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September 4, 2011
The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding: Jefferson and Locke
by Robert Curry
Private Papers

It has frequently been remarked that Jefferson’s philosophy was thoroughly Lockean, and indeed he did rank Locke as one of ‘the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.’  But we must recall that this same Jefferson also called [Thomas] Reid’s disciple Dugald Stewart one of the two greatest philosophers of the age, even though Stewart made a career of attacking Locke for his theory of ideas. (Jeffry Morrison in John Witherspoon)

Prof. Morrison is a fine scholar whose work I very much admire. This quote is taken from his excellent book John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, a book I warmly recommend — and he states the situation accurately. It certainly has been frequently remarked that Jefferson’s philosophy was thoroughly Lockean, and Prof. Morrison is correct that Jefferson honored Locke and honored Stewart as described.

A problem arises only with the use Prof. Morrison makes of this passage. He sees a contradiction here and explains that the contradiction demonstrates that Jefferson the philosopher was “inconsistent,” a philosophical lightweight who could fail to notice obvious contradictions in his own thinking.

Actually, the fact that Jefferson honored Locke and Stewart in the way that he did was not a contradiction at all. In honoring Locke while honoring Stewart and, like Stewart, profoundly disagreeing with Locke, Jefferson was simply following a well-established tradition of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the words of Daniel Walker Howe “the Scots always honored Locke and considered themselves to be working within his tradition.” As Samuel Fleischacker writes:

Hutcheson, Hume and Smith all begin from Locke, if only to disagree with him, when they discuss property, the state of nature, the functions of government and the right to resistance [emphasis added].

The Scots and Jefferson disagreed with Locke on the fundamentals, the very matters Locke is best known for. Scottish philosophy during the Enlightenment was, to a very great extent, a sustained criticism of Locke, and Jefferson and the other thinkers of the American Enlightenment were masters-in-depth of that criticism of Locke.

Thomas Reid and his disciple Dugald Stewart were leaders of the common sense school of the Scottish Enlightenment. They argued that to assent to Locke was to surrender the very possibility of knowledge, and they dedicated their careers to showing how Locke had erred. Jefferson was with them all the way, yet he was always even closer in his thinking to Francis Hutcheson, the founder of the other major school of the Scottish Enlightenment, the moral sense school. Hutcheson believed that Locke’s argument destroyed the possibility of moral judgments, and his combat of Locke’s ideas set Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in motion.

Just because it has frequently been remarked that Jefferson’s philosophy was thoroughly Lockean does not make it so. Although Jefferson, like the Scots, honored Locke, it makes more sense to say that Jefferson was thoroughly critical of Locke than thoroughly Lockean.

Locke’s British Enlightenment gave rise to the Scottish Enlightenment which in turn profoundly shaped the American Enlightenment. Locke published his first Letters on Toleration in 1687. During the hundred years until 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, the Enlightenments in the English-speaking world made great strides forward — and by 1776 had already given us The Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence. To take it as a given that Jefferson was thoroughly Lockean is to skip from the first chapter of the Enlightenment directly to its glorious culmination, leaving out important developments that shaped the American Founding and made that ultimate chapter the great achievement  it was.