Foundations of liberty
馃尦 The Principles of Liberty: The Garden to the Republic
Where the American idea of liberty came from, told mostly in the founders' own words: the Garden and the first law, natural law from Cicero to Aquinas, Magna Carta and the English charters, the common law, William Blackstone, Locke and Sidney, Montesquieu, and how the founders built all of it into the Declaration, the state constitutions and the Bill of Rights.
- 1The Garden and the First LawHow the first chapters of Genesis gave English and American thinkers an equal human dignity, a law above rulers, and an answer to the claim that kings inherit their power from Adam.22 min
- 2Natural Law From Cicero to AquinasThe long argument, from Sophocles and Aristotle through Cicero, Roman law, Paul, Augustine and Aquinas to Grotius and Pufendorf, that a law above the state binds rulers and ruled alike.24 min
- 3Magna Carta and the English ChartersHow a failed peace treaty between King John and his barons in 1215 became the first link in a chain of English charters, from the Petition of Right to the Bill of Rights, that colonists claimed as their own birthright.24 min
- 4The Common Law: Custom, Precedent and the JuryHow English judges and juries built a body of law out of custom and decided cases, and how Coke, Zenger's lawyer and James Otis turned that inheritance into arguments against arbitrary power.24 min
- 5William BlackstoneHow an Oxford professor's four-volume survey of English law, published from 1765 to 1769, taught a generation of Americans what their rights were, where those rights came from, and where he and the founders parted company.22 min
- 6Locke, Sidney and the Right of ResistanceHow a philosopher in Dutch exile, an executed republican and a Boston preacher gave the colonists a reasoned case for when a people may lawfully resist their rulers, and how Jefferson later named them among the sources of the Declaration.22 min
- 7Montesquieu and the Separation of PowersHow a French magistrate's 1748 description of English liberty became the founders' chief authority on dividing power, what Madison made of him in Federalist 47 and 51, and what a famous count of founding-era citations does and does not show.22 min
- 8The Founders on Natural RightsHow Otis, Dickinson, the Adamses, Hamilton, Jefferson and Mason moved the colonial argument from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of mankind, in their own words and in the order they wrote them.23 min
- 9Rights in the Founding DocumentsHow the principles of natural rights were written into law, from Mason's Virginia Declaration of 1776 and the state constitutions to the Northwest Ordinance and the Bill of Rights, with a table tracing each right back to its English ancestor.24 min
- 10From Garden to Republic: Virtue, Faith and Self-GovernmentWhy the founders held that a free republic needs a moral people: Franklin's motion for prayer and its fate, the McHenry note on keeping a republic, Madison on virtue in the governed, Washington's Farewell Address, Adams to the militia, Rush on education, Tocqueville, and Idaho's own school clause.22 min