Foundations of a Nation
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who have helped define our nation. On the "Foundations of a Nation" podcast Alex Tuckness, Chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, talks with his friend, Barrett Randall, about the ideas that have shaped America. Season 1 looks at the Declaration of Independence."
Foundations of a Nation
The British Background of the Declaration
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Barrett and Alex talk about the Glorious Revolution and the thought of British philosophy John Locke on the Declaration of Independence.
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who've helped define our nation. I'm Barrett Randall, and I'm not an academic, but I'm also not afraid to talk to one. On the Foundations of a Nation podcast, I have conversations with my friend Alex Tuckness, Chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, about the ideas that have shaped America. Welcome to Foundations of a Nation, a podcast that explores the ideas that shaped America. In season one, we're looking at ideas that shape the Declaration of Independence. I'm Barrett Randall. I run a golf course. And I'm Alex Technis, chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State. And we're going to be your hosts. In this episode, we're going to be talking about how understanding British history and thought helps us better understand the Declaration of Independence. Alex, you talked in the last episode about the philosopher John Locke and the Declaration. Could you explain more the historical context of him and how that sheds light on the Declaration?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so a little historical background. So John Locke was an English philosopher who was writing back in the 1600s. And so he lived through the English Civil War. In fact, the the King of England may have been executed, you know, when he was watching as a teenager. We don't know for sure. But it was at Locke's school where Charles I was executed by Parliament. They executed him out of school? Uh yeah, yeah. It's in an odd recess. Odd odd location. So Cromwell rules for a while. Eventually Charles II comes back and the monarchy is restored in England. And so like Locke is living through all of this uh all of this period. And uh he ends up being associated with uh some of the people who were concerned about um what was going to happen uh when Charles II died. And so there's this I'll kind of go back, there's this long sequence of events which eventually is gonna lead to Locke publishing one of the primary defenses of this thing called the Glorious Revolution that happens in the late 1680s in England. Uh and the glorious revolution is where they kick out uh Charles II's younger brother, James II, who had become king, uh, and then they end up bringing William and Mary over uh to be the new monarchs. Uh and so that revolution really made it clear that parliament more than the king uh was where the center of power was in uh in the British Empire. Uh and it was really popular. Like, you know, you know, if you mention the glorious revolution to somebody in England, they're like, yeah, we we did great there. You know, so this is like a really positive thing. And it's also something that British colonists viewed very favorably, right? So the um the glorious revolution that had happened in the 1600s uh in England was like this precedent of a justified revolution. British people viewed it as a justified revolution, Americans viewed it as a justified revolution. So John Locke, who is associated with that revolution, uh is somebody who is kind of like admired on both sides of the ocean and is thought to be, you know, one of the places you could look if you wanted like a reasonable explanation of when uh, you know, using force against the king is actually uh a reasonable thing to do. Um so so you know, that's that's some of the the background. Um part of how Locke ends up doing this is uh there's a lot of concern about religious freedom. And in particular, uh Charles II didn't have any legitimate heirs. Uh he had a few illegitimate ones, um, but he didn't have any legitimate heirs uh to take the throne upon his death, meaning, according to the rules, his younger brother becomes king, right, when he uh when he dies. And James II was widely thought to be Catholic. And so, you know, England has this history of religious wars uh between Protestants and Catholics, and people are like really afraid that if James II becomes king, uh it's just gonna be a matter of time before he like uh takes away the religious freedom of Protestants and tries to make it a Catholic country again. So uh John Locke ends up working for this aristocrat uh named Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later becomes the Earl of Shaftsbury. You get these great titles. That's good. Yeah. And uh so he's basically like the you know resident philosopher. You know, if you were an aristocrat back then, you'd have like your own personal philosopher to go like think things through. As you would. Yeah. So he's like helping tutor the guy's kids, attending to various things for him, but also just like, you know, thinking about stuff.
SPEAKER_00All right. So Locke's working for the British aristocrat, and he's worried about who's gonna be the next king. So how does this relate to the questions of revolution, uh, like what we get in the Declaration of Independence?
