Common Sense Nation. Robert Curry

among the Founders.

      This fundamental agreement is a matter of the utmost importance. In the words of Thomas West in his brilliant essay “The Universal Principles of the American Founding”:

      “One of the striking things about the leading men [of the American Founding] is how different they were in their particular preoccupations, and yet how much they agreed on principles.”

      How different our history might have been if there had been a significant party among the Founders committed to the ideas of the French Enlightenment. It was our great good fortune that there was not.

      THE FOUNDING

       “The Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing, the forms of government under which they shall live.”

      —JOHN JAY

      The great political writings of the American Enlightenment—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers—are quite properly included in collections of Enlightenment writings. They are among the greatest works of the Enlightenment era. Yet even Americans who are interested in American history usually do not see them as having anything to do with the Enlightenment.

      How did this happen?

      Although the Enlightenment began in England, with the passage of time the French Enlightenment gained prominence, eventually eclipsing all of the other developments in the Enlightenment era. More and more, the French Enlightenment came to be identified with the Enlightenment itself. As a result, generalizations about the Enlightenment today all too often end up actually being generalizations about the French Enlightenment.

      It is easy to find examples of even those who should know better falling victim to this tendency. The Portable Enlightenment Reader is an excellent collection of writings of the Enlightenment era. In his introduction to the book, the editor, Isaac Kramnick, writes: “The Enlightenment was an international movement that included French, English, Scottish, American, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Russian schools.” On the very next page he also writes: “What was the message of these Enlightenment intellectuals? . . . They believed that unassisted human reason, not faith or tradition, was the principle guide to human conduct.” This is a perfectly fair characterization of the French Enlightenment, which the noted scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb aptly calls “the ideology of reason.” However, as for the Scottish and the American Enlightenments, it completely misses the mark.

      The Founders did not believe that unassisted human reason was the principle guide to human conduct, nor did the Scots. For the Founders and for the Scots, human reason is able to function as a guide to human conduct only when grounded in the moral sense. For example, here is Thomas Jefferson on this subject:

      “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

      In precisely the same way, they believed reason can provide knowledge and human understanding only when reason is grounded in common sense.

      Because they did not assign primacy to unassisted human reason, the Founders do not fit the prevailing image of Enlightenment thinkers. The Founders were not like the French philosophes, and the philosophes are now the very models of the Enlightenment.

      Yet it seems to me that there is another reason why Americans today tend not to recognize The Federalist Papers, for example, as a classic of the Enlightenment. It is not for us a curious antique document that is marooned in that era in the remote past. The French remember the French Enlightenment, but no one today reads the Encyclopédie, the work that symbolized the French Enlightenment. The philosophes of the Enlightenment era have been displaced many times over by new fashions in French thought—romanticism, socialism, existentialism, postmodernism—but The Federalist Papers continues to play a living part in the political and intellectual life of our republic today.

      It is also true that the Founders did not labor to draw out for us the connections and the differences between their thinking and the thinking of others of the Enlightenment era. Had they very carefully done so for us there would be little need for this book, but they had more urgent and important tasks.

      Jay was one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and the first Chief Justice of the United States. He, like the other Founders, was not concerned to trace for us the philosophical background of the Founding. The Founders were in the act of creation. They were focused on the great task before them, the urgent challenge and enormous opportunity of founding a republic that would not fail, as Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic had, but would survive to reach our own time and beyond.

      Consequently, the Founding can be thought of as a kind of historical Big Bang, the brilliance of which eclipses its antecedents, obscuring even the American Enlightenment itself. Not guessing that we would eventually lose sight of the American Enlightenment, and therefore of the debt the American Enlightenment owed to the thinkers of Scottish Enlightenment, the Founders cannot be faulted for keeping their focus instead on making clear to us what they had given us: as Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

       TWO

       The American Enlightenment

       “. . . America was the embodiment and natural home of the Enlightenment . . .”

      —ISAAC KRAMNICK, THE ENLIGHTENMENT READER

      UNDERSTANDING JEFFERSON

       “Man was destined for society . . . He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree . . . It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock [amount] which is required for this.”

      —THOMAS JEFFERSON

      This passage is taken from a letter to his nephew written in 1787, and repeated almost verbatim in a letter to John Adams twenty-eight years later. Here, in the language of Francis Hutcheson, the founder of Scottish moral sense philosophy, Jefferson presents the theory of human nature according to the Scottish and the American Enlightenments: man the social being, endowed with a moral sense and unalienable rights.

      The emphasis on the moral sense, and also common sense, sharply distinguish both the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment from the Enlightenment in France. As the Jefferson passage illustrates, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment gave the Founders many of the ideas and the arguments they needed for the great task of the Founding.

      The American Enlightenment was driven forward by a focus on the theory and practice of political liberty. With the exception of the scientific and technological achievements of Benjamin Franklin, the great works of the American Enlightenment are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. In articulating the principles and fashioning the institutions that would sustain the new republic, Jefferson and the other Founders made for themselves a place of honor among the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment era.

      TWO VISIONS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

       “Fontenelle