Obama needs a history lesson

Barack Obama should learn a little more history before his next visit – history about America, that is, not Britain. “Our founding institutions were profoundly shaped by the English tradition,” he said outside No10 today. Not quite. It was profoundly shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment (see here for more) – and one of the great ironies of history is that America was moulded along Adam Smith’s lines while Scotland imported the disastrous ideas of the French Enlightenment which continue to dominate discourse today. The “answers” to society, argued Scots such as Smith, Adam Ferguson and Francis Hutcheson, are held by mankind in general – not by any elite purporting to represent “the people”. The best way to improve a country is for government to uphold a few laws, then get out of the way and let the people do the rest. Essentially, the  Scots Enlightenment stood for individual liberty and small government while the French one stood for power, and big government.