At Lexington and Concord, “The shot heard 'round the world” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) on April 19, 1775, marked the outbreak of the American Revolution. A year later, the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The Battle of Yorktown (with significant help on land and sea from France) concluded on October 19, 1781. The new nation's framework was set when the American Constitution was officially ratified on June 21, 1788. Let’s look at a few of the many ancient and modern authors who helped set this in motion. It’s a huge always evolving story that shows how words lead to actions of the most momentous kind…
Portrait of a philosopher, as a type, but maybe Plutarch or Plotinus, 2nd century AD. Archaeological Museum of Delphi. (Zde/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Plutarch: Truth as Character & Virtues
In the new biopic at the cinema Young Washington, Lawrence Washington gives his younger brother George some classics such as Plutarch to teach him virtue and leadership. But who was this ancient author? Whether through direct reading or the era's vibrant oral culture, Plutarch's work survived the centuries to deeply inspire the Founding Fathers.
Plutarch (around 46 – 119 CE) was an ancient Greek biographer and philosopher, born to a wealthy aristocratic family in the town of Chaeronea in the vicinity of the Oracle of Delphi during the era of Roman dominance. Because of his family's fortune, he enjoyed an elite wide-ranging education in Athens. As classicist Paul Cartledge noted on the BBC program In Our Time: Plutarch:
“Plutarch was a Platonist. He went to Athens, he studied at the Academy. He's very pro-Plato, pro-Aristotle - what we would call a Middle Platonist. But he is fiercely anti-Stoic, and absolutely, venomously anti-Epicurean.”
Plutarch’s wealth allowed him to traverse the ancient Mediterranean, absorbing the wonders of Asia Minor, Rome and Alexandria. He became a priest at the sacred Oracle of Delphi.
- Legends Of The Oracle Of Delphi At The Centre Of The World
- Pythia: Oracle and High Priestess of Delphi
Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia at Delphi , by Eugène Delacroix. (Public Domain)
Though Greek by birth, he became a Roman citizen, interacted with the empire’s elite (including Roman emperors) and lived as a figure bridging “two worlds.” For him, Rome was a vast, stabilizing power that brought peace and prosperity to the once-warring Greek city-states, yet it was an empire whose gaze was sometimes dangerous and always impossible to escape. One of his motivations was to show how his people – the Greeks – were forever great and relevant.
He secured his historical legacy with Parallel Lives, a monumental work pairing iconic Greek and Roman personages, such as Alexander the Great & Julius Caesar and Demosthenes & Cicero. Plutarch was not a rigid historian focused only on military battles and precise chronology. Instead, he generated portraits of the soul constructed from gossip, stories, asides, and eccentricities. He believed that personal quirks and private behaviors could reveal an individual's virtue far better than a battlefield victory.
Much of our modern mythology surrounding ancient heroes stems directly from the portraits and incidents Plutarch preserves. He serves as our only source for certain events - such as the tale of a young Alexander taming the wild stallion Bucephalus after realizing the horse was afraid of its own shadow. For Julius Caesar, Plutarch recounted how the young Julius had been captured by pirates and had offered them more money than they asked. He read his poetry aloud, played sports with them and even acted rudely to them, threatening to crucify them. He “took the robbers out of prison, and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking.”
Plutarch remains endlessly fascinating and immortal, providing the raw material for William Shakespeare's greatest Roman plays, including Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. At Mount Vernon, George Washington had an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives. He also borrowed a copy from New York Society Library.
Thomas Hobbes by John Michael Wright. (Public Domain)
Thomas Hobbes: Order vs. Chaos
While Plutarch looked to the ancient past, arguing that civic stability relies on cultivating personal virtue and moral leadership in statesmen, Hobbes looked to structural power, developing into a pillar of European political philosophy.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was born prematurely when rumors of the invading Spanish Armada got his mother into panic. Abandoned early by a volatile father, the brilliant youth quickly mastered classical languages before attending Oxford. He forged a lifelong alliance with the aristocratic Cavendish family, working as a private tutor and traveling across Europe, where he absorbed the science of Galileo and verbally jousted with René Descartes.
Hobbes drafted his masterpiece, Leviathan, against the backdrop of the English Civil War. The collapse of authority and social order deeply affected him. He theorized that human existence outside of a structured government - a hypothetical "state of nature" - is a battlefield. Hobbes advocated for a social contract. Through this mutual agreement, people sacrifice their unrestricted freedom to a governing authority in exchange for security and order.
Nearly a century and a half later, the Founding Fathers confronted an echo of Hobbes's warnings. Watching the weak Articles of Confederation fail and facing armed uprisings like Shays's Rebellion, they recognized that a fragmented confederation risked falling into anarchy; society requires a unified executive that can enforce laws and maintain order. Because the Framers rejected Hobbes’s defense of absolute sovereignty, they balanced this executive power with Montesquieu’s structural separation of powers. They sought a middle ground designed to prevent the nation from dissolving into the chaotic state of nature that Hobbes feared. Hobbes offers this about the state of nature:
"In such condition there is no place for industry... no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death… and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
St. James Park, London. Locke and Hobbes met others and found inspiration in parks. Locke mentioned St. James Park in writings; Hobbes was into fitness. (Photo by Renah Marranca)
John Locke: Natural Rights
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both argued that legitimate political authority relies on a social contract between a government and its citizens.
Locke (1632-1704) grew up with a father who commanded Parliamentarian troops against the king. While his early studies at Westminster School and Oxford focused on traditional education, Locke pivoted to medicine and natural science. This scientific background secured him a position as the physician and trusted advisor to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. Because of this alliance with Shaftesbury's faction, which fiercely opposed the Catholic monarchy, Locke became a target of the crown. Locke fled England and lived quietly in Dutch exile for several years.
Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller. (Public Domain)
In the landmark work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke pioneered the school of thought known as British Empiricism by arguing that every human is born as a tabula rasa - a blank slate. He maintained that all of our knowledge, moral beliefs and identities are derived from what we experience through our senses and reflect upon afterward.
Locke was finally able to return home to England in 1689 following the Glorious Revolution which limited the monarch's power. To justify this new constitutional system, he published his defining political text, Two Treatises of Government. He attacked the traditional belief in the "Divine Right of Kings," stating that legitimate political sovereignty belongs entirely to the citizens. He argued that all individuals are born with fundamental natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Because citizens only consent to a social contract to keep those core rights secure, they retain the absolute moral right to overthrow any corrupt government that breaks that sacred trust. Locke’s Life, Liberty, and Estate became Thomas Jefferson’s Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Here’s a section from Locke:
“MEN being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau author of ‘Of Social Contract’. (Marbenabogados/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
Both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the notion that political power is divinely ordained. Of our list of 5 philosophers, Rousseau and Montesquieu were unequivocally against slavery. Rousseau remains a great influence in a number of fields.
From the Republic of Geneva, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) deeply influenced modern thought. His early education began at home, reading historical biographies and French romances alongside his watchmaker father, Isaac. This ended when Isaac fled Geneva to escape imprisonment following an altercation with a French army officer. The young Rousseau was then placed in the custody of a Calvinist pastor.
At age 16 in Southern France, he encountered Françoise-Louise de Warens, a Swiss Baroness dependent on a king's pension. He later wrote in his memoirs that the specific spot where they first met was sacred and "ought to be surrounded by railings of gold." She stepped in as his protector, giving him access to books that expanded his knowledge of music, philosophy and Latin. Largely self-taught, Rousseau saw their bond evolve into a complex physical intimacy by the time he turned 21. He called her Maman (mom).
Le Procope, Paris. Frequented by Rousseau, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Franklin… (ich Selbst/ CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
Rousseau grew into a major figure of the Enlightenment, a movement that championed science, reason, and human progress. However, with his novel The New Heloise, Rousseau also became a monumental influence on the later Romantic movement, which celebrated emotion and nature over rigid logic—a direct rejection of core Enlightenment values.
Due to its philosophic and revolutionary fervor, Rousseau’s political masterpiece, The Social Contract, stands as one of the most influential books in human history. He argued that human beings are naturally good but corrupted by civilization. To solve this dilemma, he demonstrated how free citizens could govern themselves through a collective "General Will." Because the book directly attacked traditional ideas about religious authority and the monarchy, the French government banned it, forcing Rousseau to spend years in exile. Despite this persecution, his writings deeply energized the radical leaders of the French Revolution as they moved toward their destiny in 1789.
Beyond politics, Rousseau's groundbreaking book Émile transformed the world of education. He argued that children are not miniature adults and should learn through spontaneity, curiosity, and nature—rather than through rote memorization and harsh physical punishment. This progressive approach later laid the groundwork for European reformers like Pestalozzi, whose methods heavily influenced the 19th-century American educational reformer Amos Bronson Alcott. Rousseau believed that the goal of education is not to pack the mind with facts, but to preserve the child's natural purity against a corrupting world. At the beginning of The Social Contract, Rousseau writes:
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate?”
Baron de Montesquieu: Checks & Balances
During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu (1689–1755) championed governance rooted in human liberty and rationality, though they envisioned different systems.
Portrait of Montesquieu (1689-1755), by Jacques-Antoine Dassier. (Public domain)
As a French philosopher, Montesquieu helped transform how modern societies create stable government. Born near Bordeaux, he inherited aristocratic status and eventually served as a prominent provincial judge. His early education at a prestigious academy focused on the classics, the sciences – and social arts like fencing and music. He later mastered Roman jurisprudence at the University of Bordeaux before advancing his legal training in Paris. Returning home, he managed his ancestral properties, served as a magistrate and married a wealthy woman.
His epistolary novel, Persian Letters (1721), written from the perspective of two Persian travelers, was a satirical look at French society. He had it published anonymously. It was very popular.
The Spirit of the Laws (1748) was a huge success with readers everywhere, and it was among the most cited books for America’s Founding Fathers. In Federalist No. 47, James Madison defends the separation of powers by basing his argument on the ideas of Montesquieu.
In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu created his theory of checks and balances by combining old philosophy with British politics. Although he learned from Aristotle and John Locke, his ideas really took shape while watching the struggles between the English King and Parliament. Influenced by writers like Lord Bolingbroke, who argued that lawmakers must remain independent, Montesquieu expanded this framework by defining the judiciary as a separate third branch. This was a practical way to guard personal freedom, fulfilling his core belief that “it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.”
Independence Hall, Philadelphia. U.S. Constitution written here May-Sept 1787. (Public Domain)
By synthesizing these diverse philosophies, the architects of the American Revolution proved that the quill was ultimately as fearsome as the musket. That founding vision has endured for two and a half centuries—a masterful blueprint born from an illustrious, multi-generational conversation. Yet, it remains a living framework: dynamic, evolving, and continually reshaping itself to meet the extraordinary and paradoxical demands of a changing world.
Modern crises—such as unprecedented technological growth without the equivalent virtue and wisdom, the spread of weapons and the failing health of our planet—demand a level of ingenuity, compassion and Seventh Generation Thinking that has so far eluded modern governance. Despite this, the truth remains within reach. Our enduring principles remain alive, to guide each generation through uncharted vistas. We can live according to the illumination of thought, action and even utopian ideals. What is a dream one decade or century becomes true the next.
Top image: The Founding Fathers Portraits. Source: DonkeyHotey/CC BY 2.0
By Dr Richard Marranco
