Virgil: Forgotten Founder

Virgil: Forgotten American Founder

by Bradley J. Birzer

The American Founders were Men of the West. For all intents and purposes, they might as well have been the remnants of Numenor, each capable of wielding Anduril.

As such, they would not readily recognize the divisions modern historians and scholars often proclaim in history. Indeed, for the founders, history was a continuity and a cycle, not a progression. They were as much in line with Cicero, for example, as they were of John Locke or Baron Montesquieu. Sadly, though, while historians and scholars have readily found innumerable (or sort of) references to the thinkers living rather near (relatively speaking) to the founders, they have forgotten those who seem more at a distance. It is comparatively easy to show paraphrases from Locke. It is far more difficult to determine exactly where Horsa fits into it all.

In his often quoted letter of 1825, Thomas Jefferson admitted that the Declaration of Independence offered nothing original in thought, but drew upon “common sense,” giving voice or “harmonizing sentiments” to the ideas of Aristotle, Marcus T. Cicero, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. Fair enough, of course, though it should also be remembered that the name Aristotle appears in Jefferson’s writing only four times in the entirety of his writings. 1) To promote and defend his own idea of slavery; 2) to dismiss him as a “mystic”; 3) to claim his influence on the Declaration (per above); and 4) to discount any importance of him after the passing of the Declaration. That is it.

To be fair, though, very few American founders cared much about the Greeks. I have attempted to address this issue in great detail in a previousessay at The Imaginative Conservative.

In his own exhaustive research on the intellectual sources of the American Founding, everyone’s favorite pirate political scientist, Don Lutz, has demonstrated—really beyond question—that the Founders gave little serious thought to the Greeks, at least directly. Of the top thirty-six most-cited authors in the Revolutionary period, the only Greek to appear is Plato, and he appears at number twenty-six. Safely above Plato rest Plutarch, Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy. Aristotle does not make the list at all.

Understandably, several very fine and respected scholars have disagreed with me, and I might have unintentionally exaggerated my case to make my point. There can be little doubt that Aristotle influenced those who influenced the Founders. But, then, why did the Founders so often cite great thinkers but rarely Aristotle himself? The greatest exception to this, however, is James Wilson, who relied heavily upon Aristotle’s ideas in drawing up his justly famous University of Pennsylvania lectures of 1790 and 1791, attended by men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.

In addition to the work of Professor Lutz, the grand and vital work of Chris Kopff, Forrest McDonald, Trevor Colbourn, Carl Richard, and a few others has shown the critical importance of the classical thinkers on the American Founders.

................

Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org