Over the past half century or so, there has been an outpouring of literature on the many ways in which Scottish thinkers influenced America in the period of the founding. For social and cultural historians, this literature has meant a deeper understanding of the 'outlying provinces' of the British Empire; for historians of ideas, it has meant a better understanding of the reception of Scottish thought in its time; and for political theorists, it has inspired a reinterpretation of the political vision represented by the founding of the American republic.

As a political philosopher, I am primarily interested in this last project. The Scottish influence has been used to counter an earlier picture of the founders, according to which they were putting into practice the natural-rights theories, and concomitant radical individualism, to be found in Hobbes and Locke. So the debate between the Scottish and the Hobbesian-Lockean view of the founders is part of a larger controversy over whether the political philosophy expressed in the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution is primarily a ‘liberal’ or a ‘civic republican’ one. Like most scholars who attend to the role of the Scots, I agree that the Hobbes-Locke picture, still very common in schools and popular literature, is badly misleading.