America's Founding Secret: What the Scottish Enlightenment Taught Our Founding Fathers

In the history of America's founding, the names of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and other founding fathers loom large. But few Americans today would recognise the role played by such men as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, David Hume and other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. In this book, Robert W. Gavin, retired Chairman of the Board of Motorola, Inc. and one of America's most respected corporate leaders, reminds us of the fundamental debt that our founding fathers and this nation owe to this extraordinary group of Scottish thinkers. In the Scottish Enlightenment, America's founders themselves found the philosophical underpinnings for a government conceived and defined with the intent to promote economic progress in commerce based on private capital means. Concise and accessible, America's Founding Secret should change the way Americans look at their nation's beginning and remind us again of the fundamental connection between private enterprise and freedom that remains at the heart of the American experiment.