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Why the Scottish Enlightenment Was Useful to the Framers of the American Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Daniel Walker Howe
Daniel Walker Howe
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

A large body of research conducted over a period of many years has demonstrated the enormous contribution that Scottish thought made to early America. Curiously enough, the evidence for this important influence accumulated gradually without attracting widespread attention until 1978, when Garry Wills published a book on the Declaration of Independence, orienting that document within the context of Scottish thinking. All of a sudden, eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy was being discussed in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and all the major relevant professional journals. Wills' work aroused a storm of controversy, and by now it appears certain that his discussion of the philosophical issues underlying the Declaration was garbled. Nevertheless, his book proved to be a landmark of a certain kind: It focused attention on the relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment to the American Revolutionary generation. Sometimes a forceful statement, even if wrong, can have a constructive effect, and so it seems to have been with Garry Wills's account, Inventing America.

Type
The Reasonable State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 1989 , pp. 572 - 587
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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References

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44 That is how The Federalist explained it. Both systems have an intellectual basis in the Scottish Enlightenment: one in Hume, the other in faculty psychology. In theory they are not perfectly compatible, since the former is based on the premise that no one can be trusted, while the latter is based on the premise that there are a few who can be trusted more than most.

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