Plutarch
Cato — Stoic, incorruptible, willing to die rather than submit to Caesar — was the model the Founders looked to when they thought about what it meant to defend a republic against tyranny.
Discussion Questions
- What did they see in him that resonated with their own situation?
- Are there elements of Cato's character that the Founders rightly admired, and elements they might have done well to question?
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison's Cato may have had a profound influence on many American Founders' sense of what republican virtue looked like. Washington had it performed for his troops at Valley Forge. The play's lines were so deeply embedded in the imaginations of Founding-era Americans that Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death!" almost certainly draws on Cato's line.
Discussion Questions
- What does it mean that the Founders' political rhetoric drew so heavily on a particular dramatic and literary tradition? Does political rhetoric today have any comparable shared imaginative reservoir?
- If not, what has been lost — and what, if anything, has replaced it?
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry's Speech to the Second Virginia Convention (1775) — "Give me liberty, or give me death!" — may be the most famous American speech of its era. Read it as a piece of moral and political rhetoric, attentive to how Henry deploys the classical and biblical traditions to move his audience.
Discussion Questions
- Henry's speech is built on the Stoic virtues of fortitude and justice — fortitude because he refuses to be governed by fear of what resistance will cost, justice because he treats submission to unjust authority as itself a wrong he is unwilling to commit. Where in the text do you see each of those virtues operating? Is Henry's "death" a Stoic resolution, a Christian one, or both?
- Henry's most famous line — "give me liberty, or give me death!" — sits unmistakably close to the line in Addison's Cato you read just before it. What do you make of that proximity? Is Henry borrowing, channeling, or performing — and does it matter?
- What does it tell you about how a generation forms its political imagination, and about whether persuasive moral rhetoric requires a shared imaginative inheritance to draw on?
Hon. Clarence Thomas
On April 15, 2026, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered remarks commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The address is at once historical, philosophical, and personal: Justice Thomas argues that the Declaration's natural-rights claims are not the property of philosophers but a way of life.
Discussion Questions
- Justice Thomas's catalogue of possible acts of courage — speaking up in class, declining a job, resisting antisemitism, accepting unpopularity — maps onto the Stoic virtues of fortitude (steadiness under pressure) and justice (refusing to participate in what one believes to be wrong). Which of his examples seems most demanding to you? Which most easily evaded?
- Justice Thomas is asking the audience to identify, in advance, the moments when virtue will cost them something. What are the two or three moments most likely to arise in your own life over the next year — in class, in clerkship interviews, in friendships, in public life — where standing on your principles will exact a real price? What price are you actually willing to pay?
- Justice Thomas exhorts his audience to "resolve to withstand unfair criticism and attacks." What does this tell you about the fortitude required of a judge in contemporary American life?
- Justice Thomas refers to those who are willing to "live by lies" — an allusion familiar to readers of Solzhenitsyn. Who, in American public life today, do you see refusing to live by lies, at meaningful cost to themselves?
John Adams
This is a short diary entry that begins with a discussion of Adams's view that "the Christian religion ... brings the great Principle of the Law of Nature..." The passage finishes with a reference to the four cardinal virtues as the conditions necessary for happiness.
Discussion Questions
- Adams begins this entry by invoking "the Christian religion" as the source of "the great Principle of the Law of Nature," and ends by enumerating "Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude" — the four cardinal virtues of the classical and Stoic tradition — as the conditions of happiness. How does Adams hold these two together? Does he see Christianity and the classical virtue tradition as competitors, as complements, or as describing the same underlying moral order from different angles?
- The same fusion appears throughout the Founders' writings — Washington, Hamilton, Wilson, even the more skeptical Jefferson. Why do you think a generation steeped in Enlightenment rationalism nonetheless saw no incompatibility between the natural law tradition, the Christian moral inheritance, and the Greek and Roman accounts of virtue?