The View From 1776

Our socialistic colleges and universities falsely teach that our founding era owed its substance to the French version. 

In contrast to the French destruction of church, monarchy, and aristocracy, the British North American colonists wanted only to be left alone by the crown and Parliament to continue self-governing as they had for a century and a half.  No laws or systems of local government were changed by the War of Independence, nor was there any effect upon the place of religion and the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The rights of private property continued to be the paramount driver and preserver of our political liberties.

The Scottish Enlightenment & America’s Founding
The American Enlightenment

By Robert Curry

Man was destined for society… He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality…The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of a man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree…It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock [amount] which is required for this.
Thomas Jefferson

This passage is taken from a letter to his nephew written in 1787, and repeated almost verbatim in a letter to John Adams twenty-eight years later. 

As Gertrude Himmelfarb astutely observes about this passage, it could have been written by a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.  This should not surprise.  We have seen that Jefferson, like Madison, Hamilton and many other Founders, had received a rigorous education in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Here Jefferson presents the theory of human nature according to the Scottish Enlightenment: man the social being, endowed with a moral sense.  Notice especially the modest role given to reason.  The emphasis on the moral sense and the lesser role given to reason sharply distinguishes both the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment from the Enlightenment in France. 

F. A. Hayek and others have made it clear that the Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment era decisively influenced the Founders.  Given that this is true, was there an American Enlightenment that was distinct from the Scottish Enlightenment?

Of course there was.  As the Jefferson passage illustrates, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment gave the Founders the intellectual foundation, the ideas and the arguments, they needed for the great task of the Founding—and then that great task took them far beyond their teachers in one arena, the realm of applied political theory. 

The Scottish Enlightenment was an explosion of creative intellectual energy in science, architecture, political theory, economics, and technological innovation.  In contrast, the American Enlightenment was driven by a focus on the politics of political liberty. With the exception of the scientific and technological achievements of Benjamin Franklin, the great works of the American Enlightenment are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, The Federalist and the Bill of Rights.  In articulating the principles and fashioning the institutions that would sustain the new republic, the Founders made for themselves a place of honor among the great thinkers of the Enlightenment era.  .

In the words of Gertrude Himmelfarb:  As the founding was unique to the United States, so was the Enlightenment upon which it was based.  And so is the enduring commitment to the Enlightenment, the “habits of the mind” and the “habits of the heart” that inspired the Founders and that are still a source of inspiration today.

The achievements of the Founders are gifts of the American Enlightenment, and they live on today in the life of our republic.

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