A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Dr. Alexander Klieforth and Dr. Robert Munro put the case for a particular lineage for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the USA. This is a broth prepared in Scotland, not for an ancient power player, but by the peoples and the learned communities of Scotland from ancient traditions derived from kinship, shared authority, and an elective principle of rule. They argue for this being the critical force stimulating the creation of the USA on the basis of these beliefs, and not the Anglo-centric thesis, born by the Middle Temple of London out of Philadelphia, and the conventional wisdom of many historians.

The book is based on the thesis that the origin of the doctrine of 'consent of the governed' is found in the work of John Duns Scotus, circa 1265-1308, the Scholastic Theologian and Philosopher of the Friars Minor, the Franciscans, and is derived from 'Celtic' traditions of rule amongst the Scots. His work stimulated and led to the development of radical ideas amongst his followers, and their influence is profound down the succeeding centuries. From that time to the late 18th Century there is half a millennia of turbulence and change. 

Certainly, the Scottish Enlightenment, not only in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, but many others, impacted on a large number of Americans at the heart of the revolt against monarchy, on Thomas Jefferson, and through the Scottish connections of most of the draftees of the Declaration of Independence.

Tom Paine, born in Norfolk, was another mover and shaker in the American cause, but the Quaker faith of his father was rooted in the Anabaptist and Independent beliefs widespread in Europe, and his role is important for those who argue for an Anglo-Centric view. Norfolk, apparently a very English county, in the past had its fortunes, trade, and industry tied to the polities of their time across the North Sea and into the Baltic. There was a common intellectual heritage, as well as population movement. 

The county had similar links to the far north and the south of Britain. All these created a network of contacts, commerce, and clergy across great distances together with the exchange of ideas as much as goods and coin. History is often written as seen through a prism of the existing nation states and recent boundaries, with hindsight and peering through a murky fog of myth and propaganda. The geography of Western Christendom was different in the past. It is arguable that Anglo-centrism is wrong, not simply because it ignores the Scots and others, but as a reduction of the richness of the history of ideas.

The developing economic powerhouses of the Middle Ages into the 17th Century cut across the boundaries arranged in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Flanders, the Duchy of Burgundy, lands adjacent, states now absorbed into Germany, the North Italian Cities, and the ports of the Hanseatic League, all were entrepots not simply of trade but of learning and free men on the move. 

Gentry and the merchants needed legal contracts and mutual agreements, and a say in the decisions that mattered to them. Include the tradesmen and artisans, and there is a real currency in ideas and the belief in change. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were small entities, England through its economic motor of the Wool Trade, where it was easier and more secure to go from Norwich to Flanders and beyond than to Worcester overland. Agricultural improvements in Flanders and the Low Countries preceded those in England and Scotland. William Tyndale, whose English Bible had such an effect in the 16th Century, operated out of Antwerp, Cologne, and Hamburg.

Add the ideas of John Duns Scotus, that created an original and revolutionary dimension to the vision of government, and those of his successors, to this mixture in the ports and cities and the change unfolds. The Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter Reformation occur and then there is the destructive turmoil of the 17th Century across Europe giving impetus to alternative ideas of governance. 

In Scotland and England the revolt was against a Scottish dynasty, the Stuarts, whose improvidence and attachment to the Divine Right of Monarchy, derived from dependence on a French subsidy for a self-regarding elite, at last turned the majority away from their respect for Kingship as the basis of power.
Too much has been made of the 1215 Magna Carta of the Norman Ascendancy in England, agreed when Northern magnates were offering Northumbria to the King of Scots, while their cousins in the South negotiated with Prince Louis of France. The principles found in English Common Law are not unique, and that has mutated over the centuries. 

The adoption of John Locke as the agent of liberty omits the debates of the earlier 17th Century, and many forgotten men. One difficulty is that until the 19th Century writers had to avoid saying too much that was clearly new if they wanted to avoid death, imprisonment, or ridicule. It was necessary to have past authority, whether distant or fallible, to justify original thinking, and in Scotland they had to seek something Scottish.

For John Duns Scotus, how Scottish he was is an issue of debate, and it was not until 1328 that the present geographical entity of Scotland was defined with the partition of the old Northumbria in which Duns of Berwickshire lay. He studied at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, all major centres for those peripatetic scholars whose nation was Western Christendom, and based on a Church ruled by a Supreme Pontiff who was believed to be at the centre of the universe of the day. The wrangles in the Church over the rule of the Franciscan and other Orders, and the unending secular wars in Europe between the landed military elites and others around them, would have given him ample reason to think through the theological and moral basis of ruling and to be ruled in Christian States. In the Scots adoption of his ideas, regarding him as one of their own, they were not alone; they shared a larger heritage.

In the time before John Duns Scotus, the analysis of the past possible with recent scientific developments, the extensive archaeology of the last three decades and the removal of the weight of previous ideological imperatives means changed perspectives; 'Celts' becoming a shorthand for little known early peoples rather than an invading Master Race; but a more critical view of what we know about the nature of the pre-Roman past, and the early Dark Ages. Before the 7th Century we rely on outside sources for written comment and these are sketchy and owe more to propaganda and impression. 

The depopulation in the mid 6th Century leaves serious questions of who were left of the early peoples, and the nature of social organisation. Over the territories of Britain and Ireland there may have been years of tribal anarchy whose brutalities were dignified on behalf of the winners by later writers.
Perhaps it was more 'free' than before or after, and the leadership of persons or groups more transient and open to contest, but it is neither modern democracy nor happy peasants playing kiss in the ring. 

Later there are cohering elites forming a military supremacy, maybe through their control of technology, or accepting a hierarchic form of Christianity. When they become established over larger areas with enough powerful followers and with a religion where the after life is all that matters, then they can set aside, ignore, or prevent, the consent of others. 

The Scots Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, claims expulsis primo Britonibus et Pictis omnino deletis, which, however translated, gives a survivor of the 20th Century a queasy feeling. The references to Norwegians, Danes, and Angles, suggest that they were not welcome economic migrants. Also, it is addressed to a Pope then currently engaged on a Crusade against his local Jews, eliminating dissidents, conniving at the sale of heretics as slaves in Islam, and pursuing the fleeing scholar followers of John Duns Scotus.

In the longer beat of human history, the risings of the oppressed and misused recur, as do the climatic variations and volcanic eruptions that destabilised food supplies and societies. Where did the survivors of these events, and their beliefs travel? The transmission of ideas is difficult to assess or track across lands, peoples and time, even along the Silk Road from the East. Scotland was one small part of Christendom. After King James VI became King of England the Scots contribution was significant in the translation of ideas into the ideological language of the New World. 

How far the early history was critical in the late 18th Century through philosophers and historians such as David Hume is a debate worth having, and Dr. Kleifort and Dr. Munro make a telling and thoughtful contribution.

Reviewed by Thomas Knott
email: thk@britishlibrary.net