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January 1 - January 24, 2021
the influence of Enlightenment thinking on the founders—in particular the writings of John Locke—the fact is that these men did not study Locke as much as they did the writings of the ancient world, Greek and Roman philosophy and literature:
But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.
The practice of virtue was paramount, which is one reason George Washington, not an articulate man, loomed so large over the post-Revolutionary era.
the founders refer to Cicero in their correspondence and diaries about five times as often as they do to Aristotle.
Their readings ranged over more than a thousand years of ancient history, all the way from the Iliad to Justinian’s Codex, but came back again and again to that crucial period of the decline of the Republic. That decades-long process of republican erosion provided their political context, their point of reference, and much of their civic language.
Because the founders failed to find a way to address the entire issue of race-based chattel slavery, less than a century later the nation they built would fracture into civil war and undergo a long and halting reconstruction that continues even today.
Jefferson was many things, but he was never a soldier, so he probably did not grasp that in military life, a mind “slow in operation” tends to be not a fault but a strength.
In leading combat operations, slow and steady thinking, followed with energetic execution, often is more effective than a series of hasty moves that tend to exhaust a force and expose it to attack.
Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible: Jefferson did not quite say so, but he was describing Washington as the American Cato, the eighteenth century’s embodiment of virtue, the very ideal of what a public man should be.
In our own century, Ron Chernow, in a fine study of Washington, states that “the goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries.”11
“city upon a hill,”
Cato was his favorite play. The drama is as stiff as Washington strove to be,
Cato denounced Caesar as pleading for false mercy that endangered the state.
More than almost all his peers, he became able to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued.
His enormous force of will, perhaps his most significant quality as an adult, was beginning to emerge.
“He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.”
“Nec Aspera Terrent”—that is, “not frightened by difficulties.”
25th ID Wolfhounds
Know yourself, and know those you are fighting. This is a more complex proposition than it may seem, as it requires introspection, strategic thinking, and reliable intelligence. Study the terrain and make it your friend. As circumstances change, be ready to change views and abandon assumptions. Listen to dissenters and know how to weigh alternatives.
In strategic terms, he had seen events that would resonate with him decades later during the War for Independence. First, he had seen the French appear to be on the cusp of victory in the war, only to lose years later. Second, he had witnessed an army of British regulars shattered in a battle with people born in North America. Third, he had seen in Braddock’s spectacular failure what can happen to a general who disregards informed advice and fails to adapt his approach to the circumstances.
the key goal of a general is sometimes not to win but merely to keep his army alive.
“Discipline is the soul of an army.”
Washington “always understood power and how to use it.”76 What could be more Roman than the prudent exercise of power?
Plutarch always balances his praise of great men by emphasizing one great shortcoming. In Cicero’s case, this was vanity. “He was always excessively pleased with his own praise, and continued to the very last to be passionately fond of glory; which often interfered with the prosecution of his wisest resolutions.”
What kind of country had Rome become? Cicero asked. “There are here, among our fellow-senators, my lords, . . . men who are meditating the destruction of us all, the total ruin of this city and in fact of the civilised world.”
If Adams was a Cicero, Washington was a Cato—a comparison that would frustrate Adams later in life.
Sovereignty flows from the people, who have the power to withdraw it, and the duty to do so if the delegated authority abuses it.
Scottish empiricism
Scottish scientist James Hutton, who played a crucial role in creating the field of geology.
Charles Darwin in turn may have arrived at his theory of natural selection in part by combining Hutton’s conception of vast time with his friend Adam Smith’s theories of the free market, applying both to the natural world.
“The words of truth are simple, and justice needs no subtle interpretations, for it has a fitness in itself; but the words of injustice, being rotten in themselves, require clever treatment.”
Perhaps as a consequence of his new political position, his reading turned from philosophy to governance. He ordered a stack of books from T. Cadell, a London bookshop, among them John Locke’s On Government and the works of Montesquieu.83
The Sicilian city of Syracuse began as a colony of Corinth, notes Stanyan, but it grew “large and beautiful,” and as it “increased in power,” it came to renounce its “obedience” to Corinth.86 So, too, would come a time when it would become necessary for the American colonies to renounce the political bands that had connected them with their mother country, and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station.
Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90
Sir Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century British philosopher, concluded that Montesquieu’s impact remains all around us, pervasive yet often unseen, in the form of modern liberal democracy.
Fox and the hedgehog
all men are equal, and that power is delegated to leaders by the people.
In January, William Pitt the Elder, a former prime minister, rose in the House of Lords to support a motion to pull British troops out of Boston. “I have read Thucydides, . . . but I must declare and avow that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, . . . no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress of Philadelphia.”35
he considered the Declaration to be “an appeal to the tribunal of the world.”
Our Declaration, a wonderful line-by-line and word-by-word explication of the Declaration of Independence, the political philosopher Danielle Allen
“Liberty, like Power, is only good for those who possess it, when it is under the constant Direction of Virtue.”
the signers “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour.” In other words: We will not back down. Our virtue is at stake.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
power of this section of the Declaration is that it’s more about “what we ought to be” rather than “what we are.”
interested in Caesar
sought to model his public persona upon Cato—upright,
celebrated general Fabius, who defeated an invader from overseas mainly by avoiding battle
American Cincinnatus.
the American Fabius during the War for Independence.
general Fabius
He was celebrated by Rome for defeating the shocking invasion of Hannibal by refusing to give battle.
