The View From 1776

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.

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. 

Abstract theories of liberal-progressive-socialism lead to collectivized tyranny, as we see in the long train of liberal-progressive obliterations of individual economic and political liberties, most recently under Barack Obama.

On Human Nature
By Robert Curry

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

James Madison

The Scottish theorists were very much aware how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested on man’s more primitive and ferocious instincts…They were very far from holding such naïve views…as the “natural goodness of man,” or the existence of a “natural harmony of interests”…[They] showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do least harm.

F. A. Hayek

Neither the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment nor the Founders were under any illusions about human nature.

If we want to understand the efforts of the Founders during that hot summer in 1787, we must see them as trying to design self-government with a very sober assessment of human nature in mind.  When in the next century Lord Acton wrote “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he captured in a ringing aphorism the view the Founders shared with the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This view of the effect of power on human nature explains the Founders’ focus on defining and limiting federal power by distributing power among three branches, preserving the political independence of the states and creating a zone of liberty around the individual--even by further dividing the (supreme) legislative power itself, crafting two legislative bodies with separate powers and potentially competing interests.

Put yourself for a moment in the place of one of the Founders.  Imagine that it is your responsibility to craft a government by the people and for the people that can succeed and endure.  And, just for the moment, also imagine that you are, like them, under no illusions about the natural goodness of man.  Now, how do you define your challenge? 

Hayek’s contemporary, the philosopher Karl Popper offered a statement of the task of making a government that, I believe, illuminates the wisdom of the Founders.  He proposed that if we face from the beginning the possibility of bad government, the question then becomes “how can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” And that is just how the Founders approached their task.

It is perhaps the great tragedy of the modern world that the French did not follow the cautious example of the Founders or, like the Founders, make use of the wisdom of the Scottish Enlightenment.  After their Revolution of 1789 and under the influence of the rationalist utopianism of the French Enlightenment, France quickly descended into the Terror and soon plunged the world into war.  Even worse, it was the tragic destiny of France to create almost immediately the first model of the modern perversion of self-government, the evil twin of the Founders’ creation, and to bequeath it to posterity. It is important to remember that Napoleon gained power through a series of plebiscites.  Sophia Rosenfeld describes his accomplishment succinctly:

Napoleon’s great innovation…was to keep alive the idea of unlimited popular sovereignty…in the service of the curtailment of individual liberty and his own personal seizure of power.  He successfully mobilized ‘the people’ in support of policies that disempowered them.

By 1799 Napoleon had seized power and was on his way to the military conquest of Europe; Washington had already left office two years earlier and retired to Mount Vernon.

The Progressives:  Modern and Postmodern
By Robert Curry

The Modern Progressives

[N]o doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle…
Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, the very model of the modern Progressive, utterly rejected the Founders’ natural rights philosophy.  Wilson and the modern Progressives saw the Constitution itself as anachronism that America had progressed beyond.  According to the modern Progressives, the Constitutional limits on the power of government hobbled government, preventing it from using its powers to advance progress.

Wilson grounded his rejection of the Founders and the Constitution in the philosophy of the 19th century German G. W. F. Hegel, writing:

[T]he philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought.’

Professor Ronald Pestritto states Wilson’s and Hegel’s position succinctly:

Historical contingency makes it impossible to ground politics on an abstract principle.

For Hegel and therefore for Wilson, history advances as each age replaces the preceding age through a dialectical process.  History had simply moved on and the Constitution had outlived its time and its usefulness.  Marx, of course, also took his notion of history advancing dialectically from Hegel.

During the second half of the 19th century German scholarship was in fashion, and Wilson’s teachers at Johns Hopkins University were all educated in Germany.  Wilson championed his version of Hegelianism in academia, and then went on to champion modern Progressivism in politics. 

Many Americans know enough about the events leading up to the Civil War to have a sense of just how much Congressional debate once centered on what was and what was not constitutional, on what the Constitution allowed Congress to do.  As the result of a series of successful campaigns by the modern Progressives, that began to change.  The Constitution was rewritten by the courts and (except for very recently with the rise of the Tea Party) largely ignored by Congress.  The long decline in the standing of the Constitution shows just how successful the modern Progressives have been.

However, it is a new time and the spirit of the new time has brought forth a new generation of Progressives.

The Postmodern Progressives

That depends on what your definition of “is” is.
William Jefferson Clinton

The Democratic Party claims Thomas Jefferson as the first President of their party, yet it is clear that there is a big difference in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the recent President with “Jefferson” in his name—and even a big difference between the thinking of Woodrow Wilson and that recent President.  Jefferson believed that there are truths that are self-evident; Wilson believed that any doctrine is merely contingent on the spirit of its historical period; Clinton’s statement invokes a challenge to the very possibility of truth.

