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Introduction

As you know, the American Founders claimed they were guided by self-evident truths, truths “no sooner understood than they are believed” because they “carry the light of truth itself.”

In order to understand the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we need to begin with the fact that the Founders’ understanding of self-evident truth was based on the work of a Scottish philosopher named Thomas Reid. Reid was the founder of common sense realism, referred to by Prof. Arthur Herman on the page of quotes above.

Self-evident truths are the foundation of common sense realism, and they are a key to understanding the thinking of America’s Founders.

America was truly blessed by the wisdom of the Founders.

So remarkable are the Founders that many Americans believe Providence was at work in America’s Founding. The evidence for that belief abounds. Washington was again and again miraculously protected from harm in battle. The illegitimate, orphaned Hamilton was whisked from obscurity on a remote Caribbean island to serve brilliantly at Washington’s side in the war, at Yorktown and in the first administration as Treasury Secretary. These are just two examples in the marvelous chronicles of the gathering of the Founders. No wonder Washington believed Divine Providence had guided events.

The greatness of the Founding goes far beyond that awe-inspiring assembly of men. In designing the government and envisioning the nation, the Founders were quite consciously relying on and working with a well-considered set of arguments and ideas, arguments and ideas that were grounded in a new and profound understanding of human nature. The success of America’s Founding was the result of the ideas that guided those men, as well as the greatness of the men who relied on those ideas.

Today in America, the greatness of the Founders has not been completely forgotten, but we have, for the most part, lost sight of the ideas that guided their deliberations. Many Americans believe what every schoolboy and every schoolgirl believes: the Founders took the ideas they used for the Founding from John Locke. Although it is widely believed, this version of the story of America stops short of the developments that made the Founding what it was. To understand the Founders’ thinking, we must understand the American Enlightenment.

An American Enlightenment? The very idea may seem to you to be a surprising one. Wasn’t the Enlightenment about the ideas of the French philosopher Voltaire and his followers? And aren’t we told the Founders were basically down-to-earth, practical men of simple good sense? After all, the widely admired French commentator on America, Alexis de Tocqueville, famously wrote in 1831 that Americans were not interested in theoretical pursuits:

“I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

Books on America written in our day frequently quote these words of Tocqueville as if they represent the authoritative final judgment on American thought in the early period of the nation. But is it true that the Founders merely took what ideas they needed from Locke, and little more needs to be said about American thought during the Founders’ era?

As will become clear, there was an American Enlightenment, and understanding it provides the key to unlocking many mysteries, mysteries in the era of the American Founding, in American Constitutional history up until the present and even in the direct antecedents of the Founding reaching back to the sixteenth century.

In broad outline, the story is easy to follow.

John Locke established the foundation for political thought at the beginning of the Enlightenment era. So great was Locke’s influence that in terms of politics the Enlightenment era could be called the Age of Locke. Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 overthrew the last Stuart king and put an end to the Stuarts’ claim to unlimited royal sovereignty by divine right. Locke championed the Glorious Revolution and the right of revolution. He also made the case for limits on government power and for the consent of the governed.

Despite the importance of Locke’s political thinking, he had a divided legacy. During the Enlightenment era, America and France each had their own revolutions, but neither resembled the British revolution of 1688. The French got political chaos, the blood-drenched time of the Terror, and soon reverted to tyranny again, this time under Napoleon. America got something new in the political history of humankind.

In the realm of political theory, France began by proceeding directly from Locke, or at least Voltaire believed he did. Voltaire was inspired by Locke (“never, perhaps, has a wiser, more methodical mind existed than Mr. Locke”) and Sir Isaac Newton (a genius “the like of which has scarcely appeared in ten centuries”). From the example of Locke and Newton, Voltaire drew the conclusion that unassisted human reason could provide humanity with the answers to every question. He believed he was introducing English ways into France, starting with his English Letters in 1734 then setting to work on his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. However, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and his French colleagues quickly took a radically different direction, perhaps a characteristically French one, certainly not an English one.

America’s revolution too had a very different outcome than Britain’s Glorious Revolution. The political thinking of the Founders had taken them beyond the ideas of the Glorious Revolution. The Americans were able to create political structure anew because they were thinking anew about mankind and the state.

That new thinking about mankind and the state is what the American Enlightenment is all about. The American Founding that resulted is still today the most radical attempt to establish a regime of liberty in the entire history of mankind.

The political genius of the Founders made the American Enlightenment one of the most remarkable developments in the history of the world. As Lord Acton wrote in his Essays in the History of Liberty, “Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that the plain ideas . . . burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man.”

Unlike the French, the Americans did not arrive at the American version of the Enlightenment by proceeding directly from Locke. Instead, the Americans got some help, and magnificent help it was. The American Enlightenment was informed by the Scottish Enlightenment. That is to say, the Americans benefitted from another of the most remarkable developments in the history of the world. The Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith gave us modern economics with his epoch-making book The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s close friend James Hutton gave us modern geology and the modern concept of deep time. Smith and Hutton’s close friend the chemist and physicist Joseph Black initiated the science of thermodynamics. Black helped another Scottish James, James Watt, also one of Smith’s many friends, develop the steam engine. (Smith, a professor, helped Watt find workspace at Smith’s university for his experiments.) The list goes on and on because the Scottish Enlightenment was, as it is said, “crowded with genius.” The economics of Adam Smith and the discoveries of James Watt, Joseph Black and their colleagues powered the Industrial Revolution and opened the way to our modern world.

