The Founders And The Classics

The influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book—the first comprehensive study of the founders’ classical reading.

Is our Greek and Roman heritage merely allusive and illusory? Or were our founders, and so our republican beginnings, truly steeped in the stuff of antiquity? So far largely a matter of generalization and speculation, the influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book-the first comprehensive study of the founders' classical reading.Carl J. Richard begins by examining how eighteenth-century social institutions in general and the educational system in particular conditioned the founders to venerate the classics. He then explores the founders' various uses of classical symbolism, models, "antimodels," mixed government theory, pastoralism, and philosophy, revealing in detail the formative influence exerted by the classics, both directly and through the mediation of Whig and American perspectives. In this analysis, we see how the classics not only supplied the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution but also contributed to the founders' conception of human nature, their understanding of virtue, and their sense of identity and purpose within a grand universal scheme. At the same time, we learn how the classics inspired obsessive fear of conspiracies against liberty, which poisoned relations between Federalists and Republicans.The shrewd ancients who molded Western civilization still have much to teach us, Richard suggests. His account of the critical role they played in shaping our nation and our lives provides a valuable lesson in the transcendent power of the classics.

Founders, classics, and canons have been vitally important in helping to frame sociology's identity. Within the academy today, a number of positions?feminist, postmodernist, postcolonial?question the status of "tradition."In Founders, Classics, Canons, Peter Baehr defends the continuing importance of sociology's classics and traditions in a university education. Baehr offers arguments against interpreting, defending, and attacking sociology's great texts and authors in terms of founders and canons. He demonstrates why, in logical and historical terms, discourses and traditions cannot actually be "founded" and why the term "founder" has little explanatory content. Equally, he takes issue with the notion of "canon" and argues that the analogy between the theological canon and sociological classic texts, though seductive, is mistaken.Although he questions the uses to which the concepts of founder, classic, and canon have been put, Baehr is not dismissive. On the contrary, he seeks to understand the value and meaning these concepts have for the people who employ them in the cultural battle to affirm or attack the liberal university tradition.

"The American Founders and the Classics analyzes theories of democracy from America's founders and connects them with the ideas of classical and Renaissance political philosophy. The text explores classical thinkers from Ancient Greece, political writing from the Enlightenment, and America's founders. Students will read Aristotle's Politics: Book I and Cicero's On the Laws. They will consider how Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau's The Social Contract may have impacted the work of American founders such as Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Adams. The text allows students to connect writers such as Plato, Locke, and Hobbes with founders such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. The anthology includes the entirety of all original documents paired with commentary, analysis, and imagery to enhance both interest and comprehension. Featuring original illustrations, The American Founders and the Classics is an accessible and enjoyable text that gives students a comprehensive, analytical overview of America's great political thinkers and serves as a reminder that America was founded with pragmatism, compromise, and aspiration. The book is well suited to courses on American government, political thought, and the Constitution, as well as introductory political philosophy classes. Justin DePlato holds a Ph.D in political science from the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is an assistant professor of political science at Robert Morris University. Dr. DePlato's research and teaching interests include presidential power and rhetoric and theories of presidential decision-making. His work has appeared in numerous journals and he is the author of The Cavalier Presidency: Executive Power and Prerogative in Times of Crisis and The Tell: Examining the Signaling Effects of Members Consponsoring Legislation in the United States Senate.

New York Times Bestseller Editors' Choice —New York Times Book Review "Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country." —James Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation. On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world. The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew. First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.

This lively and engaging book is the only popular work to explore the profound impact of Ancient Greece and Rome on the Founding Fathers. The classical education they imbibed as young students inspired them to undertake the American Revolution and influenced their approach to a host of constitutional and practical issues crucial to the shaping of the new American republic. Recounting the stirring stories the founders encountered in their favorite histories of Greece and Rome, renowned scholar Carl J. Richard explores what they learned from these vivid tales and how they applied these lessons to their own heroic quest to win American independence and establish a durable republic. Richard explains how the founders learned the importance of individual rights from the absence of those rights in Sparta, the superiority of republican government to monarchy from the Greek victory over the Persians, the perils of democracy from the instability of Athens, the need for a strong central government from the fall of Greece to Macedon and Rome, the importance of virtue to the success of a republic from early Rome, the need for eternal vigilance against ambitious individuals from the fall of the Roman republic, and the preciousness of liberty from its destruction by the Roman emperors. Crucial to the decisions that shaped the United States, these lessons remain invaluable today for every citizen concerned with America's future course.

In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics.