The Declaration of Independence audaciously declares certain “truths” to be “self-evident”.  And, in so doing, offered a justification for not only a break with Great Britain and Revolutionary War, but the foundation upon which a new nation could be built.  But how uniformly were these “truths” held and understood by the Founding Fathers?  Were they disparate views that were ultimately incoherent or inconsistent?  Did the divergent cultures of the American North and South have fundamentally different ideas of what they conceived of America to be?  Were the Founders simply protecting their material interests and reaching for any argument at hand that seemed useful to that end?

 

Who was most responsible for the ideas of the American founding?  John Locke?  Scottish Enlightenment thinkers?  Egalitarianism?  Modernity?  Scientific rationalism?  Christian teachings?  Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is historian Hans Eicholz who argues it was actually a harmonization of many of these different, but not incompatible, sentiments that lead to the founding of America.

 

About Hans Eicholz

Hans Eicholz is a historian and Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund.  Much of his work has been in the history of economic thought, looking initially at the influence of market ideas in the American founding period, but also extending up through the 19th century.

 

Hans is the author of Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government (2001; Second Edition, 2024), and a contributor to The Constitutionalism of American States (2008).