Common Sense Nation. Robert Curry

is also the reason for the Founders’ emphasis on the importance of education. Each of us must get the education necessary to become an American citizen. Here is Lincoln again: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

      The bad news is that we were not taught the Founders’ ideas or the language of the Founders when we were in the school room. If we had been, then you and I would always have been ready to answer questions from a foreign visitor about Jefferson’s immortal words in the Declaration with the greatest of ease.

      That is why you want to read this book.

      The good news is that understanding the language of the Founders and the ideas of the Founders is not difficult—and the rewards are great. Once you understand their thinking, all of the pieces will fit together. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will open themselves to your understanding.

      The Founders intended it to be so. They meant for us to understand the American idea. That is one of the reasons the Declaration and the Constitution are so brief that a citizen can carry both of them printed together in a small, slim copy that slips easily into a shirt pocket. Armed with a good understanding of the American idea, the Declaration and the Constitution become our guidebooks for carrying out our responsibilities as American citizens.

      This brief book is not intended for the scholar, but for the intelligent citizen who simply wants to understand the Founders.

      In what follows, we will consider the Declaration’s immortal statement of the principles of the Founders as well as other statements by the Founders in order to learn how they fit together, to discover the pattern of ideas that connects them. We will also examine some well-known comments about what the Founders meant from more recent times.

      So this brief book does not focus on the obscure, but instead, for the most part, on the very familiar. In that sense, it only skims the surface, but it aims to do so in a way that reveals the depths.

      If reading this little book quickens your interest to learn more, there is a wealth of fascinating material—and this book can get you oriented to make sense of whatever you choose to read.

      If on the other hand, you simply want the maximum of understanding in the minimum of pages, then this is the book for you.

       Introduction

      As you know, the American Founders claimed they were guided by self-evident truths, truths “no sooner understood than they are believed” because they “carry the light of truth itself.”

      In order to understand the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we need to begin with the fact that the Founders’ understanding of self-evident truth was based on the work of a Scottish philosopher named Thomas Reid. Reid was the founder of common sense realism, referred to by Prof. Arthur Herman on the page of quotes above.

      Self-evident truths are the foundation of common sense realism, and they are a key to understanding the thinking of America’s Founders.

      America was truly blessed by the wisdom of the Founders.

      So remarkable are the Founders that many Americans believe Providence was at work in America’s Founding. The evidence for that belief abounds. Washington was again and again miraculously protected from harm in battle. The illegitimate, orphaned Hamilton was whisked from obscurity on a remote Caribbean island to serve brilliantly at Washington’s side in the war, at Yorktown and in the first administration as Treasury Secretary. These are just two examples in the marvelous chronicles of the gathering of the Founders. No wonder Washington believed Divine Providence had guided events.

      The greatness of the Founding goes far beyond that awe-inspiring assembly of men. In designing the government and envisioning the nation, the Founders were quite consciously relying on and working with a well-considered set of arguments and ideas, arguments and ideas that were grounded in a new and profound understanding of human nature. The success of America’s Founding was the result of the ideas that guided those men, as well as the greatness of the men who relied on those ideas.

      Today in America, the greatness of the Founders has not been completely forgotten, but we have, for the most part, lost sight of the ideas that guided their deliberations. Many Americans believe what every schoolboy and every schoolgirl believes: the Founders took the ideas they used for the Founding from John Locke. Although it is widely believed, this version of the story of America stops short of the developments that made the Founding what it was. To understand the Founders’ thinking, we must understand the American Enlightenment.

      An American Enlightenment? The very idea may seem to you to be a surprising one. Wasn’t the Enlightenment about the ideas of the French philosopher Voltaire and his followers? And aren’t we told the Founders were basically down-to-earth, practical men of simple good sense? After all, the widely admired French commentator on America, Alexis de Tocqueville, famously wrote in 1831 that Americans were not interested in theoretical pursuits:

      “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

      Books on America written in our day frequently quote these words of Tocqueville as if they represent the authoritative final judgment on American thought in the early period of the nation. But is it true that the Founders merely took what ideas they needed from Locke, and little more needs to be said about American thought during the Founders’ era?

      As will become clear, there was an American Enlightenment, and understanding it provides the key to unlocking many mysteries, mysteries in the era of the American Founding, in American Constitutional history up until the present and even in the direct antecedents of the Founding reaching back to the sixteenth century.

      In broad outline, the story is easy to follow.

      John Locke established the foundation for political thought at the beginning of the Enlightenment era. So great was Locke’s influence that in terms of politics the Enlightenment era could be called the Age of Locke. Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 overthrew the last Stuart king and put an end to the Stuarts’ claim to unlimited royal sovereignty by divine right. Locke championed the Glorious Revolution and the right of revolution. He also made the case for limits on government power and for the consent of the governed.

      Despite the importance of Locke’s political thinking, he had a divided legacy. During the Enlightenment era, America and France each had their own revolutions, but neither resembled the British revolution of 1688. The French got political chaos, the blood-drenched time of the Terror, and soon reverted to tyranny again, this time under Napoleon. America got something new in the political history of humankind.

      In the realm of political theory, France began by proceeding directly from Locke, or at least Voltaire believed he did. Voltaire was inspired by Locke (“never, perhaps, has a wiser, more methodical mind existed than Mr. Locke”) and Sir Isaac Newton (a genius “the like of which has scarcely appeared in ten centuries”). From the example of Locke and Newton, Voltaire drew the conclusion that unassisted human reason could provide humanity with the answers to every question. He believed he was introducing English ways into France, starting with his English Letters in 1734 then setting to work on his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. However, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and his French colleagues quickly took a radically different direction, perhaps a characteristically French one, certainly not an English one.

      America’s revolution too had a very different outcome than Britain’s Glorious Revolution. The political thinking of the Founders had taken them beyond the ideas of the Glorious Revolution. The Americans were able to create political structure anew because they were thinking anew about mankind and the state.

      That new thinking about mankind and the state is what the American Enlightenment is all about. The American Founding that resulted is still today the most radical attempt to establish a regime of liberty in the entire history of mankind.