Enlightenment Roots of the American Revolution and Constitution

Introduction: The Enlightenment as Foundation

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 for the three-branched government of the United States. This paper explains how the European Enlightenment set the stage for the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution by advancing the ideas that Americans would use as the basis of their political and social foundation.

The Enlightenment — also known as the Age of Reason — was an era 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 political truce among the warring nations — without, it should be noted, the consent of the Roman Pontiff (Holsti).

Religious Liberty, Voltaire, and the First Amendment

Voltaire celebrated the Peace of Westphalia as a move toward secularism and the separation of church and state, which he himself advocated (Elliott) — and which the United States 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." There was thus a direct connection between Voltaire's promotion of religious liberty and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As Cobbs shows, Jefferson was strongly committed to the protection of religious liberty, which he demonstrated in his proposal to protect religious freedom in 1786 (Cobbs).

The religious wars of the Reformation Era, it should be acknowledged, had as much to do with political struggles and land grabs (Holsti) as they did with actual theological ideologies — ideologies that were important primarily to revolutionary religionists such as Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Cranmer, and useful to figures like Cromwell who sought to exploit the fighting factions for their own political advantage (Laux). Voltaire's promotion of religious freedom was therefore itself not without irony, yet its influence on the American constitutional framework was undeniable.

Locke, Natural Rights, and the Declaration of Independence

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).

Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were thus lifting the principles for their rebellion against the Crown directly from the philosophical assertions of John Locke. The English Crown was acting tyrannically, 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 English rule 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 fundamental law of nature was freedom — a position Rousseau essentially echoed in The Social Contract. Locke refused to acknowledge the "divine right of kings" — and so too did the American Revolutionaries when they issued their Declaration of Independence.

Conclusion: The Enlightenment Legacy and Its Contradictions

To a major extent, the American Revolution and the U.S. 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 Enlightenment philosophers to justify their actions. The Declaration of Independence 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, who refused to acknowledge their right to govern themselves. Such rebellion would never have been tolerated in the Old World during the Age of Faith; it would have been suppressed, and those advocating for freedom would have been ignored by other nations, since Europe during the Age of Faith was essentially united in ideology.

By the time of the Enlightenment, Europe was fractured and fragmented, and alliances and periods of peace were purely political in nature. Thus, when the American Revolutionaries rebelled against the Crown, it was not difficult for them — thanks largely to Franklin's diplomatic efforts — to win support from the French against the English. Rousseau, a major French Enlightenment philosopher, lent weight to the Americans' argument that their cause was just because it opposed tyranny and proclaimed equality and natural philosophy.

Enlightenment thinkers ultimately found their own doctrines elusive, however. The French Revolutionaries were mostly 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. The doctrines of the Enlightenment were thus largely myopic, limited to reading the world in a way that rejected the lessons the Old World had to offer. Enlightenment ideology was by and large a collection of justifications that the revolutionaries of the modern era used to legitimize their rebellion.

The Americans were no different. They founded the United States on the principles of the Enlightenment, using the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others to frame their new system and legitimize their position. The truth was that the Americans were not genuinely interested in universal equality but rather in consolidating their own power as the aristocratic ruling class of the New World. Their government would be by and for them — though their writings proclaimed it would be by and for the people. In reality, as Douglass showed clearly enough, they were the only "people" that counted. Only Adam Smith was candid enough to acknowledge that the new system would not end well for many unless those in charge moderated it through the application of older values and virtues. America was not interested in those restraints, however. It ushered in the New World order — and every coin produced by the U.S. Mint still says so today.

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