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Declaration of Independence - Transatlantic Influence Viewpoint
The transatlantic influence viewpoint holds that the Declaration of Independence was not a purely American invention but the product of sustained intellectual exchange between the British colonies and European - particularly British and Scottish - political thought. Proponents argue that the Declaration's core philosophical architecture, including its language of natural rights, consent of the governed, and the right to revolution, was drawn substantially from transatlantic traditions that predated the founding, and that understanding the document requires situating it within that broader intellectual genealogy. This view is held by historians of ideas, intellectual historians of the Atlantic world, and scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Core Arguments
Lockean foundations. Advocates of this viewpoint argue that the Declaration's most famous passage - that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - is a direct appropriation and adaptation of John Locke's natural rights theory, particularly as developed in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Where Locke enumerated life, liberty, and estate (property), Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness,” a modification proponents trace to the Scottish Enlightenment's moral philosophy rather than to any distinctly American tradition.1)
Scottish Enlightenment transmission. A central pillar of this viewpoint is the role of Scottish moral philosophy in shaping revolutionary thought. Francis Hutcheson, the Glasgow philosopher, had articulated the language of unalienable rights and the moral calculus of resistance to tyranny decades before 1776. Proponents point to the direct influence of Hutcheson's A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) on Jefferson and other founders, arguing that the Declaration's ethical vocabulary is Hutchesonian as much as it is Lockean.2) David Hume's skeptical empiricism and Adam Ferguson's civic republicanism are also cited as shaping the intellectual climate in which revolutionary arguments became thinkable.
Commonwealthman and Whig traditions. Proponents further argue that the Declaration drew on the English republican tradition - the “commonwealthmen” or “Real Whigs” - whose writings circulated widely in colonial America. Thinkers including Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, and later John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (authors of Cato's Letters) provided colonists with a ready-made language of liberty, corruption, and legitimate resistance. This view holds that American revolutionaries saw themselves not as innovators but as defenders of an English constitutional inheritance being betrayed by the Crown.3)
Atlantic print culture. A more materialist strand of the viewpoint emphasizes the infrastructure of transatlantic exchange: the circulation of pamphlets, newspapers, and books across the Atlantic that made American readers contemporaries, not provincials, of European debate. Proponents argue that the founders were voracious readers of European political literature and that their ideas cannot be adequately explained without reference to that reading culture.4)
The “contagion of liberty.” Some proponents, following historian Bernard Bailyn, argue that the ideological exchange was not unidirectional. The American Revolution in turn radicalized British and European reformers - a feedback loop in which transatlantic influence flowed both ways. This version of the viewpoint frames the Declaration as a node in a broader Atlantic revolutionary network rather than as either a purely American document or a derivative European one.5)
History of the Viewpoint
The transatlantic influence interpretation has deep roots but gained systematic scholarly form in the mid-twentieth century. Caroline Robbins's The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959) mapped the transmission of Real Whig ideas into American political culture. Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) became the landmark work of this school, arguing from an extensive reading of colonial pamphlet literature that revolutionary ideology was saturated with the commonwealthman tradition.
Garry Wills's Inventing America (1978) pushed the argument further, contending that Jefferson's primary philosophical debt was to Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment rather than to Locke, a claim that proved controversial but forced sustained scholarly engagement with the Scottish dimension. David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007) extended the frame beyond the Atlantic to consider the document's worldwide reception and its place in a global tradition of declarations, while reinforcing the transatlantic context of its composition.
The viewpoint has also been advanced by historians of the “Atlantic world” school who emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, arguing for an integrated history of the societies bordering the Atlantic rather than separate national histories.
Notable Proponents
Bernard Bailyn (1922-2020) - Harvard historian whose The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution remains the foundational text of the transatlantic influence school. Bailyn's archival work on colonial pamphlets demonstrated the density of European political thought in American revolutionary argument.
Caroline Robbins (1903-1999) - British-American historian whose The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman traced the Real Whig tradition from the English Civil War through its American transmission, providing the intellectual genealogy on which later scholars built.
Garry Wills (b. 1934) - Journalist and historian whose Inventing America controversially foregrounded Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment, challenging the Lockean consensus and expanding the transatlantic frame.
David Armitage (b. 1965) - Harvard historian whose The Declaration of Independence: A Global History situated the document in both transatlantic and global intellectual contexts, extending the frame of influence beyond Britain and Scotland.
John Dunn (b. 1940) - Cambridge political theorist who traced Lockean transmission to America and contributed to the analytical literature on the Declaration's philosophical sources.
Internal Debates
Locke vs. Hutcheson. The most significant internal dispute concerns the relative weight of Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment. Wills's claim that Jefferson was primarily Hutchesonian rather than Lockean has been contested by scholars including Ronald Hamowy, who argued that Wills overstated the Scottish connection and understated the Lockean one.6) This debate remains unresolved and methodologically significant.
Derivation vs. transformation. Some proponents emphasize that the founders did not merely receive European ideas but transformed them - that the Declaration's synthesis and its application to a specific political crisis constituted something genuinely new even if the raw materials were European. Others in the school resist this qualification, arguing it concedes too much to American exceptionalism.
Atlantic world vs. British Atlantic. Some scholars argue that the relevant frame is specifically British and Scottish - that the French Enlightenment's influence on the Declaration has been overstated and that the document belongs to an Anglo-American tradition. Others argue for a broader Atlantic frame that includes Dutch republican thought, French natural law theory, and Swiss constitutional theory (particularly Emmerich de Vattel's The Law of Nations).