Liberal-progressivism - in all its manifestations from Soviet Communism, to European socialism, and Hitler’s National Socialism - is founded in the repeatedly disproved theory that intellectuals can restructure political society in ways that will perfect human nature. Philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment and those who crafted our Constitution were firmly and correctly certain that human nature has always been the same and will remain unchanged.
The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding
In 1776
By Robert Curry
In 1776, [Adam] Smith could only theorize from scattered historical precedents as to how a projective free enterprise system might work, because nowhere in his mercantilist world was a free enterprise system of the sort he described on paper actually operating.
The American states of 1776 in gambling on democratic republics stood alone in the political world. Nowhere in contemporary Europe or Asia could Americans turn for reassuring precedents showing functioning republican government.
Douglass Adair
Though they were boldly proposing to take mankind where it had never gone before, neither Smith nor the Founders were utopian dreamers. We now know that their thinking was quite sound. Free markets work, and today even tyrants accept the need to stage elections and plebiscites to give their regimes at least the appearance of legitimacy. The systems of Smith and the Founders showered the world with undreamed of prosperity and liberty, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live where their ideas were applied.
Smith and the Founders believed they had arrived at an understanding of human action much as Newton had explained celestial motion. Washington said it best. The Founding, he wrote in 1783, had occurred at a time “when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period; the researches of the human mind after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, …[and] are laid open for our use.”
Just as Newton had explained celestial mechanics by means of the unifying principle of gravity, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment had based their thinking on a single unifying principle. The Americans of the Enlightenment era had embraced that same principle and set out to apply it carefully in their design of the American Republic. Douglass Adair, perhaps the greatest 20th century student of the Founders, identified their unifying principle this way:
The Scottish system, as it had been gradually elaborated in the works of a whole generation of researchers, rested on one basic assumption…The assumption was “that…in all nations and ages…human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations.
Adair quotes Hume here and means for us to understand that with these words Hume could be acting as the spokesperson for the Scots of the Enlightenment era, as well as for the Founders.
Within just a few years of 1776, the Founders were to make the next great application of what they had learned. They made use of those researches to create two of the greatest breakthroughs of the Enlightenment-- first the Constitution and then the Federalist Papers.
Since their time, history has been marked by a succession of assaults on these researches by wave after wave of theoreticians, sometimes backed by political movements, sometimes backed by marching armies. Those theoretical assaults have taken a toll on the luster of the systems of 1776. Yet fettered as it is, the free market continues to prove itself, and the democratic republic of the Founders still endures.
The Founders believed that they were building on a solid foundation of real understanding. What if they were correct in their assessment of what they had done? Then perhaps that is why what they made has endured. That would suggest that those who attack their work are simply recoiling from what actually works and how things actually are. If so, perhaps President Coolidge said it best:
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
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