Articles — Self-Evident

About a hundred and two passengers were aboard. Some had come out of a separatist congregation that had spent a decade in exile in Holland; others had been recruited in England by the merchants financing the voyage, and the separatists called them strangers. William Bradford, who would govern the colony for most of the next thirty-five years, later wrote down what some of the strangers said once they understood where they were: that when they came ashore they would use their

The five nations of the Haudenosaunee — the people of the longhouse, known to the French and the English and through them to almost all the scholarship as the Iroquois — occupied a band of country running east and west across what is now upstate New York.⁸ They described that country as a single longhouse, the bark-covered dwelling in which several related families lived along a central row of fires. The Mohawk, farthest east, were the keepers of the eastern door. The Seneca,

Voltaire reached them early and reached them as a historian and a dramatist more than as a philosopher. His histories were in colonial libraries; his plays were performed; Candide circulated. The part that bears on this article is the toleration argument, which also circulated, and which arrived in a colonial world already working out its own settlements between churches and civil authority.³⁰ None of that makes a French book the source of any American measure, and the surviv

The men who opposed ratification had the small-republic doctrine, and they used it hard. Brutus opened his first essay to the citizens of New York with it; Cato used it; it was the ground of the objection the leading Anti-Federalists put first, that a territory as large as the American states together could not be governed on free principles.⁴⁶ Hamilton answered, in the ninth number, by turning to another part of the same book. The opponents of the plan, he writes, have with

Adam Smith came home to Kirkcaldy in the spring of 1767, at forty-three, having resigned a professorship at Glasgow to travel through France as tutor to a young duke. He had met Voltaire at Ferney and Quesnay and Turgot in Paris. He came back to a small port town with a life pension and a manuscript, and stayed roughly six years.⁴ The letters from those years are the letters of a man in difficulty.

In the autumn of 1730, a professor began to lecture at the University of Glasgow in a language his students could understand without translation. This was not, on its face, a revolution. The man was thirty-six years old, Irish by birth, the son of a Presbyterian minister in County Down, and he had spent the previous decade running a dissenting academy in Dublin because his connections had made a Scottish pulpit difficult to obtain. He had been elected to the Chair of Moral

The phrase they used for what they feared was not absolutism or tyranny in the abstract. It was popery and arbitrary power, spoken as one linked idea, and it appears in exactly that form in the statute they eventually wrote. To them the halves were a single thing: a Catholic king would rule without Parliament, and a king who ruled without Parliament would restore Catholicism. That is prejudice and constitutional argument at once, sincerely both, and translating it into secula

A man was killed for what he had written in private and never published. It is worth truly considering that fact still for a moment, because it tells us something about the stakes of the ideas this article concerns. These were not abstractions to be debated at leisure. In the England of the 1680s, the proposition that no king could derive an unanswerable title from Adam — and that legitimate power rested instead on law, the public good, and some form of consent — was dangerou

The war that ended in 1647 had begun five years earlier as a quarrel over exactly the questions the previous article left unresolved: whether the king’s power ran only as far as the law allowed, or whether the crown held reserves of authority above the reach of Parliament and the courts.

Articles 8 through 15 follow arguments. They follow a lawyer insisting that the common law bounds the King, a regiment debating the franchise in a Putney church, a philosopher justifying revolution, and a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires. What those articles do not do, because they cannot do it without losing their subjects, is keep a running account of who held the throne while the arguments were made, and what that person was doing.

To understand why that sentence was revolutionary, and why the man who spoke it is widely regarded as one of the most important legal minds the English common-law tradition has produced, we have to understand what the common law was, what the Stuart kings claimed, and why the collision between them shaped the constitutional inheritance that the American colonists would one day take up as their own.

The revolt that began as a defense of provincial liberties against a foreign king had produced something its own leaders never set out to build: a durable, tolerant, prosperous republic that governed itself without a crown and became, for a century, one of the richest societies in Europe and among the most free and religiously plural of its political orders. It was the practical answer to the question the resistance theorists had left hanging — not only how to be rid of a tyr

In the decade after 1572, and especially in the seven years that followed, the Calvinist world produced a body of political theory that would change the trajectory of Western liberty. Theodore Beza, François Hotman, the anonymous author of the most systematic treatise of them all, and the Scot George Buchanan set out to answer, with rigor and at length, the question that Luther had raised at Worms and refused to resolve.

The lesson of Worms was not the lesson Luther meant to give. He meant to defend the Word of God against a corrupt Church. He taught, instead, that no earthly authority is beyond the judgment of a conscience answerable to something higher — and that lesson, once learned, could not be confined to the Church.

The medieval centuries in which the inheritance traced in the first three installments of this series was put to immediate political and legal use. Athens had given the West reason and the idea of the mixed constitution. Jerusalem had given it the covenant and the conviction that even kings stand under a law above themselves. Rome had given it natural law and the architecture of a republic. The House of Wisdom had preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical inheritance

This is the article in which the cross-civilizational character of the liberty tradition becomes unmistakable. The reader who insists on seeing the Founding as the product of one people, one continent, one faith, will find the historical record contradicts such insistence. The reader willing to follow the evidence will find an inheritance richer than any chauvinism could fit inside.

The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.

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.