Abstract
It is now a commonplace in the study of the Scottish-American Enlightenment to note that the two greatest intellectual contributions of 1776 were Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation, and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the former proclaiming economic freedom and the latter political freedom in the broad sense. Indeed, the two works were closely related, not simply because they were published in the same year, but, much more significantly, because they symbolize the powerful intellectual relationship between Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution.
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Notes
Andrew S. Skinner, ‘Adam Smith and the American Economic Community’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 59–78;
Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonie, (1965), Chapter 2; Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay In Historiographic Revisio, (Cambridge, 1978), Chapter 7.
See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind In American Civilization, 1606–1865, 2 vols (New York, 1946) and the bibliographic references therein;
Michael J.L. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economics in the United State, (New York, 1944);
Paul K. Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economist, (Bloomington, In., 1980).
Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy In Jeffersonian Americ, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980);
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790, (New York, 1984);
Ralph Lerner, Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republi, (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolutio, (New York, 1978);
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independenc, (New York, 1978).
John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, ‘England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (April, 1954), 200–13.
Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Idea, (New York, 1971);
Andrew Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–183, (Glasgow, 1975);
William R. Brock, SCOTUS AMERICANUS: A survey of the sources for links between Scotland and America in the eighteenth centur, (Edinburgh, 1982);
Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Heritage of the Constitutional Era: The Delegates’ Librar, (Philadelphia, 1986), 45–52;
Mark Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search For A Christian Enlightenment In The Era of Samuel Stanhope Smit, (Princeton, NJ, 1989);
Richard Sher and Jeffrey Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenmen, (Edinburgh, 1990).
Samuel Miller, Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (New York, 1803);
James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilto, (New York, 1875);
I. Woodbridge Riley, American Philosophy: The Early School, (New York, 1907), 475–563;
Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosoph, (New York, 1946), 33–250 (the quotation is from 246);
Wilson Smith, Professors & Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers Philosophers before the Civil Wa, (Ithaca, NY, 1956);
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, ‘Scottish Philosophy and American Theology’, Church History, 24, 3 (September 1955), 257–72;
Daniel W. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1806–186, (Cambridge, Mass., 1970);
Donald H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethi, (Philadelphia, 1972);
Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenmen, (New York, 1976);
Henry May, The Enlightenment in Americ, (New York, 1976);
Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphy, A History of American Philosophy, Volume I, (New York, 1977), 203–361;
Norman Fiering, ‘Moral Philosophy in America, 1650–1750, and Its British Context’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University, 1969);
Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy At Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transitio, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981);
Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Contex, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981).
Edward S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stile, (New Haven, Conn., 1962);
Louis L. Tucker, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale Colleg, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962);
Albert F. Gegenheimer, William Smith, Educator and Churchman, 1727–180, (Philadelphia, 1943);
Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, 2 vols (Princeton, 1925);
Roger J. Fechner, ‘John Witherspoon and the Scottish-American Enlightenment’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Iowa, 1974);
Joseph Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–177, (New Haven, Conn., 1973);
Elizabeth P. McCaughey, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnso, (New York, 1980);
James D. Casteel, ‘Professors And Applied Ethics: Higher Education In A Revolutionary Era, 1750–1800’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1964).
David Lundberg and Henry F. May, ‘The Enlightened Reader in America’, American Quarterly, 28, 2 (Summer, 1976), 267–71.
On Franklin see Paul W. Conner, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Orde, (New York, 1965), 69, 151, 237;
on Adams see Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams & the Prophets of Progres, (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 168–9;
Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Natur, (Baltimore, 1961), 197–208;
Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton And The Idea Of Republican Governmen, (Stanford, Calif., 1970), Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, op. cit., 161–3, 178–80;
Roy Branson, ‘James Madison And The Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 235–50;
David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1956–57), 343–60.
John Witherspoon, An Annotated Edition o, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’, edited by Jack Scott (Newark, Del., 1982), 189–203;
David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College In The Era Of The American Revolution, 1750–180, (Westport, Conn., 1985), 168.
On Hutcheson and Alison see David Fate Norton, ‘Francis Hutcheson in America’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Centur, (Oxford, 1976);
20a. Sloan, op. cit., 73–102. On Hutcheson, Alison and Witherspoon see James L. McAllister, Jr, ‘Francis Alison and John Witherspoon: Political Philosophers and Revolutionaries’, Journal of Presbyterian History, 54 (Spring, 1976), 33–60.
On Witherspoon see Sloan, op. cit., 103–45; Scott, op. cit., passim, McAllister, ‘John Witherspoon: Academic Advocate for American Freedom’, in A Miscellany of American Christianity: Essays in Honor of H. Shelton Smith, edited by Stuart C. Henry (Durham, NC, 1963), 183–224;
D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, ‘Introduction’, to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiment, (Oxford, 1976), 25–33.
On Hutcheson and Jefferson, see Wills, op. cit., passim, On Hutcheson and Madison, mediated through Witherspoon, see James H. Smylie, ‘Madison and Witherspoon: Theological Roots of American Political Thought’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 22, 3 (Spring, 1961), 118–32.
For a brilliant discussion of Smith’s political ideas, especially compared to Hutcheson’s, see Winch, Politics, op. cit., 46–69. On Smith’s politics, see also Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthma, (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 196–99.
On Hutcheson’s political thought see Robbins, Commonwealthman, op. cit., 185–96, and Robbins, ‘“When It Is That Colonies May Turn Independent”: An Analysis Of The Environment And Politics Of Francis Hutcheson’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (April, 1954), 214–51. On republican American revolutionary ideology see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the America, (Cambridge, Mass., 1967);
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–178, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968);
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Traditio, (Princeton, 1975), 506–52. On Alison and Witherspoon see the references in note 20 above. Robson provides ample evidence of the direct relationship of the political ideas of the American academic moralists and their revolutionary political activities and the impact of both on the politics of their students.
This central interpretive theme runs throughout May, op. cit., but see especially 342–343. On the relationship of Hume and Smith to the Moderate Literati see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati Of Edinburg, (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
Donald Meyer, ‘The Uniqueness Of The American Enlightenment’, American Quarterly, 28, 2 (Summer, 1976), 165–86, but especially 185.
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© 1993 Hiroshi Mizuta and Chuhei Sugiyama
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Fechner, R.J. (1993). Adam Smith and American Academic Moral Philosophers and Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. In: Mizuta, H., Sugiyama, C. (eds) Adam Smith: International Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22520-0_9
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