The Other Document Of 1776

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Most Americans can recite the opening lines of one of the two great documents published in 1776.

They cannot name the other.

In Philadelphia that summer, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues declared that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights — among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The document they produced became the founding scripture of American political life. It is read aloud every July 4th. Schoolchildren memorize it. Presidents invoke it. (RELATED: The Sacred Call Of Every American Generation)

Three thousand miles away, on March 9th of that same year, a Scottish moral philosopher named Adam Smith published a book called “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” It was, in its own way, equally revolutionary.

Where Jefferson articulated the case for political liberty, Smith articulated the case for economic liberty. Where Jefferson argued that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, Smith argued that economies derive their productive power from the choices of free individuals. (RELATED: An Old Insult Still On The Books)

Two documents. One year. A common argument about freedom, political and economic.

The coincidence is almost too neat — except that it wasn’t really a coincidence at all. Both men were children of the Enlightenment, breathing the same intellectual air, drawing on the same tradition of natural rights and individual dignity.

There is no record that Jefferson and Smith ever met or corresponded — yet Jefferson would later call the Wealth of Nations “the best book extant” on political economy. Smith’s book appeared in March; Jefferson’s Declaration followed in July. Four months apart, an ocean apart, and yet arriving at the same fundamental conclusion: that the individual, not the state, is the proper author of a free life.

For a time, Americans held both inheritances together. Political freedom and economic freedom were understood as inseparable — two expressions of the same underlying conviction that individuals, not institutions, were the proper authors of their own lives.

Today, Jefferson’s document is celebrated with fireworks and parades. Smith’s is taught in economics departments, argued about in policy journals and increasingly treated as a relic of a simpler age — useful perhaps as a historical artifact, but inadequate to the complex challenges of........

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