FAD - Intellectual Influence Lesson

Intellectual Influence

Intellectual Political Influence

Key Enlightenment Ideas: 1. Reason 2. Natural Law 3. Progress 4. Liberty 5. Toleration

 

Our Founding Fathers lived in a historical period known as the Enlightenment. Many European political thinkers

 held new ideas on how the relationship between the people and their government should work. These ideas became popular in the American colonies and leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison used these ideas to justify their opposition to the British government.

Influential Documents

Magna Carta (1215): Foundation for parliamentary government, established checks on the king's powers, asserted the right of due process of law.

The Petition of Rights (1628): Reminder that it was the law, not the king, that protected the rights of the people and defined specific liberties the king was prohibited from infringing.

English Bill of Rights (1689): Contained strict limits to the power of the monarchy and defined inalienable political and civil liberties of the people.

Brutus No. 1: adhered to popular democratic theory that emphasized the benefits of a small decentralized republic while warning of the dangers to personal liberty from a large, centralized government.

Key Political Thinkers

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651) John Locke: Second Treatise on Government (1689) Charles de Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Jean Jaques Kousseau: The SOical Contract (1762)

Social Contact Theory

The Founders knew that a government was needed to maintain order, protect property, and protect the "general welfare." Most of the governments of the time were monarchies that believed people only had the rights the King said they had. The Founders wanted something different and turned to the philosopher John Locke who had developed two important ideas. These were the ideas of Natural Rights and Social Contract Theory.

This idea behind the social contract theory is pretty simple:

  • Because we are alive, we have certain rights that no human can take away (Natural Rights)
  • We give up a little bit of those rights to allow the government to maintain order
  • In return, the government must protect our rights
  • If the government does not protect our rights, we as citizens have the right to change or get rid of our government.

Thomas Jefferson borrowed this idea for the Declaration of Independence. Putting aside the battles of the American Revolution, the real revolution in 1776 was taking these ideas and, for the first time in history, using them to start a new country.

Read the following excerpt of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.-- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Locke's Social Contract Theory is definitely evident in the above excerpt.

Now, read the last paragraph:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Remember that the people who signed this document were committing the crime of treason, a crime punishable by death!  They truly were putting everything on the line for this to work.

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