Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This is the most interesting essay of this collection so far. Wood states a bold thesis to begin: We have repeatedly pictured the Founders, as we call them, as men of vision -- bold, original, open-minded, enlightened men who deliberately created what William Gladstone once called "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the hand and purpose of man." We have described them as men who knew where the future lay and went for it... In contrast, we have usually viewed the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, as very tame and timid, narrow-minded and parochial men of no imagination and little faith, caught up in the ideological rigidities of the past  -- inflexible, suspicious men unable to look ahead and see where the United States was going. The Anti-Federalists seen forever doomed to be losers, bypassed by history and eternally disgraced by their opposition to the greatest Constitutional achievement in our nation's history. But maybe...

Many politicians campaign based on getting back to "the America of the Founders": that America, of course, interpreted through the lens of their own political position. But the thing is, there never was any "America of the Founders," except in their minds: the actual polity immediately began diverging from their vision: The American leaders may have begun their Revolution trying to recover an idealized and vanished Roman republic, but they soon realized that they had unleashed forces that were carrying them and their society much further than they had anticipated. Instead of becoming a new and grand incarnation of ancient Rome, a land of virtuous and contented farmers, America within decades of the Declaration of Independence had become a sprawling, materialistic and licentious popular democracy unlike any state that had ever existed. (p. 75) The world you imagine your revolution will bring about is never the world it actually brings about!

If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century, it was ancient Rome -- republican Rome -- and the values that flowed from its history. It was ancient Rome's legacy that helped to make the late eighteenth century's apparently sudden transition to republicanism possible... If the Enlightenment was to discover the sources of a flourishing society and human happiness, it was important to learn what lay behind the ascendency of republican Rome and its eventual decline and fall. The French and American revolutionaries' view of the past was therefore very selective, focusing on the moral and social basis of politics and on social degeneracy and corruption. Since the eighteenth century believed "similar causes will forever operate like effects in the political, moral, and physical world," the history of the ancient world inevitably became a kind of laboratory in which autopsies of the dead republics, especially Rome, would l...

Sometimes, it might appear that there is a gulf separating the way pro-Paul and anti-Paul people judge the Texas congressman. The pro-Paul people say, "Ron Paul is a man in the mold of this nation's founders, a true defender of the views that formed this Republic!" The anti-forces say, "Are you kidding? Ron Paul is a nut job, a person who believes completely absurd things about there being massive, dark conspiracies to rob us of our liberty." Well, folks, if I am one thing, it is a uniter not a fighter, so I'm here to say, you can both be right, because... the founders also generally believed completely absurd things about there being massive, dark conspiracies to rob them of their liberty! Although I don't think this will get into the high school history books anytime soon, I do believe this is now generally recognized by the experts in the field, people like Pocock, Bailyn, and Wood. Here is Wood: [The rebels thought that] the Tories were a...

"Although emphasizing the importance of economic liberty, the American founders were not property rights absolutists. The framers would have been dumbstruck by the idea, common among later libertarians, that property must never be impinged, regulated, or taxed by the government in any way. Instead, the framers thought the government could intervene in the economic sphere for a variety of social purposes." -- John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness , p. 14