Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) - Influence in Colonial America

Influence in Colonial America

Norman Fiering, a specialist in the intellectual history of colonial New England, has described Francis Hutcheson as “probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century.” Hutcheson's early Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, introducing his perennial association of "unalienable rights" with the collective right to resist oppressive government, was used at Harvard College as a textbook as early as the 1730s. In 1761, Hutcheson was publicly endorsed in the annual semi-official Massachusetts Election Sermon as "an approved writer on ethics." Hutcheson's Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy was used as a textbook at the College of Philadelphia in the 1760s. Francis Alison, the professor of moral philosophy at the College of Philadelphia, was a former student of Hutcheson who closely followed Hutcheson’s thought. Alison's students included "a surprisingly large number of active, well-known patriots,” including three signers of the Declaration of Independence, who "learned their patriotic principles from Hutcheson and Alison.” Another signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), relied heavily on Hutcheson's views in his own lectures on moral philosophy. John Adams read Hutcheson's Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy shortly after graduating from Harvard. Garry Wills argued in 1978 that the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence was due largely to Hutcheson's influence, but Wills's work suffered a scathing rebuttal from Ronald Hamowy. Wills' view has been partially supported by Samuel Fleischacker, who agreed that it is "perfectly reasonable to see Hutcheson’s influence behind the appeals to sentiment that Jefferson put into his draft of the Declaration..."