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Thread: Taking the Founders’ Moral Ideas Seriously

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    Taking the Founders’ Moral Ideas Seriously

    Taking the Founders’ Moral Ideas Seriously is a review of C. Bradley Thompson's America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.

    I would argue along lines Gordon S Wood argues in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that the colonists strandled both views at the time of the Revolution. They thought still in terms of the rights of the people, but in time individualism would win out.

    ...America’s Revolutionary Mind stands as a refutation of two noxious trends in recent American historiography. The first, which Thompson mentions only briefly in a few endnotes, is the effort to downplay the impact of Locke’s ideas on the Founding Fathers. Scholars of the “classical republican” persuasion have argued that, important as Locke may have been, American revolutionaries were more influenced by Greek, Roman, and Puritan writers who placed less emphasis on the rights of the individual than on the stability of society, the importance of tradition, and the need to sacrifice for the common good. Thompson, by contrast, argues that “America’s revolutionary mind is virtually synonymous with John Locke’s mind” and backs that argument up with an arsenal of examples.

    While the Founders certainly consulted the writings of such classical thinkers as Aristotle and Cicero, Thompson argues that they modified the ancients’ republicanism in light of their Lockean commitment to liberty: “For traditional republicans going back to ancient Greece and Rome, the sacrifice of individual interests for the common good was the ultimate standard of moral and political value,” he writes. But thanks to the influence of now-forgotten intellectuals such as Massachusetts minister Jonathan Mayhew, who wove Lockean theory together with Christian doctrine, the Founders adopted “a new and improved understanding of republicanism” that focused on what the Declaration calls “happiness and safety,” the twin pillars of the bourgeois commercial republic....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Taking the Founders’ Moral Ideas Seriously is a review of C. Bradley Thompson's America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.

    I would argue along lines Gordon S Wood argues in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that the colonists strandled both views at the time of the Revolution. They thought still in terms of the rights of the people, but in time individualism would win out.
    Well, it was about individualism. THAT was the draw. That's how they got movement to Northern Ireland, Ireland proper and then the American colonies. Without a social contract that expressed the rights "of the people", read individual, they would having nothing new. Moral value is an ideal based on religious principles; religion being the cement that bound people in a safe society... so to speak. But in our new way, the individual had value and safety outside of religious controls. Again, the draw for those who wanted be away from persecution and judgement from amoral hypocrites.

    The founders were trying to articulate what the new social structure and contract be and how it would work in legal system wherein the individual was granted the same rights as a king. It was all about security.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jet57 View Post
    Well, it was about individualism. THAT was the draw. That's how they got movement to Northern Ireland, Ireland proper and then the American colonies. Without a social contract that expressed the rights "of the people", read individual, they would having nothing new. Moral value is an ideal based on religious principles; religion being the cement that bound people in a safe society... so to speak. But in our new way, the individual had value and safety outside of religious controls. Again, the draw for those who wanted be away from persecution and judgement from amoral hypocrites.

    The founders were trying to articulate what the new social structure and contract be and how it would work in legal system wherein the individual was granted the same rights as a king. It was all about security.
    The West was moving toward individualism, you got that much right.

    The Christians established the idea of individualism with a personal relationship with God.

    The Jews long before had established to notion of equality where all were subject to the same law,even the king.

    Equality and individualism are fundamental to monotheism.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    The West was moving toward individualism, you got that much right.

    The Christians established the idea of individualism with a personal relationship with God.

    The Jews long before had established to notion of equality where all were subject to the same law,even the king.

    Equality and individualism are fundamental to monotheism.
    So condescending...

    It as the Hebrews that established the "individual relationship with God", Christians took it a step further with Jesus. The Hebrews established monotheism which drew the ire of the Romans. Your last line about monotheism is correct; that's how religions attracted "the individual".

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    Quote Originally Posted by jet57 View Post
    So condescending...

    It as the Hebrews that established the "individual relationship with God", Christians took it a step further with Jesus. The Hebrews established monotheism which drew the ire of the Romans. Your last line about monotheism is correct; that's how religions attracted "the individual".
    That's how, in part, individualism emerged.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    That's how, in part, individualism emerged.
    Individualism, it could be argued, really took off with the King's Vassals.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jet57 View Post
    Individualism, it could be argued, really took off with the King's Vassals.
    Oh? Explain. Also, could you be more precise than "really took off"?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Oh? Explain. Also, could you be more precise than "really took off"?
    It took off as a result of the individual who excelled to become a fixed part of government who held his own sway and thereby in the 10th century brought about the true age of nobility. Knights were middle class men in the social economy just below that of of Baron in the British Isles.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jet57 View Post
    It took off as a result of the individual who excelled to become a fixed part of government who held his own sway and thereby in the 10th century brought about the true age of nobility. Knights were middle class men in the social economy just below that of of Baron in the British Isles.
    Knights and vassals were mutually dependent. That's not individualism.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Knights and vassals were mutually dependent. That's not individualism.
    Uh, kinghts were vassals...

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