The Scottish Crucible
from Founding Fictions
This episode of "Founding Fictions" challenges the myth that America's founding ideals were a simple inheritance from English thinkers like John Locke. Instead, it reveals the overwhelmingly Scottish roots of the revolution, tracing two powerful streams that converged in the colonies. The first is the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid), which provided a new language for virtue and the "pursuit of happiness." The second is a centuries-old theological tradition of radical rebellion (Samuel Rutherford), which supplied the moral and religious duty to resist tyranny. Discover how these two streams were carried to America and fused by key figures like John Witherspoon and James Wilson, forming the true ideological DNA of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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