The Scottish Invention of America, Democracy and Human Rights
The Scottish Invention of America, Democracy and Human Rights is a history of liberty from 1300 BC to 2004 AD that traces the philosophy and fight for freedom from the ancient Celts to the medieval Scots to the Scottish Enlightenment to the creation of America. The authors contend that the roots of liberty originated in the radical political thought of the ancient Celts, the Scots’ struggles for freedom, John Duns Scotus and the Arbroath Declaration (1320), a tradition traceable through the writings of Scots Mair, Buchanan, Knox and Hutcheson and a tradition that influenced Locke and the English Whigs theorists and our Founding Fathers, particularly Jefferson, Madison, Wilson and Witherspoon. Thus, the work is a revolutionary alternative to the traditional Anglocentric view that freedom, democracy and human rights descended only from John Locke and England of the 1600s. The work is the first historical analysis to locate and document the origin of the doctrine of the “consent of the governedâ€Â
