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The philosophy of freedom: Ideas that shaped the American Revolution

250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans still grapple with many of the same questions that shaped the Revolutionary era: What makes government legitimate? What rights belong to individuals? When does power become too concentrated? What does it actually mean to be free?

Roderick T. Long, professor of philosophy, believes those questions are key to understanding the American Revolution itself.

To understand what freedom meant to the founding generation, Long points to the philosophers who shaped their thinking.

“Philosophy is the attempt to solve fundamental questions about reality, knowledge and value by reasoning about them for oneself, rather than relying on someone else’s say-so,” Long said. “The American founding can be seen as an exercise in applied philosophy.”

Figures including Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke and Montesquieu offered ways of understanding government, rights and the relationship between individuals and power.

Among those influential philosophers, Locke loomed especially large.

Writing in opposition to defenders of absolute monarchy, Locke rejected the idea that some people were born to rule while others were born to obey. Instead, he argued that people were fundamentally equal and that governments gained legitimacy through the consent of the governed rather than inherited power or divine right.

Those ideas became central to the Declaration of Independence.

“Locke’s ideas, and sometimes even his exact phrasing, are particularly evident in the Declaration’s preamble,” Long said. “Thomas Jefferson was relying on Locke’s understanding of equality as independence in the sense of not being anyone’s natural-born subordinate.”

Ideas about freedom did not end with the Declaration. Once independence was won, the founding generation wrestled with how those principles should shape a new government and society.

“When the founders got down to the practical task of implementing the broad general principles they’d fought for in 1776, they soon realized that maybe they hadn’t all been fighting for the same specific versions of those principles,” Long said.

“The American revolutionaries did agree that the American colonies weren’t free so long as they were governed by British politicians they had had no role in choosing. But how would that apply in the American context, after the Revolution? Americans who’d fought side by side against the British would soon find themselves divided over such issues.”

Some feared wealthy elites would dominate political life, while others worried democratic majorities could become oppressive. Early disagreements between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans revealed competing visions of how much centralized power a free society could tolerate.

At the same time, debates over slavery, Native sovereignty and women’s rights exposed glaring contradictions between the nation’s ideals and realities.

Many of those same philosophical tensions remain today. Revisiting the philosophy behind the American Revolution offers an opportunity not only to examine the country’s founding, but also to reconsider what freedom demands today.

“I think it would be refreshing for each of us to reflect on these questions: ‘Are there forms or sources of arbitrary power that haven’t been on my radar but should be? Are there concerns about power that I’ve been dismissing too quickly?’ It could be very eye-opening,” Long said.

Learn more about America250 at Auburn University.

Tags: Faculty Philosophy