Vol. 2 No. 21 · 6 November 1980
page 14 | 2703 words
The Idea of America
Alasdair MacIntyre
- Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills
Athlone, 398 pp, £12.50, September 1980, ISBN 0 485 11201 9
Garry Wills has two distinct aims in this book. He wishes to demythologise American beliefs about the Declaration of Independence in order to discredit the view that the United States is founded upon an idea, upon a set of moral beliefs. In so doing, he is trying to refute, not only external commentators such as G.K. Chesterton, who wrote that ‘America is the only nation in the world founded upon a creed,’ but more importantly a central American tradition whose hero and spokesman is Lincoln. Lincoln is for Wills the prototype of the political moralist who is prepared to appeal to the Declaration against the status quo, even the constitutional status quo. From this moralism, so Wills believes, spring many of the evils that the United States, its aims sanctified in its own eyes by its high principles, has brought upon the world and itself. Yet it is, on Wills’s view, a moralism deeply alien to Jefferson’s own beliefs and intentions as embodied in his drafts of the Declaration.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 23 · 4 December 1980
From Donald MacRae
SIR: I have not yet read Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence – my health and my academic duties preventing me. But I have long thought, and been confirmed by over twenty years’ study, that the role of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ in the making of the mind of Thomas Jefferson and in the shaping of America’s constitutional establishment was far greater than any direct influence of either Locke or Montesquieu. That, however, is not why I write.
Professor MacIntyre (LRB, Vol. 2. No 21) may be right on many matters in his review of Wills. On two he is wrong. Hutcheson, we are told, ‘ closely … followed’ Hume. Now Hutcheson (1694-1746) published nothing of importance in his lifetime after An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions in 1728. Hume was. Cod knows, precocious. He was born in 1711. He asked Hutcheson for advice on the draft of A Treatise of Human Nature of 1734. Clearly something is wrong with Professor MacIntyre’s account. A.O. Lovejoy is perhaps now little read but whatever else it is about, there can be no history of ideas that neglects his methodological prescriptions and does not establish ‘intellectual pedigrees and inheritances’. Of course that is not all the enterprise may entail, but that it must involve. Wills cannot be at fault in this concern.
It is perhaps to cavil, given Hutcheson’s long commitment to the philosophical city of Glasgow, to add that he was an Ulsterman. To pursue that point would be to raise issues not pertinent to MacIntyre’s review, though necessary to our understanding of the Scottish mind in the 18th century.
Donald MacRae
London School of Economics
Vol. 3 No. 1 · 22 January 1981
From Alasdair MacIntyre
SIR: I am grateful to Professor Donald MacRae (LRB, Vol. 2, No 23) for drawing your readers’ attention to an error that appeared in my review of Garry Wills’s Inventing America. The words ‘how closely Hutcheson followed Hume’ should have read ‘how closely Hutcheson followed a line of argument that was to be made familiar by Hume’. The missing words remove the impression that either I or Garry Wills believe that Hume preceded Hutcheson. Unfortunately I had no opportunity to correct the proofs of the review.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
