The View From 1776

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding

Locke and the Declaration of Independence
By Robert Curry

• “… self-evident.”

“[T]he very first sentence of the actual Declaration roundly states that certain truths are—crucial words—self-evident.  This style—terse and pungent, yet fringed with elegance—allied the plain language of Thomas Paine to the loftier expositions of John Locke…”
Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson

Hitchens here observes the venerable tradition of finding Locke in the Declaration.  Although Hitchens is often cheerfully iconoclastic, in this instance he is very much in the mainstream of scholarly and popular comment.  It is after all the conventional wisdom that Jefferson applied the ideas of John Locke in writing the Declaration.

But did he?  If we question this assumption, we encounter big problems right away. 

First, there is Locke’s definition of “self-evident.” Locke’s definition would actually disallow Jefferson’s use of those “crucial words” in the Declaration.  For Locke, a self-evident truth is a proposition whose subject and predicate are identical, a proposition having the form “A is A.” Such propositions express a concrete identity.  Jefferson’s self-evident truths clearly do not conform to Locke’s very restricted definition:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

Jefferson simply cannot be using “self-evident” in the Lockean sense.  But if not in Locke’s sense, then in what sense?  Hitchens does not address this difficulty.  By moving directly to “style” and invoking an alliance with the language of Thomas Paine, he sweeps past the problem and moves on.

Moving on, Hitchens again finds Locke in his discussion of natural rights in the Declaration, although Hitchens does note that 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.  It is a fundamental deviation by Jefferson from Locke’s thinking.  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. 

Even this brief examination makes it clear that the conflict between Locke’s thinking and Jefferson’s thinking is actually profound.  How, then, can the traditional view that Jefferson relies on Locke in the Declaration endure?  It endures, I suggest, because the same mainstream of thought that finds Locke in the Declaration has lost sight of the role of the Scottish Enlightenment in America’s Founding.  Consequently, that mainstream account also leaves out an important part of Jefferson’s story. 

Jefferson in the Declaration and throughout his life is a kind of anti-Lockean, an anti-Lockean of a very specific sort.  Jefferson was schooled in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Gertrude Himmelfarb has even pointed out that Jefferson wrote like a professor of philosophy at a Scottish university of his day.  Although Jefferson famously honored Locke as one of the Enlightenment trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, to understand Jefferson’s use of “self-evident” we need to turn to the thought of a philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment—Thomas Reid. 

Reid made self-evident truths the foundation of his philosophy, the philosophy of common sense.  For Reid, self-evident truths are principles that are implicit in our conduct and imposed upon us by “the constitution of our nature”: 

“The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident…”

Reid took self-evident truths far beyond the mere perception of a concrete identity, broadening their reach by rooting them in language and our communal experience. 

Hitchens’s rhetorical linking of Locke and Paine will not stand much scrutiny--Locke and Paine are just too dissimilar--but it is an inspired suggestion all the same.  If we simply substitute Reid for Locke, Hitchens’ formulation works wonders.  Paine, the author of Common Sense, and Reid, the philosopher of common sense, are natural allies.  Hitchhiking on Hitchens’ brilliant insight, we are positioned to notice that Jefferson allied the plain language of Thomas Paine with the loftier expositions of Thomas Reid—and we are well on our way to a better understanding of the Declaration.

• “…the pursuit of happiness.”

“[The Scots] had been pushed aside from the European mainstream yet not thrown free of it: permitted, rather, to witness closely its ruthless forward roar and to harbor… a criticism that became…America.”
                                                                                           John Updike, Macbech

Updike says that something happened in Scotland—a criticism—that made America.

What happened in Scotland was the Scottish Enlightenment. It flourished from around 1730 until about 1790.  Carried to America by a wave of enthusiastic Scots who came to teach, and brought back from Scotland by Americans who traveled to Scotland to study, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment arrived just in time to have a decisive influence on the Founders, and to remain, in the words of Jeffry Morrison, “the dominant philosophical school in America for nearly a century and a half.”

Just as Updike suggests, there is, at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment philosophical and political thought, a brilliant and sustained criticism.  That criticism was aimed at the philosophy of John Locke.  Locke’s thinking provided the impetus for the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.  In the words of Garry Wills:

“Man was seen, after Locke, as determined by the impact of pleasure and pain upon his senses.  [Thomas] Reid saw this as a challenge to the certainty of knowledge.  [Francis] Hutcheson saw it as a threat to the very possibility of virtue.”

Hutcheson founded the Scottish Enlightenment, and his thinking quickly came to play a dominant role in Scotland and in America. 

There are for our purposes here two essential points.  First, the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers defined themselves in opposition to Locke, and, second, these were the ideas and arguments that undergirded the American Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the American experiment.

It is a commonplace to observe that Jefferson followed Locke in the famous formulation “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Yet we have seen that he conspicuously did not.  The Lockean triad was “Life, Liberty and Property,” and for Locke property was the basis for all other rights.

In deviating in precisely this way from Locke, Jefferson was following Hutcheson.  Hutcheson did not agree with Locke that property was the basis for all other rights.  For Hutcheson, our rights to life and liberty are our principal rights.  They are natural and unalienable, but our right to our goods and labors arises out of the division of labor which depends on the right to exchange (alienate) them.  Hutcheson’s brilliant argument convinced Jefferson and also cleared the way for the enormous contributions of Adam Smith.

Hutcheson’s central concern was to make the case for the moral sense, and it is widely recognized that Jefferson held to moral-sense doctrine.

The consequences of that fact are far-reaching, though not often confronted; it means that Jefferson was not a Lockean. To hold to moral-sense doctrine was not to follow Locke.  Jefferson famously honored Locke as one of Enlightenment trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, but early and late in his life Jefferson’s thinking was always closest to that of Francis Hutcheson.  In choosing “pursuit of happiness” Jefferson was making an informed choice to side with Hutcheson contra Locke. 

Why “happiness?” Again, Jefferson follows Hutcheson. Hutcheson puts happiness at the center of his system of moral philosophy.  According to Hutcheson, for the state, “the general happiness is the supreme end of all political union.” For the individual, “the surest way to promote his private happiness [is] to do publicly useful actions.”

What then of Locke and the Declaration?  No doubt Locke is the thinker who set in motion the thinking that is in the Declaration.  However, Hutcheson and Reid and the other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment believed that they had refuted Locke—and they, not Locke, were the thinkers Jefferson relied upon in writing the Declaration.