Clinton was rightly seen as attempting to squirm his way out the trouble he was in, but what went generally uncommented on was that he was relying on a particular epistemology to do so.  If you had not been keeping up with the latest developments in the world of intellectual fashion, you might not have recognized that Clinton’s challenge to common sense was rooted in the doctrines of postmodernism.

The postmodernists go far beyond Hegel’s rejectionism to deny even the meaningfulness of claims to truth. The French postmodernist Michel Foucault puts their position this way:

It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth or Knowledge.

Richard Rorty, the best known of the American postmodernists, makes the same point with greater apparent philosophical rigor:

To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth.  It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth… as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term which repays ‘analysis’.

For the postmodernist, language only connects with more language; language never connects with reality.  According to the postmodernists, the meaning of “is” –and everything else--is up for grabs. 

The invasion of the postmodernists came in the second half of the twentieth century, about a century after the Hegelian tide.  As you may have heard, the postmodernists have captured the commanding heights of academia.  Once again, as with the Hegelians, they first successfully invaded academia, and then reached out to change American society and government through the Democratic Party. 

While the modern Progressives were primarily opposed to the U.S. Constitution, the postmodern Progressives have a much more radical and far-reaching agenda.  This difference makes the two versions of Progressivism fairly easy to distinguish.  Modern Progressivism, rejecting the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of the individual in favor of the government’s ability to bring about progress, favors, for example, government provided health care.  In contrast, postmodern Progressivism, rejecting Western culture itself, reflexively favors third world peoples and supports policies that are aimed at hobbling first world economies to reduce the living standards of their populations.

In his excellent book Explaining Postmodernism, Professor Stephen Hicks presents a list of claims of postmodern discourse: 

• On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

• Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.

• Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

• Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

Professor Hicks presents the list primarily to make the philosophical point that these claims are self-contradictory.  I quote them for a different purpose.  I ask you: Do these ideas seem familiar?  Have encountered them in the current public discourse? 

Clearly these claims are very different from the self-evident truths of Jefferson and the Founders, and not even ideas that would have made any sense to Woodrow Wilson, but the question for our purposes is this: how far have the postmodernists gotten in their campaign to set the direction for Progressivism? 

I invite you to be the judge of that.

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding: Understanding Madison

By Robert Curry

“Madison’s political feelings were most aroused, oddly enough, not by the imperial issues of trade and taxation…it was the union of Church and State that set him on fire.  The cause of religious freedom became Madison’s passport to revolution.”

M. D. Peterson, editor, in James Madison: A Biography in His Own Words

The italics are mine, and not those of the distinguished historian who was selected to edit this 2-volume work drawn from Madison’s collected papers.

For Madison, there was, of course, nothing odd here.  Madison simply is the great champion of religious liberty.  That fact is the key to understanding his political thought in general.  Yet Madison’s focus on religious liberty strikes Prof. Peterson as odd.  Why?

The problem is that Madison’s great central passion does not fit the reigning narrative in academia.  The academic narrative tends to favor economic explanations over explanations involving religion.  Madison is the Founder who is often called the framer of the Constitution.  Better for that narrative if he had been focused on the “imperial issues of trade and taxation.” But Madison just cannot be made to conform to the paradigm Prof. Peterson prefers.

Madison was educated at Princeton where, under the leadership of John Witherspoon, religious liberty was both practiced and defended.  On his return to his native Virginia, he was “set on fire” when Baptist preachers were imprisoned by Virginia’s established (Anglican) church.

Religious liberty was even the focus of Madison’s first foray into constitution-making.  At the age of 25 in 1776, he was a newly-elected delegate appointed to the committee to prepare a constitution and a declaration of rights for Virginia.  Because of his youth and junior status, he kept a very low profile on the committee—until the work on the declaration of rights came to the issue of religious conscience.  George Mason dominated the committee’s proceedings.  Following Locke, he had proposed “toleration.” This did not go nearly far enough for Madison, and it aroused him to action.  He proposed instead that religious liberty be declared, in his words, “a natural and absolute right.”

His formulation carried the day in Virginia and, as the result of his untiring efforts, in America as well.  We can see this very clearly in Washington’s celebrated “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport” of 1790:

“The citizens of the United States of America have… given to mankind examples of a…policy worthy of imitation.  All possess alike liberty of conscience …It is now no more that toleration is spoken of…”

Madison, you see, was a true revolutionary.  The Revolution for him was not simply a matter of replacing the Colonial government with a new, indigenous government in order to address issues of taxation and trade.  Madison was fighting for a radical re-conception of the relationship of man and the state, a re-conception that went far beyond the ideas of John Locke.  For Madison, liberty is a natural and absolute right of the individual, not a privilege granted by the state.