In a wealth of texts produced during the second half of the 1700s, the significant thinkers of the previous centuries, and previous millennia, contributed concepts about government and civic virtue. The names of those thinkers form a list which looks like a good syllabus for a class in the history of civilization.
Starting with Hammurabi and Moses, the list includes the writers of Greco-Roman classicism, the medievals, and the Renaissance thinkers. A synthesis and distillation of those works was produced by the political thinkers of the Enlightenment, including those in North America.
The work of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith rested upon foundations laid by Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, and dozens of others. All of which led to Thomas Paine, Sam Adams, James Otis, and Patrick Henry.
The courageous authors of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were educated in both ancient and modern history, and among them were those who could read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Italian, and French.
Having mined the world’s classics for ideas, these authors set about fitting them intricately together. The political tradition of the Enlightenment was based upon abstract reasoning about human nature, and rational reflection about the nature of human intelligence. The result fit together well, sometimes congruing and sometimes complimenting the spiritual treasures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as scholar Harvey Cox writes:
In the United States, there was a combination of biblical Christianity and of Enlightenment virtue. So you have in the early founding documents the famous phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (an Enlightenment phrase) “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (a religious phrase). This constituted a wedding of two not completely separate traditions, because some of the founding fathers were mild Calvinists with Enlightenment leanings, some were stricter Calvinists, and others were Episcopalians.
Thus it was that Thomas Paine, who rejected most or all forms of organized religion in favor of a rationalist deistic concept of God, was part of the same movement as the passionately spiritual George Washington.
The phrases and ideas woven together in the founding documents of the United States, as well as in the tracts and pamphlets which surrounded them, appeal to the rationalist and the mystic, the cynic and the idealist, the Jew and the Christian, the deist and the pietist.
Together, the texts which gave birth to the American Revolution, composed during the second half of the eighteenth century, form a catalogue or compendium of civic thought spanning five millennia. To understand the documents of the American Revolution is to survey political philosophy from its earliest moments onward.