SPEAKER_01From his association with uh with Shaftsbury, Locke actually starts thinking about America a lot. This is kind of an interesting aspect of his um his biography. So uh Shaftsbury was like the lead guy uh helping to like start the momentum to create a colony in Carolina. And uh so as they're working on creating a colony in Carolina, he says to John Locke, Hey, could you help uh like put together a draft constitution that we might use for Carolina? Sure. Jacques's like, Locke's like, okay. So he's he's like working on, you know, this kind of slightly quirky draft constitution. But the point is, like, he's thinking about, you know, these questions about America uh and governance, uh, even while, you know, he's he's living in England. Uh he's he he reads stories from people who've traveled to America who was really interested in kind of reading all these accounts of you know reports on uh you know Native Americans and uh you know the colonies and and what things were like here. Uh so eventually things keep like ratcheting up, and the guy he's working for is basically leading the charge to try to get permission to skip James II and go to somebody else in the line of succession so that there's no chance of a Catholic king. Um well, Charles II, who's the still the current king, still alive at this point, thinks this is not how this works. Like you don't get to pick who the next king is, it's just the rules, you know. Uh and so uh Locke's boss, uh Lord of Shaftesbury, gets thrown into prison. So he's like in the Tower of London in prison. John Locke's like, you know, I think this might be a good time to like leave the country for a little while. So he goes and leaves the country. Uh and uh while he is like basically living in hiding in exile, because he's worried that like British agents are gonna like track him down and uh and arrest him, uh, he's thinking about these issues, you know, some more. He he writes uh you know some important work on religious freedom while he's there. But interestingly, before he left and went into exile, he'd been working on this book that was going to be a justification for uh, you know, rebelling against James II. Uh if James II starts trying to do stuff out of line. So he's he's writing this book that's a justification for revolution. Okay. But before he publishes it, things get too hot and he like flees for his life. Fast forward a few years, James II becomes king. Uh he starts doing some stuff parliament doesn't like, and they run him out of town. Uh they say he's abdicated the throne, so that's when they make William and Mary the new monarchs.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Uh Locke had actually somehow gotten to know William and Mary while he's in Amsterdam, right? So he's kind of like got an in with the new monarchs. And so like he's on the same boat, I think, with Mary, as like she's you know, like sailing to England. Um and Locke's like, this is great news. Like my side, my side just won here. Um, and so after uh William and Mary come to the throne, he publishes his most famous political work, which is called Two Treatises of Government. And what's what's kind of really interesting about it is he wrote it for a possible future revolution, but he published it after the resolution revolution was already over and had already succeeded. And so the great thing about this is it's all like kind of like Thomas Paine. Yeah, his timing was perfect.
SPEAKER_00Sure.
SPEAKER_01Right? Uh, because if you if you publish it before the fact, a lot of people are gonna try to kill you, which is why part of the reason he didn't, you know, publish it sooner. Yeah. But because the revolution had succeeded and it was wildly popular, a good justification for that revolution uh, you know, was very well received uh by people, right? And so, you know, so so when when people would read the two treatises of government, they were like, oh yeah, that's just that's obvious, of course. That's what we British people think. Um, but they might not have thought that if they'd read it, you know, in the heat of the moment um, you know, before the Glorious Revolution took place.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And so importantly, this is a a British man writing about a British form of government and about the government in Britain. That's right. And it wasn't inherently aligned with America at all.
SPEAKER_01That's correct, right? So yeah, so he he's not he's not particular there are references to America in the book, but America's not the focus of the book. Got it. But what he does is he articulates more general universal principles that in principle would apply to any country, you know, anywhere. Yeah. And so it's those general principles where, you know, talk about things like universal rights to life and liberty and so forth, uh that the colonists would say, well, hey, if if those are true of British subjects, those are true of us too. Those are universal rights.
SPEAKER_00And so Especially in the British Empire, like they were. That's right.
SPEAKER_01That's right. So so yeah, so that becomes uh one of the reasons when people in America are trying to explain why we are justified in having a revolution, Locke would be, you know, one of the obvious sources uh that they could look to.
SPEAKER_00So that helps us then understand basically the declaration is understanding Locke's uh reason for writing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that that's right. So so I'll I'll give some examples here. So um one of the things I I sometimes do with with my students at Iowa State is uh you know, we've got this little handout uh that we look at. And on column one, I've got some of the original text of the Declaration of Independence. And in column two, I have some quotations from John Locke, right? And you can kind of see them right next to each other to make it a little easier to see uh what uh similarities are. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but uh uh, you know, we've got the famous line, maybe the most famous line from uh the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Um, you you look at Locke, uh, and Locke says um to understand political power right and to derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, without the bounds of the law of sorry, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending on the will of any other man. Right. So he's kind of describing people who, in their natural state, have a liberty to direct their own lives, to, you know, uh, you know, decide how they want to live life. Now, they they can't go around like violating other people's rights, because there's this law of nature he's going to explain that sets some ground rules. But within those kind of basic ground rules, you've got this freedom uh to live your life. You're not under anyone else's authority. So then he's now describing this original state human beings are in. And he says it's a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should be equal, one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. So he's saying, like, the starting point is we assume all of us have equal political rights. We're not equal in every respect, but we're equal in the sense that I don't have any natural authority over you where I can tell you how you have to live your life, and you don't have any natural authority over me where you can tell me how I have to live my life, because we're we're members of the same species, we have the same basic types of abilities. And so there's this assumption that it's equal, unless he's got this one caveat. If God were to say uh person A gets to rule over person B, God would have the authority to do that. But one of his arguments is God hasn't done that, right? God has has like put us in this uh starting point of equality that's the basis from which everything else flows, right?
