The American Revolution and Enlightenment Thought

Revolution, Constitution and Enlightenment The American Revolution and the ensuing U.S. Constitution put forward by the Federalists were both products of and directly informed by the European Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers were considerably influenced by thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu (whose separation of powers served as the model of the three-branched government of the U.S.). This paper will explain how the European Enlightenment set the stage for the American Revolution and U.S.

Constitution by putting out the ideas that the Americans would use as the basis of the political and social foundation. The Enlightenment aka the Age of Reason was an Age in which natural philosophy assumed the vaulted position of guiding light over the preceding Age of Faith, which had served as the socio-political basis in Europe for centuries.

The Reformation had upended the Age of Faith and introduced secularization into the political realm (Laux), particularly via the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to the Thirty Years War and established a mere political truce among the warring nations—without, it should be added, the consent of the Roman Pontiff (Holsti). Voltaire celebrated the Peace of Westphalia as a move towards secularism and the separation of church and state, which he himself advocated (Elliott)—and which the U.S.

would adopt as a political doctrine in the establishment of its Constitution—particularly in the First Amendment, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thus, there was a direct connection between Voltaire’s promotion of religions liberty (the separation of church and state in Europe) and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

As Cobbs shows, Jefferson was all for the protection of religious liberty—which he demonstrated in his proposal to protect religious freedom in 1786 (Cobbs). Even the Declaration of Independence was rooted in Enlightenment ideology. Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, for instance, wrote that people had the right “to change a government that did not protect natural rights of life, liberty and property” (“The Beginnings of Revolutionary Thinking”).

The Declaration of Independence stated explicitly that “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” (Declaration of Independence). Thus, Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were lifting the principles for their rebellion against the Crown right out of the philosophical assertions of John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher.

The English Crown was acting tyrannical, the Americans argued, in denying them the right to pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness on their own terms—and so they felt justified in overthrowing the English government in America—just as Locke argued people had the right to do whenever life, liberty and property were threatened by an authoritarian government.

Locke’s view of government was that it should serve to protect individual freedom and that the main law of nature was freedom (which is what Rousseau essentially said in The Social Contract as well). Locke refused to acknowledge the “divine right of kings”—and so too did the American Revolutionaries when they issued their Declaration of Independence. When it came to organizing their own government, the American Revolutionaries continued to turn to Enlightenment thinkers.

After all, they themselves were fully situated within the Age of Reason. Therefore, it only made sense that they would look to people like Montesquieu for guidance. For example, Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of Laws (1748) that “there can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person”—an idea that Hamilton expressed in the Federalist Papers, regarding the three branches of government—the legislative (Congress), the executive (the President), and the judicial (the courts).

Ironically, Jefferson disagreed (as did the Anti-Federalists, who voiced their concern that the U.S. Constitution and the federal, centralized government would usher in an era of tyranny like that which the Revolutionaries had just opposed in England, in spite of any so-called separation of powers). Jefferson was more direct in that he argued that the judicial branch of government would hold tyranny over the executive through its interpretation of the laws of the Constitution—which proved true enough in the Supreme Court ruling on Marbury v.

Madison in 1803, which established the principle of Judicial Review (Epstein). Jefferson lamented the decision and voiced his opposition to it—as he felt it went against the idea of liberty and the authority of the executive; however, the European Enlightenment was not without its own contradictions and instances of hypocrisy.

Voltaire, for instance, promoted the idea of religious freedom via the separation of church and state even though the religious wars of the Reformation Era had more to do with political struggles and land grabs (Holsti) than they did with actual ideologies, important primarily to the revolutionary religionists such as Luther, Calvin, Knox and Cranmer—and useful to those like Cromwell who sought to use the fighting factions to their own political advantage (Laux).

Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were sons of the Enlightenment—not of the Age of Faith, and so the doctrines and philosophies they used to support the framework for their new nation were distinctly naturalistic and borderline Romantic—as the philosophy of Rousseau certainly was with its insistence that man in his natural state was perfectly moral and upright and need only follow his most naturalistic inclinations and urges to be perfectly satisfied and happy.

Rousseau lamented the Old World order when he wrote in The Social Contract, “Man is born free and everywhere he is chains” (3). The idea that any ruler could lay claim over the life of another was anathema to Rousseau—and so the Founding Fathers also felt—at least so long as the life belonged to a white male. Slaves were not permitted their freedom—not for another century in America, at least.

