Myths About the Enlightenment That Get the American Founding Wrong

There is a story that gets told in a lot of lecture halls, and it goes like this. A group of skeptical, rationalist gentlemen read the French philosophers, lost their faith in tradition and Scripture, and built a secular machine of government out of pure reason. The Constitution, on this telling, is a Paris salon with a Philadelphia address.

It is a wonderful story. It flatters a certain kind of professor, it comforts a certain kind of skeptic, and it has one small defect: it does not match what the Founders wrote, read or said. I want to take seven of its claims and put each one on the table next to the evidence. Here is the method. State the claim. Give it the best case its defenders can make. Test it against the primary record. Render a verdict.

First, a definition, because the word "Enlightenment" does a lot of dishonest work. There was no single Enlightenment. There was a French one, anti-clerical, abstract and often hostile to inherited institutions. There was a Scottish one, empirical, moral and friendly to commerce, custom and common sense. There was an English one that grew out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the common law. And there was a religious Enlightenment among Protestant divines on both sides of the Atlantic. The Founders drew heavily on the second, third and fourth. They read the first with caution, and some of them with alarm.

Myth one: the Founders were children of the French Enlightenment

The claim: the American Revolution and the French Revolution were twins, products of the same philosophy.

The best case for it: the dates are close, the vocabulary overlaps ("liberty," "equality," "rights of man"), Jefferson served as minister to France from 1785 to 1789 and admired the early revolution, and Lafayette fought with Washington.

The record: the Constitution was drafted in the summer of 1787, two years before the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789. Its authors had no French Revolution to learn from. What they had was the experience of thirteen colonial legislatures, a decade of state constitution-making, the failure of the Articles of Confederation and a deep reading in English law and ancient history. When the French Revolution turned to terror, the Federalists drew exactly the opposite lesson from the one the myth would predict: that a revolution built on abstract principle and animated by hatred of the old order devours itself.

The cleanest test is how the two revolutions ended. The American one produced a written constitution that has operated since 1789. The French one produced a republic, a Terror, a consulate and an emperor within about fifteen years. Siblings do not usually diverge like that. The verdict: false. The American Revolution was a defense of inherited English rights; the French was an attempt to start history over.

Myth two: Rousseau inspired the Constitution

The claim: the idea of popular sovereignty came from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762.

The best case for it: Rousseau is about the people ruling themselves, and so is the Constitution's preamble.

The record: Rousseau's central concept is the "general will," a collective will that is always right and to which individuals must submit, and that can "force a man to be free." That is a description of unlimited power with a democratic label on it, and it is the thing the framers spent the summer of 1787 trying to prevent. Their whole design is built on the opposite assumption, that majorities and individuals have different interests, that no body of men is trustworthy with undivided power, and that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Madison's Federalist 51 says it in a line: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

Rousseau also believed that representation was a betrayal of true sovereignty and that real democracy works only in small, homogeneous cities. Madison argued in Federalist 10 for the reverse: that a large, diverse republic, governed through representatives, is the best protection against faction. Where Rousseau saw the problem, Madison saw the solution. You will search the Convention debates and the Federalist Papers in vain for Rousseau as an authority. The verdict: false, and almost backwards. The Constitution is a rebuttal to the general will. For more on that idea, see Rousseau's General Will Is the Idea Behind Every Power Grab for the People.

Myth three: Locke was a radical secularist

The claim: John Locke grounded government in reason alone, cutting God and tradition out of politics.

The best case for it: Locke does argue from reason, and he separates church from the civil magistrate in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).

The record: Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) is soaked in theology. Its argument for natural equality rests on the claim that human beings are "the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker" and "his property, whose workmanship they are." The natural law, for Locke, is God's law known by reason. He wrote a lengthy work, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), arguing that the Gospels are the most reasonable account of the moral life. He also spent his political writing arguing from the Hebrew Scriptures against the divine right of kings: the first of his Two Treatises is a point-by-point demolition of Robert Filmer's use of the Bible.

Locke's politics are not radical either. His revolution was a defense of the English constitution as it stood after 1688, a restoration of ancient rights against a king who had broken them. The Founders read him as a defender of rights that preceded government and of a God who stood behind them. The verdict: false. Locke was a Christian writing for a Christian country. See Consent of the Governed Was a Precise Idea in Locke, Not a Slogan for the precise shape of his argument.

Myth four: Jefferson's deism made the Founding secular

The claim: Jefferson was a deist, Jefferson wrote the Declaration, so the Declaration is a deist document.

The best case for it: Jefferson did doubt miracles, edited the Gospels to remove them, and wrote of "a wall of separation between church and state" in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.

The record: the Declaration was a committee product, edited by Congress, and read for what it says. It invokes "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," asserts that men are "endowed by their Creator" with unalienable rights, appeals to "the Supreme Judge of the world" for the rectitude of the cause, and closes with "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." Four references to God in one short text. Those phrases were adopted by a Congress made up of men from many churches, and the vast majority of them were orthodox in their various denominations.

And Jefferson is the outlier. Washington's Farewell Address says that religion and morality are "indispensable supports" of political prosperity. John Adams wrote in 1798 that the Constitution "was made only for a moral and religious people." Many of the signers were active churchmen, and one, John Witherspoon of Princeton, was a Presbyterian minister. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that "religion, morality, and knowledge" are necessary to good government. The verdict: false. Even if Jefferson were as secular as the myth requires, he did not write the Constitution, and he was not even in the country when it was drafted. See Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable.

