The founding fathers of the United States were heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, in particular John Locke’s arguments for the existence of universal individual rights, and in turn incorporated these ideas into the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The signing of the Declaration of Independence coincided with another milestone in the history of individualism: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, which argued that if each person pursued his own economic self-interest, society as a whole would benefit as if guided by an “invisible hand.”
