John Locke
Locke is an important headwater. Before the Founders wrote, they read, and Locke's account of the state of nature shaped their vocabulary of natural rights and natural law.
Discussion Questions
- In these pages, Locke argues that the state of nature is governed by a law of nature, knowable by reason, that binds everyone: reason teaches all mankind that, being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Read it as the source-text for the Declaration's appeal to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," and watch for the same inheritance at work in Hamilton and Wilson.
- Locke grounds natural rights in a law of nature knowable by reason, without resting the argument on revelation. As you read Hamilton and Wilson, ask how much of their natural-law language is Lockean reason and how much depends on the Creator. Does the Declaration's "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" collapse that distinction, or hold the two in deliberate tension?
Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton's The Farmer Refuted, written when he was barely twenty, states: "the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself."
Discussion Questions
- How is the young Hamilton's argument different from a positivist defense of legal rights? Is Hamilton representing what might be considered a "natural law" view?
- What does his description owe to Cicero, and what does it owe to the more recent natural-rights tradition of Locke and Burlamaqui?
- Compare Hamilton's description of the source of "the sacred rights of mankind" to the language of the Declaration of Independence, written just a year later. Both point to divinity as the source of rights, and both make the argument that they are inalienable. Yet Jefferson and Hamilton were often ideological rivals. What does their accord on this topic tell us about the pervasiveness of natural law thinking in the founding generation?
- Hamilton would later become a chief architect of one of those "old parchments" — the Constitution. Are the two roles in tension, or does the natural-law foundation explain why writing the Constitution mattered at all?
James Wilson
James Wilson was not just a theorist; he was a signer of both the Declaration and the Constitution, and one of the original justices of the Supreme Court. Wilson articulates the structure that would have been familiar to nearly all of his learned contemporaries: there is a divine law, communicated by reason and conscience and by Scripture; human law derives whatever authority it has from its conformity to that higher law.
Discussion Questions
- Does Wilson believe that human law derives its authority from divine law and that human lawmakers have genuine work to do that the divine law does not specify?
- How do you square his claims that human law derives its authority with higher law, with Wilson's own role in helping draft the Constitution – which was very clearly a document produced through political compromise?
Samuel Langdon
Preached on June 5, 1788, as the states were ratifying the Constitution, Langdon argues that divine providence had blessed America with excellent constitutions, that the proposed federal Constitution would complete this framework, and that constitutional excellence means nothing without virtuous practice.
Discussion Questions
- Langdon argues that the United States has been blessed with excellent constitutions — but that constitutional excellence means nothing without virtuous practice. How does this claim sit against Madison's structural arguments in The Federalist? Is Madison's design meant to do without virtue, or to channel and economize what virtue a people actually possesses?
- Langdon preached in June 1788, with ratification still uncertain. His sermon is doing political work — urging that the Constitution be adopted and that its adoption be understood as the completion of a providential framework. Strip away the providential frame. Does the underlying argument — that institutions cannot save a people who have abandoned the virtues that make republican government possible — survive? Is it true?
- Langdon draws an analogy between the American states and the republic of ancient Israel. The analogy is doing more than rhetorical work: it locates the American project within a longer story of free peoples constituted by law and accountable to a higher order. What is gained, and what is risked, by understanding America in those terms? Does the analogy invite a kind of providential hubris, or does it impose a discipline of self-examination — judging the nation by the standards it claims for itself?