SPEAKER_00So uh when I can see why that would be a revolutionary thought. Yeah. When and potentially dangerous in a monarchy. Yeah. I don't know. Here's this is where I'd come in handy. I don't know. I don't know when the British Parliament started. But it does seem what you're suggesting, that these ideas of Locke are a little closer to this idea of a democratic insight and contrary to sort of a monarchy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, so the they would have probably used the language a republic instead of a democracy to try to describe what they were doing. So so for people like Locke and even for like the founders, at that particular point, democracy had a little bit of a bad rap. Oh, okay. Um, because when people thought of democracy, they thought of like uh, you know, Athens putting Socrates to death, you know? Uh so like direct democracy that degenerates into mob rule was kind of like the association people would have when they heard about democracy. Uh yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So it had a lot of yeah, a lot of populist connotations to it. Um and so uh they preferred uh to talk about a republic uh representative. Yeah, so it's it's representative, there's representatives who represent the people, sure, and there's some checks built in, you know, to keep things from getting out of hand. Okay, right. Um but Locke was writing about. Right. But but part of what's interesting too is Locke himself was not like completely against monarchy. So he thinks we start out from a position of equality, but from that position of equality, we could then choose by consent to create a government. And we could choose to create a monarchy if we wanted to, or we could choose to create a direct democracy, or we could, you know, create some more complex republic, right? That uh is is different from either one of those. But the point would be: even if you have a king, the ultimate authority of the king has to trace back to the fact that the people decided we agree to have a king. Uh and that's really different than say, like, I'm king by divine right, uh, you know, I'm king because God chose my, you know, great-great, great, great, great, great grandfather to be king, you know, and the kingship just kind of automatically passes down from generation to generation. Um if you go back far enough, Locke's position would be the ultimate authority of the king, whatever it is, has to be from the people, uh, as opposed to from some other source.
SPEAKER_00So it's like if I dumb it down, it would be like the representatives would sort of be like a board of directors for a business. There is a CEO, but ultimately if the CEO has a board, they have to sort of listen to what the board says.
SPEAKER_01Um it could be. So I I think what Locke would say is the people would have the freedom to set it up that way if they wanted to. Okay. Right? And so uh, you know this this may get into other stuff that, you know, like in in in in in you know, in a future, like especially like if we do, if we do this long enough and we actually get to talk about the constitution and how the constitution is set up and the different branches of government and all that. The part of the idea would be um the people have the freedom to set up s and this is Locke's view, right? To set up sovereignty the way they want sovereignty set up. They could give it all to the king, or they could say, no, king, you're the executive, but you are answerable to parliament. They could set it up that way too, right? And that would make it more like the kind of board of directors, CEO kind of thing. Um the the the crucial point, though, is that if you're going to explain why is there political authority, you have to kind of trace it back to this original decision of the people, right? And so uh the idea in the declaration that government is by consent uh has this as its idea, right? When it's when it says in the declaration that, you know, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government, whatever powers the legislature has, whatever powers the executive have, they only have those powers because the people consented to give those powers to that office. And so so what's what's more revolutionary is this idea that the people have the right to decide what the basic constitutional structure is. And then if the government fails to abide by those principles that the people have set up, by the time we get to the later on in the declaration, there's going to be this right of revolution, right? Uh where you've got the right to say overthrow a king who oversteps his bounds and becomes a tyrant, things like that.
SPEAKER_00That's interesting. So Okay. So Locke's not developing a government system. He's developing basically a thought process and a way of valuing people differently than maybe had been before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So so Locke doesn't, at least the part we're talking about now, he doesn't give a specific blueprint for government. Okay. And I would argue, even in his other stuff, he certainly has some opinions, like, you know, if you you get farther, I think he thinks it's really important that you have uh a robust legislature uh, you know, that's that's answerable to the people as as part of government. Um but the main thing he's doing is not so much giving a blueprint for here's how government has to look, as giving principles for how you would know is this government legitimate or not. Okay. And for it to be legitimate, it's gonna have to start from this position of equality. Right. In other words, the explanation is gonna have to eventually go back to the people who are equal with each other having decided we grant authority to the government to do these things.
