The Scottish Invention of America, Democracy and Human Rights: The History of Liberty and Freedom from the Ancient Celts to the New Millennium (review)

Klieforth and Munro set out with an overly ambitious agenda—to prove that Scotland is the source of human rights and democracy. They have produced a work in three parts supported by a substantial chronology. Part one (chapters one to twenty) establishes the Celts and Scots before 1776 as the origins of the concepts of human liberty, freedom and democracy. Part two (chapters twenty-one to twenty-seven) traces how Scottish ideas led to the creation of American independence and democracy. Part three (chapters twenty-eight to thirty-five) shows how Scottish and American ideas have culminated in an age of human rights. These are momentous topics that deserve serious academic treatment in several well-documented volumes, but alas, this single volume does not provide such treatment, rather it adds to a worrisome trend—treating Scottish history as the preserve of enthusiasts who ignore the rigours of scholastic argument.

The book suffers from a number of substantial problems. Its first eighteen chapters of nearly 200 pages rest upon the authority of a mere thirty-two footnotes. In the last seventeen chapters the number of citations increase, but only because the authors cut and paste directly from secondary sources, with that material accounting for at least a fourth of the words on pp.197-318. The situation is particularly offensive for parts two and three of the book, where they cite many individuals, such as James Madison and James Wilson, but use secondary sources when the original texts could serve as the foundation for fresh critical synthesis and insightful analysis. The authors exhibit no familiarity with the primary texts, which they do quote, but they cite these almost entirely from secondary sources. The chronology runs for fifty pages and accounts for nearly a hundred of the 521 notes. Its eclectic approach, (including birth and death dates for Scottish artists), errors (such as the establishment of the Scots Guards in 1642 and a Jacobite rebellion in 1708), and a lack of entries to sustain the Celtic origins of political liberalism makes its less than useful. The choice of continuous enumerated endnotes is idiosyncratic, but less worrisome than the reliance on single sources for significant passages (for example notes 14-19, 99-109, 166-71, 275-86, 295-304 and 340-57). Chapter 20 largely contains potted biographies of Enlightenment Scots, including some with no connection to the world of ideas or politics.

There are a number of particular problems with some of the book's assertions. For example, the authors' argument (chapters twenty-one to twenty-five) that Thomas Jefferson drew from pre-Enlightenment Scottish ideas for the Declaration of Independence is dealt with in a questionable manner. His teacher the Rev. Douglas was an Anglican, who would have found the political thought of Knox, Buchanan and the seventeenth-century Presbyterians abhorrent, and is unlikely to have instilled him with an appreciation of Scottish constitutionalism. Their claim (p. 243) that William Small, his favourite university lecturer, inculcated Jefferson with the ideas of the Arbroath Declaration is nothing less than an unsubstantiated assertion. They overlook Jefferson's pejorative view of Scots, exemplified by his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, which condemned George III for using 'large armies of Scotch and other mercenaries' against the rebellious Americans. This is hardly surprising since most of the American elite viewed itself as English.

The case that Scottish political documents and ideas, earlier than those of the Enlightenment philosophers, influenced the United States' Declaration of Independence remains 'not proven'. A number...