Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

Abstract

G ARRY Wills's study of the intellectual background to that most famous of all American political documents, the Declaration of Independence, is nothing short of revolutionary.' In what is surely the most ambitious effort to investigate the political philosophy underlying the Declaration since Carl Becker published his monograph in I922,2 Wills, with enormous ingenuity, has attempted a thorough reinterpretation of Jefferson's meaning as it emerges in the document. His thesis, simply put, is that there are really three Declarations: the Declaration as political document (the Declaration adopted by Congress); the Declaration as symbol of nationhood (the Declaration as a product of later reinterpretation); and the Declaration as philosophical treatise (the Declaration as written by Jefferson). The major emphasis of Wills's monograph, and that which provides the subtitle of his book, is on this third DeclarationJefferson's Declaration.3 The heart of his analysis the term is Wills's is his contention that, far from bearing the imprint of Lockean political theory, the Declaration, as Jefferson originally intended it, can be properly understood only if it is analyzed as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and that Jefferson's views on the nature of man and society derived not fromrJohn Locke's Two Treatises of Government but from the works of Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's system of moral philosophy particularly, Wills contends, contains the key to decoding the theory of the nature and proper functions of government embedded in the Declaration. To his central argument Wills attaches several others in defense of his theory of three Declarations: that the Declaration, to those who signed it, held none of the significance as a