SPEAKER_00So these are like foundational moral ethic ethical debates, that's right. Not you know, logistics.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's right. So yeah, so it's this is this is this is about um the the the fundamental principles. I'll give another example. Uh it says um uh in the declaration, they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Again, these are some of the most famous parts of the declaration. Um so paragraph six of Locke's second treatise of government, uh, he's talking about the laws of nature. And the idea is that there's like, even if we didn't have a government at all, like so. Imagine, you know, like uh, you know, we we find ourselves suddenly all washed up on uh the shores of this like deserted island with no government. Lord of the flies. Lord of the flies kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. And the mighty conch. Yeah. So if you found yourself in that situation, Locke argues that you have not entered into like a morality free for all where anything goes. That there are still some moral principles, like even if we find ourselves on this deserted island, I should know, I shouldn't kill you, I shouldn't enslave you, right? You know, I shouldn't steal from you, right? There are these kind of moral principles that we as human beings know we ought to abide by, even if there's not a government that tells us we have to. So here's what he says: he says, the state of nature, this is a state without government, he says, has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. And he's explaining, you know, goes on to explain, uh, because we're all created by God, we're actually like God's property, we're not our own property. So like killing you uh, you know, would be like damaging God's property, right? And I'm not allowed to uh I'm not allowed to do that. So some of the religious language uh that you see in the declaration, you know, endowed by their creator with certain uh rights, and and there are various places where sometimes Locke will summarize that down to life, liberty, and property. Uh that's one of Locke's formulas for talking about our rights. Um and part of what's interesting is uh Jefferson mostly uses that, but he changes it slightly, right? Instead of life, liberty, and property, uh with Jefferson, we get life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Uh so he's he's taking ideas that you see in Locke, but he's he's adapting them, but he's also making them much easier to follow. Right. Uh so I don't know what your experience was as I was reading Locke to you, uh, but he's it's you know, it's not the easiest uh language to follow. It's a little uh convoluted. And what Jefferson was able to do is take some of these ideas and put them in a much shorter, easier under easier to understand uh language that made it something that you you know you could have people read at a Fourth of July celebration to kind of remind people of uh you know what our basic principles are in a way that like sitting down and everybody getting out their copy of John Locke would not have worked nearly as well. You know, like uh, you know, it's a much longer book, takes a lot longer to say everything. Um so so Jefferson's both like shortening and but also making some changes as he goes along, right? So it's not like a verbatim copy of exactly what Locke said.
SPEAKER_00So how do we uh measure the influence then of Locke?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's it's it's a tricky question. And so remember I in you know, in episode one, I mentioned that uh, you know, this professor in in England that I worked with was one of the people who was like, hey, I think you might be like overstating how much of an influence John Locke has. And some of the some of the ways they would look at this, they'd say, like, well, how many libraries actually had Locke's books in them? You know, was that common? Was that not common? You know, quantifiable. Yeah, you tried to try to look for evidence, you know, how much was he actually being uh being cited? And so what I would say is it's it's like a mixed bag. So on the one hand, you know, in in episode one, I mentioned a study I did of in in American revolutionary pamphlets that explained when revolution would be justified, who did they cite? Well, uh, they cite the Bible more than anything else, right? That's actually the thing that gets cited the most often, which is kind of obvious in their culture, you know, it was a uh deeply influential book, right, in in culture of the day. But by my count, Locke was the next most common uh source, right? So they they cited him more than they cited anybody else, but still, a lot of people didn't cite him at all. And even if they were using very similar ideas to his, it doesn't necessarily mean they got those ideas from him directly, because they might have gotten the ideas from him indirectly, right? So Locke's writing a hundred years before, right? So there's plenty of time for Locke to write something, then somebody else to read Locke and write something else, and then maybe they read that second thing rather than the first thing. And so they're still getting some of his ideas, but they're getting them indirectly rather than uh rather than directly. Sure. So, you know, when they were writing it, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are like the main two people like working on writing this thing. Uh, they're they're allies. By the time you get to the 1790s, they're rivals. You know, as George Washington has like stepped away, uh they end up being like the leaders of these two competing factions that end up becoming uh political parties. And they're like in this contest for who gets to be president, right? So uh Jefferson's at this point starting to say, like, hey guys, I'm the one who wrote the Declaration of Independence. That's a really big deal. Um, and proponents of Adams were like, Well, let's let's let's not make your contribution a bigger deal than it really was. Sure. There's a lot of people involved, and one of the charges they make is actually there's not much original in it because all the main ideas you just took from John Locke. So it's almost like they're accusing him like of plagiarism, saying, like Jefferson. Jefferson. Like, Jefferson, really, there's not a lot of new ideas here. Um, which the the plagiarism charge, we'll talk about this, it's that's not really fair because by the standards of writing of his day, what he was doing was completely above board, right? No one no one would have thought there was anything sketchy about it. And when you're you're you know you're writing a document like that, you're you're trying to kind of summarize what people as a whole think, sure, right? Not uh, you know, be your most individual creative self. Yeah. But but the point is, like there's actually been people going all the way back to the beginning who've noted these similarities between the Declaration of Independence and John Locke. Uh, and so since that's one of my interests, that's what we're going to talk about next. Great. Can't wait, man.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_01The views expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of Iowa State University. Thank you for listening.