Myth five: the Founders ignored the ancients

The claim: the Founders were modern men who threw out the classical inheritance in favor of new science.

The record: the opposite is nearer the truth. The educated men of the Founding read Latin and often Greek. The pen names they wrote under tell the story: Publius, the name Hamilton, Madison and Jay signed to The Federalist, honored a Roman consul who helped found the Republic; Cato and Brutus recalled Roman opponents of tyranny. The Convention debates are full of Greek leagues and the fate of Rome. Madison prepared for the summer of 1787 by studying ancient and modern confederacies. Aristotle's mixed constitution and Polybius's theory of checks shaped how the Founders thought about balancing the one, the few and the many. Cicero was among the Romans they read most. See Aristotle Said the Best Republic Rests on a Large Middle Class for one thread of this.

The Founders were certainly modern in one respect: they believed that a new science of politics, built on representation, federalism and separated powers, could cure old diseases. Madison says as much in Federalist 9. But the tools they used had ancient roots, and their goal, a republic of virtuous and self-governing citizens, was classical to the bone. The verdict: false.

Myth six: the Founding was a project of reason against tradition

The claim: the Founders swept away inherited institutions in favor of rational design.

The record: look at what they kept. They kept the common law, which every state adopted in some form. They kept trial by jury, habeas corpus, the grand jury, the right to petition, the bicameral legislature and a good deal of the language of Magna Carta. The Seventh Amendment is explicit: "the rules of the common law." The Declaration's list of grievances charges the King not with being old-fashioned but with violating the established rights of Englishmen.

The Founders also understood that reason has limits. Madison argued in Federalist 14 that the new form of government should not be rejected merely because it was a novelty, and that the plan had to be judged against the lessons of experience, and in Federalist 37 he admitted that "a faultless plan was not to be expected" from a body of fallible men. Patrick Henry's famous line, as William Wirt reconstructed it in 1817, "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience," points in the same direction. Burke's theory of an inherited constitution found its natural audience in America. See Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing. The verdict: false. The Founders were reformers within a tradition, not demolition contractors.

Myth seven: we do not know what the Founders read

The claim: arguments about influence are guesswork, so anyone can claim the Founders for his own philosophy.

This is the lazy myth, the one that lets everyone off the hook, and it has a decisive answer. In 1984 the political scientist Donald Lutz published a study in the American Political Science Review that counted the sources cited in a large body of American political writing between 1760 and 1805: pamphlets, newspaper essays, convention debates and sermons. As the study is widely reported, the most frequently cited source was the Bible, followed among European thinkers by Montesquieu, Blackstone and Locke. Critics point out that reprinted sermons supply much of the biblical count, and Lutz's own conclusion was that no single European writer or tradition dominated American thought. Neither point rescues the myth of a Paris-made Founding.

Lutz's count is imperfect, as any such count must be, and his method has critics. But the broad shape of the finding matches everything else we know: the Founders cited Scripture, English law, Montesquieu on the separation of powers, and Locke on rights. Montesquieu, incidentally, was French, and that is a fair complication. He was a French nobleman and a lawyer who admired the English constitution and spent his Spirit of the Laws (1748) arguing for checks and balances, a very different project from Rousseau's. Federalist 47 calls him "the oracle who is always consulted and cited" on the separation of powers. The verdict: the evidence is not silent. It is quite clear, and it points away from Paris.

The strongest objection, answered

A fair-minded critic will say: you have shown the Founders were not Jacobins. But Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, consent and the limits of authority plainly did shape the Founding. Isn't that the whole point of calling it Enlightened?

Yes, and I concede it. Three points explain what the concession does and does not mean.

1. The ideas the critic names, natural rights, consent, limited government and the rule of law, are older than the Enlightenment. They grow from Magna Carta in 1215, from the medieval natural law tradition of Aquinas and Cicero, from the English common law and from the Protestant theory of conscience.
2. The Enlightenment that mattered to the Founders was the one that defended those inherited ideas, not the one that mocked them. The Scottish and English schools asked how to secure liberty under law. The French radical schools often asked how to remake man.
3. What made the American result so unusual is the combination: rights and religion, reason and custom, new institutions and old law. Strip out any one of these and the structure falls. A purely rationalist Founding would not have lasted; a purely traditionalist one would not have been a republic.

Why it matters now

This is not antiquarian bickering. If the Founding was a secular rationalist experiment, then each generation of experts is entitled to redesign the machine, and the Constitution is a user manual that the clever may revise. If the Founding was an inheritance, carried by a people who believed in a moral order, then our task is stewardship: to understand what was built and why, and to repair it without discarding the foundations. The first view invites the expert class. The second asks for citizens.

The case in brief

1. The American Founding drew on Scottish, English, classical and Protestant sources far more than on French radical philosophy, and the Constitution was written before the French Revolution began.
2. Rousseau's general will is the thing the framers designed against; Locke wrote as a Christian defender of an inherited constitution; Jefferson's private doubts do not describe the men who drafted and ratified the Constitution.
3. The Founders kept the common law, the jury, the bicameral legislature and a Bible-saturated political vocabulary, which is not what rationalist demolition looks like.
4. The best evidence, Lutz's count of what the Founders actually cited, puts the Bible, Montesquieu, Blackstone and Locke at the top.
5. Reading the Founding as an inheritance rather than an experiment changes what citizens owe it: stewardship rather than redesign.

What you can do: pick one Federalist paper from the Constitution page and read its first paragraph; note every writer or historical example it cites, and see where each one comes from.