Frederick Douglass would show as much in his autobiography, in which he illustrated how, even when white slave owners had children with their slave mistresses, the children were not viewed as equals or as free beings: children of slave mothers and slave owning fathers were “in the first place, a constant offense to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do anything to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash….” (Douglass 2-3).

But that was just one more instance of the type of hypocrisy that riddled Enlightenmnet thinking. Still, the Founding Fathers were not too worried about that. Like Rousseau, who believed that the only legitimate government was one that had the consent “of the people,” the Founding Fathers identified “the people” as ones like themselves—the property-owning, moneyed class—i.e., the aristocracy of the New World.

They refused to consent to the government of the King of England once they were nicely established in their respective colonies—and Rousseau provided the perfect philosophical cover for their rebellion. It certainly helped that Adam Smith had defined the type of economic system that would flourish in America in The Wealth of Nations, the same year the Founding Fathers were signing the Declaration of Independence.

Capitalism would be the economic system adopted in America, and Smith explained it in purely Enlightenment terms, though he also expected a degree of common sense and Christian virtue to still persist in regulating the avarice of industrialists and capitalists.

He was wrong to expect as much, but it is evident in his writings that he saw such modesty as necessary in order for capitalism to work, when he warned of the danger of monopolies in a capitalist economy: “The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate…Such enhancements of the market price [by monopolists] may last as long as the regulations of policy which give occasion to them” (Smith 57).

The Americans like the idea of a capitalist system, though they were not evidently too keen on Smith’s underscoring of the need to prevent monopolies, as some of the biggest barons of the industrial age were monopolists like J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller with Standard Oil (McNeese). The economic system of America was founded on the idea not only of separation of church and state but also the idea of separation of “us and them”—i.e., the separation of the haves and have-nots.

The haves were the original aristocrats (the Founding Fathers) and the have-nots were everyone else. This system was rooted in Enlightenment thinking, which was spawned by the rise of the aristocracy against the Church during the Reformation (Laux; Holsti). Essentially, the capitalist system in America was just a carry-over.

To get the world to go along with it, though, the relied on the master literary figure Ben Franklin to make it seem that anyone from anywhere could rise up to join the ranks of the aristocracy in America—because in America everyone was “free” and “equal” and “equal opportunity” lay waiting for one and all. This was the essence of the American Dream that would be promoted from the beginning.

Ben Franklin’s Autobiography laid the groundwork for that Dream—a dream in which all the ideals of the Enlightenment Age were possible and within reach: all one had to do was keep at it and literally anyone could make it to the top in America (Cobbs).

Of course, it helped if one became an influential diplomat in a major revolution the way Franklin was—but not everyone in America had the opportunity or skill set to achieve such, and so many in America found the American Dream to be elusive.

Enlightenment thinkers felt their own doctrines to be elusive in the end, too, however: the French Revolutionaries were mostly all guillotined in turn (Laux) and the revolution ushered in the Napoleonic Era, which saw the rise of one of the most authoritarian European leaders of the modern era threaten to take over the whole of the continent. The doctrines of the Enlightenment were thus largely myopic and limited to reading the world in a way that rejected the lessons the Old World had to give.

The Enlightenment ideology was by and large full of excuses that the revolutionaries of the modern era used to justify their rebellion. The Americans were no different. They found the U.S. on the principles of the Enlightenment, using the writings of everyone from Locke to Rousseau to Montesquieu to frame their new system and legitimize their stance.

Only Adam Smith was objective enough to admit that the new system would not end well for many unless those in charge regulated society through the application of Old World values and virtues. America was not interested in those, though: it ushered in the New World order—and every coin produced by the U.S. Mint still says so today. Summary To a major extent the American Revolution and the US Constitution were a product of, and informed by, the European Enlightenment.

The American Revolutionaries, from Thomas Jefferson to Ben Franklin to George Washington to Alexander Hamilton all relied upon the Enlightenment philosophers to justify their actions. The Declaration of Independence, signed by Founding Fathers, used the words and thoughts of John Locke to justify the Revolutionaries’ pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness and their right to overthrow the King of England since he refused to acknowledge their right to rule themselves as he saw fit. Such.