The Enlightened Scot Who Inspired America’s Founders

America’s Revolutionary generation studied the works of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746)

(Wikimedia Commons)

By Samuel Gregg

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.

The year 1776 was a momentous one, and not just because of what Americans commemorate every July 4. On March 9 of that year, a book was published that changed the world forever: Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

We remember Smith’s book for launching economics as a distinct social science and as a new way of exploring reality that opened a window onto the underlying dynamics of commercially oriented societies. But in 1776, the few American colonists who might have read The Wealth of Nations were probably most impressed by the book’s concluding paragraphs.

Here Smith argued that the trade restrictions associated with the British mercantile system would become economically “oppressive and insupportable” for the American colonies as their economic development accelerated. In the long term, Smith believed, the colonies would decide that the restraints imposed on their trade outweighed the benefits of being part of the British Empire.

To that extent, The Wealth of Nations gave the American colonists a commercial rationale for becoming independent states.

But why would rebellious American colonists be interested in the economic reflections of a Scottish philosopher who had never visited and would never visit North America? The answer is that educated eighteenth-century Americans were intensely interested in all things Scottish.

THE FOUNDERS LOOK TO THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Colonial American educational institutions from New Hampshire to the Carolinas were dominated by Scottish ministers of religion. Such men were personified by the Reverend John Witherspoon, graduate of the University of Edinburgh, minister of the Church of Scotland, sixth president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Eighteenth-century Scotland produced many scholars from whom prominent American Revolutionaries absorbed the ideas of that movement of ideas which we call the Scottish Enlightenment. At the College of William and Mary, for instance, Thomas Jefferson was taught by William Small, a graduate of Marischal College, Aberdeen. In later life, Jefferson wrote that “Dr. Small was…to me a father. To his enlightened and affectionate guidance of my studies while at college, I am indebted to everything.”

Whether it was the philosophy articulated by Jefferson or the legal thought embraced and promoted by another signer, James Wilson (himself a Scot who probably attended Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence), Scottish Enlightenment thinkers provided both style and content to the Revolutionary generation. The men of 1776 read the sermons and lectures of enlightened Scots like the Reverend Hugh Blair—close friend of Smith and David Hume, chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, and Sunday preacher to Scotland’s burgeoning merchant class.

They were also familiar with Smith’s other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), throughout which we can find scattered intimations of the revolutionary book on economics that was to come. Indeed, one of the many distinctions of Smith’s Wealth of Nations is that it is the only book in George Washington’s library annotated in the general’s own hand.

THE RIGHT OF REBELLION

One Scot’s influence on the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence has been consistently underestimated. Francis Hutcheson is not an American or Scottish household name today. Born in Ireland to Scottish parents, Hutcheson was a Presbyterian minister who served as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1730 until his death in 1746. His most famous student was Adam Smith, who described his teacher in a letter as the “never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.”

Hutcheson’s writings were read carefully by America’s Revolutionary generation. In student notes penned in Philadelphia as early as 1759, for instance, we discover extensive citations from some of Hutcheson’s most important writings, especially his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy (1755). In these and other Hutchesonian texts are to be found ideas that underpinned the logic of the Declaration of Independence.

Drawing on Cicero, Hutcheson wrote on the idea of a moral sense “by which we perceive Virtue, or Vice in ourselves, or others,” and which inclines us to behave benevolently toward others. He also alerted his readers to the political and social changes proceeding from the rise of commerce throughout the European world. But Hutcheson’s most momentous contributions to eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse may well be his discussions of political order. Here, his articulation of the right of resistance features prominently.

Hutcheson had no illusions about the chaos and destruction that flowed from rebellion and efforts to crush it. During his lifetime, politically and religiously motivated rebellion had shattered the domestic peace of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Like everyone else at the time, Hutcheson also believed people had responsibilities that arose from custom, tradition, religious doctrine, and law.

Still, Hutcheson insisted on the right of rebellion—more precisely, people’s natural right to defend themselves against any form of private or public tyranny. Servants, he argued, may leave unjust masters. The subjects of monarchs may not be treated unjustly.

On this foundation, Hutcheson built the idea that colonists cannot be perpetually constrained to the mother country by obligations of gratitude or past agreements. It followed, he stated, that should the mother country impose “severe and absolute” power over its provinces, then the colonies were “not bound to continue in their subjection.” They “cannot be bound to sacrifice their own and their posterity’s liberty and happiness, to the ambitious views of their mother-country, while it can enjoy all rational happiness without subjection to it.”

Integral to Hutchesonian political doctrine was thus the principle that people had the right to resist a government’s excesses—and the right, if necessary, to replace such a political authority. Colonial subjects, Hutcheson said, were owed good government, and if their political masters oppressed them, they could justly overthrow their oppressors. In Hutcheson’s words, “The people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.”

Hutcheson’s claim that poorly governed colonies had the right to rebel was widely repeated throughout North America in the 1770s. His words were reprinted in places like Philadelphia, thus providing many patriots with an intellectual rationale for rebellion.

UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

There is another dimension to Hutcheson’s contribution to the Declaration, involving “the pursuit of happiness” and “unalienable rights.”

In his Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson linked the phrase “unalienable rights” to the right to resist tyranny. Thanks to Scottish clergymen and educators teaching and preaching throughout North America, this idea became embedded in many colonial curricula.

“Our rights,” Hutcheson wrote in A System of Moral Philosophy, “are either alienable or unalienable.” By “unalienable” he meant rights derived from human nature and inherent in all human beings. Our rights to our life and liberty, Hutcheson wrote, exemplify such rights. Other rights, however, he considered alienable. “Our right to our goods and labors is naturally alienable,” Hutcheson stated. We can alienate our rights to these things by selling them or giving them to others.

Hutcheson’s writings strongly influenced Thomas Jefferson. We know, for instance, that Jefferson held closely to Hutcheson’s moral sense doctrine. In one letter, Jefferson referred in Hutchesonian terms to “the moral sense, or conscience,” as being “as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”

Jefferson’s use of the phrase “unalienable rights” in the Declaration probably came from Hutcheson. After all, the Declaration does not list property as among its “certain unalienable rights.” Indeed, we need to be able to alienate our property if we are to participate in commercial life. That said, humans have an unalienable right to purchase, own, and engage in exchanges of property. Why? Because when we cannot freely own, use, and exchange property, it becomes nearly impossible to preserve our life and liberty, let alone pursue happiness.

Taken together, Hutcheson’s defense of the right of rebellion, his argument for the right of colonies to pursue independence from their mother country, and his articulation of the concept of unalienable rights amount to a heady mixture of ideas. So, too, does the Declaration of Independence. In fact, these three key Hutchesonian claims are integral to the Declaration’s distinctiveness and help endow the Declaration with its revolutionary character. For that alone, Francis Hutcheson, father of the Scottish Enlightenment, that greatest and most humane of Enlightenments, merits our attention today.

Samuel Gregg is the president and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.