But it was mainly in philosophy that the Founders learned from the Scots. This was for the very good reason that the American Enlightenment was focused on the theory and practice of liberty. As we shall see, the Founders’ understanding of “self-evident truths” and “unalienable rights” was rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scots gave the Founders a tremendous assist, and then America’s Founders went far beyond their Scottish teachers in the realm of political thought.

Scottish Enlightenment philosophy was brought to these shores by a wave of enthusiastic scholars and clergy from Scotland, scholars like John Witherspoon and William Small who mentored Madison and Jefferson, and also by Americans like Benjamin Rush who went to Scotland to study.

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the people who carried their ideas to America arrived just in time to provide the foundation for the American Enlightenment and to shape the American experiment. The Founders and the ideas they needed met in the historic moment.

Perhaps this matter of perfect timing is as remarkable as the men who received it and the remarkable use those men made of their opportunity.

Scottish Enlightenment philosophy was set in motion by Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson taught philosophy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland from 1730 until his death in 1746. His concern was to make a philosophical case for the moral sense, but his impact was not restricted to this overriding concern. His profound analysis of rights gave us “unalienable rights”, one of his greatest gifts to the Founders. Hutcheson mentored Adam Smith, the author of The Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, who in his turn held the same prestigious professorship. Thomas Reid succeeded Adam Smith in that same professorship.

Reid founded common sense realism, called by Arthur Herman “virtually the official creed of the American Republic” on the page of citations at the beginning of this book. Reid published his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in 1764. In it he took a different lesson from Newton than did Voltaire. Voltaire drew the conclusion that unassisted human reason could answer all questions; for Reid, Newton taught “the way of observation and experiment”:

“Wise men now agree, or ought to agree, in this, that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature’s works—the way of observation and experiment.”

According to Reid, Newton’s method was based on the capacity we all have to conduct our daily lives: “the first principles of all sciences are the dictates of common sense and lie open to all men.”

As you know, the American Founders claimed they were guided by self-evident truths. For our purpose of understanding the Founders, the Declaration, and the Constitution, the important point is that their claims about self-evident truths reveal that their deliberations were deeply informed by the thinking of Thomas Reid. In addition, the prominence of the concept of unalienable rights shows that they had also carefully studied the works of Francis Hutcheson.

Despite what Tocqueville and others have written, there was a distinctively American philosophy at the Founding and during the life of the young American republic. Because that philosophy had deep roots in the Scottish Enlightenment the Scottish philosophical tradition was paramount in America’s colleges. The distinguished American historian, Allen Guelzo, made that point in this way in his truly great lecture series, “The American Mind”:

“Before the Civil War, every major [American] collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.”

This accurate and important observation manages to say a great deal in a few words. It makes the important point.

For our purposes however, two brief additional comments may be helpful. Notice that by the time of the Civil War, this had been the American intellectual tradition for at least a century. Yet because of its deep roots in Scottish thought, the Scottish label endured, and is still used today when referring to the Americans who carried on the tradition long after the official end of the Scottish Enlightenment period in Scotland. This is remarkable testimony to the impact of the Scottish thinkers on American thought.

In addition, with the passage of time “common sense realism” came to do double duty. In its narrow use, it referred to Reid’s philosophical work; used more broadly, as by Guelzo above, it became the shorthand term for the Scottish Enlightenment in general and also for the thought of Americans who continued to work in the moral sense and common sense tradition the Scots had founded. In part this broad use of the term reflects Reid’s enormous prestige in America. Also, there was a need for a shorthand term; “moral sense philosophy and common sense realism” is simply too long to be handy. More fundamentally, Reid, following as he did Hutcheson and Adam Smith, in many ways encompassed their thinking. In addition, many believed then and believe now that Reid provided Scottish Enlightenment philosophy with its crowning achievement. All of these factors made common sense realism the natural choice for use as the shorthand label for the whole tradition.

If we want to understand the thinking of the Founders as revealed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we must first touch base with Thomas Reid and his Scottish colleagues. Is the importance of Reid and his colleagues to the Founders news to you? Have you perhaps never even heard of Thomas Reid? If so, what that means is you have not been provided with the keys to understanding the thinking of the Founders.

The good news is that understanding their thinking is not going to be difficult for you. It is even fun, and it is well within your reach. All you need is common sense, and a brief survey of the territory so well known to the Founders, yet largely forgotten today.

As I will attempt to make clear, the ideas of Reid and his Scottish colleagues shaped the American Enlightenment, the American experiment and American political thought.

There is one point I must emphasize: to say the Scottish Enlightenment shaped the American experiment is not to diminish in any way the achievements of the Founders. Their astonishing achievements are in the first rank in the whole history of the world. To get a clear view of the tallest mountain peak, you may need to be standing on a nearby peak—and to be facing in the right direction. To understand the Founders, we need to understand on whose shoulders the Founders were standing.

This book was written as a series of individual studies over a period of years. These studies have an overarching unity of purpose. They are the record of the explorations and discoveries I made as I pursued a path of understanding. That path kept revealing itself to me as I progressed. I could not have said ahead of time what I was going to learn along the way. Each study I have included here selects a strategic point over the buried past. These strategic points reveal the hidden outline of what has been lost.

As a result of my journey, I can report to you that understanding the thinking of the Founders is a task worth doing. It is also the citizen’s duty and the patriot’s joyful obligation.

I begin with the conventional wisdom regarding Locke and the Glorious Revolution.