This superb little book deals with a subject of great importance—the intellectual backdrop for the American Revolution. It is commonly said that the founding fathers were children of the Enlightenment and that our system of government is based on Enlightenment principles, with Locke, e.g., providing the argument for the social contract and the consent of the governed and Montesquieu providing the framework for a system that is built upon checks and balances. Some have even said that the new science of the Enlightenment (filtered through Montesquieu) contributes to a conception of government as a problem in hydrodynamics, one in which the system must be kept in constant equilibrium. (Curry is more concerned with economic equilibrium, filtering his argument through Adam Smith’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS and such contemporary thinkers as Thomas Sowell.)
Curry is at pains to alter this picture. He argues, correctly, that there are multiple Enlightenments and that the most telling one affecting America is not the French Enlightenment but rather the Scottish Enlightenment. Some will speak of the ‘British Enlightenment’, thus including Gibbon (and, I would argue, Samuel Johnson), but Curry is focused on the Athens of the North (as Edinburgh was termed at the time), and the faculties of the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen. The key figures are Hume, his critic, Thomas Reid, Reid’s student Dugald Stewart and, very importantly, Frances Hutcheson and Adam Smith (who wrote on aesthetics, moral science, et al. in addition to economics).
While the French Enlightenment thinkers stress science, reason and logic they tilt toward materialism, atheism and abstraction and open the door to practices that can lead to such things as the Reign of Terror and an ensuing military dictatorship. The abstract (and hence, the academic) are always dangerous because governments are not conducted by angels. The founders’ view of man is far closer to Hobbes’s than to Rousseau’s. They protected us against ‘factions’ and the tyranny of the majority and their watchword was common sense, both in Tom Paine’s title and in Thomas Reid’s entire intellectual program. As Hutcheson assumes a moral sense in man, Reid assumes a common sense. This is something like Kant’s categories, something that is prior to experience and makes the reaction to experience capable of being shared and broadly accepted. It is far more than the kind of aw-shucks ‘common sense’ exemplified by the talk around the general store checker board or cracker barrel. Reid’s common sense philosophy is a response to Hume’s skepticism (though there is a strong ‘common sense’ element in Hume, who always claims that his skepticism is something that disappears when he leaves his study and goes out into the everyday world of experience where one must act, choose and live).
Part of the book is devoted to the distinctions between the founders’ vision and our current realities. They were insistent that strong central governments must be kept in check and that the liberty of the people should be protected. They enumerate the specific powers of government but not the broad liberties of the people, their default position being, ‘when in doubt, the central government should relinquish powers to the states and the people’. We now live under a very different regime, one that the author laments. As in most books on the thought of the founders the reader comes away with new respect for their courage and, more particularly, their utter genius. These kinds of books always draw implicit comparisons between the leadership that we once enjoyed and that which we now experience. The author is also at pains to identify the landmarks that brought us to our current condition, principally the labors of Woodrow Wilson and FDR on centralizing power and, in the case of FDR, very cleverly altering the political nomenclature to cloak his actual goals.
This is an excellent little book, which I recommend highly. I only wish that he had gone into greater depth in elucidating the thought of Frances Hutcheson and Thomas Reid. The latter is seen by many as one of the truly great but truly underrated or even neglected philosophic thinkers in the west. Some of his thought (which even baffled Hume) is quite complex and requires greater exposition than he is able to receive here.
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