates said, “Part of this analysis will entail going places that have been avoided by politicians in the past.”

The President, the Congress, and the American people should openly decide which commitments and capabilities America should maintain, reduce, or abandon.  It is a debate we need to have.  Typically, most pols would kick this thorny issue down the road.  In one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates has brought this vital issue to the forefront of the public attention.  His service to the nation is commendable.  Let the debate begin.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

Regarding the pursuit of economic truth, read Robert Higgs’s essay on the Independent Institute website.

Quote:

Much modern economic theory, for example, has been used to justify government intervention in the free-market process. We might pause to reflect that this process, which operates as a price system or, seen from another angle, as a profit-and-loss system, is simultaneously a way of revealing the truth. Thus, for example, a price established on the free market communicates true information to all potential market participants about the exchange value of a good or service relative to other goods and services. If the government places an excise tax on a good, thereby diminishing the quantity demanded and raising the market price, potential buyers now react to a false signal of the good’s true exchange value. If the government pays a subsidy to a good’s producers, thereby increasing the quantity supplied and lowering the market price, potential suppliers now react to a false signal of the good’s true exchange value. In both cases, changes in the amounts produced give rise to corresponding changes in the amounts of various inputs demanded; and those changes give rise to other market changes; and so on, as the effects of a single government intervention in the market price system ripple outward from their source.

(Those who have studied a little economics in a university may object that according to the theory of “market failure,” various deviations from hypothetical “perfectly competitive” conditions may cause market-determined prices to be distorted and outputs to be “inefficient,” and in this event the government can intervene with taxes, subsides, and regulations to bring the market into an efficient configuration. What these students probably were not taught, however, is that this theory assumes a great deal that cannot be known to anyone except as it is determined in actual markets. Further, because the actual parameters of demand, cost, and supply functions are unknown [and constantly subject to change] in the real world, the government does not, indeed, cannot know how much to intervene—what amount of tax to set, or how much to pay as a subsidy, for example. Further still, this theory implicitly assumes that the interventionist actions the government takes are themselves without costs. One wonders: how are the tax-and-subsidy agencies and the regulatory bureaucracies supported? Even further still, because in reality such interventions are the creations not of genuine economic experts [themselves helpless enough], but of politicians and their lackeys, the interventions are intended to, and do, serve not the purpose of establishing an efficient allocation of resources, but the purpose of promoting the politicians’ personal, ideological, and political ends. The entire apparatus of the theory of market failure is a sheer blackboard fantasy, an economic theorist’s plaything that has been accepted far too often as a helpful guide to, or justification of, government intervention in the market economy by putatively public-spirited legislators and regulators.)

In reality, the market system fosters an efficient allocation of resources—it constantly creates incentives for resource owners to direct their resources away from areas in which those resources have lesser value and toward areas in which they have greater value. Taxes, subsidies, and other government intrusions in the market process in effect falsify the price “signals” that guide market participants in their decisions about how much to buy, how much to sell, how to produce, where to produce, and exactly when to take various actions.