The third week of Political Studies will engage key texts that have helped shape the political idea—and political ideals—of America.

The first section will explore the political significance of the year 1776 through a remarkable set of contributions to political theory: books by Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, pamphlets by Thomas Paine and Richard Price, poems by Phillis Wheatley—and, of course, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

The second section will engage the ideas of modern liberal democracy, exploring how the American system has sought to balance the deepest themes of ancient political thought against the imperatives of individual freedom, security, and economic progress that are so central to modern liberal thought.

Image: Allyn Cox, The Declaration of Independence, 1776

Ryan Hanley on Adam Smith

This course is part of our residential Political Studies Program. Fellows participate in morning seminars and meet prominent men and women in public life over afternoon and evening sessions. Up to 32 fellows will be selected.

Faculty

Ryan P. Hanley

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment. He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life and Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity.

Ryan P. Hanley

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Previously, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment.

He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton University Press, 2019), Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His edited volumes include Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2016), the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin, 2010), and with Darrin M. McMahon, The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in History, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2010).

His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, Review of Politics, Social Philosophy & Policy, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Revue internationale de philosophie, and Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.

Professor Hanley received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Phil. from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Prior to Marquette, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center.

Wilfred M. McClay

Wilfred M. McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. His book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, received the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history.

Wilfred M. McClay

Wilfred M. McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. Before coming to Hillsdale in the fall of 2021, he was the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty.

His book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, received the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books is The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Public Life in Modern America, and Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.

He served for eleven years on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently is a member of the U.S. Commission on the Semiquincentennial, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026.

He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, and served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Rome. He is a graduate of St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University.

Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session

Readings:

  • Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Selections

Discussion Questions:

    1. What distinction does Paine draw between “society” and “government”?  Where exactly does he think government comes from?  What does he think is the proper end or purpose of government?
    2. Why does Paine begin Part Two by insisting that men were “originally equals in the order of creation”?  What significance does this claim have for his argument?
    3. Why does Paine appeal to both Biblical history and English history? What do these reveal about the nature of monarchical government?
    4. What does Paine mean when he says that Great Britain’s motive in keeping the colonies “was interest and not attachment”?  What does he mean by “interest”?  Why is this significant for his argument?
    5. In what does Paine think the “true interest of America” and the “true interest of this continent” consists?  What does he mean by “interest” here?  According to Paine, how will independence advance these interests?
    6. Is pursuing self-interest always a good thing, according to Paine?  What challenges does the pursuit of self-interest through commerce pose?  How does his vision of these challenges shape his argument as to why the American colonies should not delay their claims of independence?

Readings:

  • Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Selections

Discussion Questions:

  1. What are the four types of liberty that Price identifies?  What does he mean when he says that the “one general idea” that runs through them all is “self-direction, or self-government”?  How does this fundamental idea manifest itself in each of the four types of liberty?
  2. How does Price’s understanding of self-government particularly shape his concept of civil liberty?  What sorts of political institutions and practices are justified on the basis of self-government?  What sorts of political institutions and practices are precluded?
  3. Can one country ever exert legitimate authority over a free people in another country, according to Price?  Why or why not?  Is there any sense in which Britain’s proposal to maintain this power through war could be considered a just war?
  4. How does Price explain Britain’s decision to fight to hold the American colonies?  To what degree does he attribute this to the “love of power inherent in human nature”?  To what degree does he attribute it to the love of revenge?
  5. Does Price think it is in fact in Britain’s interests to continue to hold the American colonies?   In what specific ways does Price think Britain has violated its own interests in its conduct towards America?
  6. Does Price consider the war with America honorable?  On which side does he think honor lies, and why?  What does he predict will be the effect on Britain’s honor of a possible military defeat in America?

Readings:

  • Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Preface, Ch. 1–3 (pp. v–viii and 1–84)

Discussion Questions:

  1. What are the defining characteristics of the Romans and their government at the height of their excellence, according to Gibbon?  What kind of moderation especially distinguishes them?
  2. What qualities define the non-Roman “barbarians” in this period?  What value do they place on freedom?  How does their attitude towards freedom compare to the attitude of the Romans?
  3. What does Gibbon find distinctive in the Roman attitude towards religion?  Towards war?  Towards patriotism?  Towards wealth and opulence?
  4. What does Gibbon mean when he says that the Roman constitution was in fact “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth” (p. 69)? In what relationship did the senate and the emperor stand in this period?  Why does Gibbon emphasize this relationship?

Readings:

  • Smith, Wealth of Nations, Introduction and Plan, Book 1, Ch. 1–2 and Book 4, Ch. 7, Part 3

Discussion Questions:

  1. What contrast does Smith draw between “savage” and “civilized” society in his introduction?  On what grounds does he consider civilized society superior?
  2. Smith begins the first chapter with the story of the pin factory and ends it with the story of the global supply chain behind ordinary objects.  What is the point of these two stories?  What elements do they share in common?
  3. Smith says in the beginning of Chapter 2 that market orders are “not originally the effect of human wisdom.”  What then accounts for their regularity?  What light might the story of the butcher, brewer and baker shed on this?
  4. Who does Smith think is hurt by the mother country’s monopoly on trade with its colonies?  Who, if anyone, is benefited?  How does Smith challenge ordinary understandings of these issues?
  5. How does the current system contrast with what Smith recommends?  What would it take to institute a system of “perfect liberty” (p. 210)?  How does Smith think such a system is best instituted?
  6. What explanation does Smith give for American resistance to British rule?  Why does he think that the simple idea of taxation without representation doesn’t explain it?  Why does he turn to issues that we might associate today with psychology?

Readings:

  • Phillis Wheatley, “To His Excellency, George Washington” and “Liberty and Peace”
  • Declaration of Independence (rough drafts and final draft)
  • Hannah Cowley, The Runaway

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why does Wheatley so admire George Washington?  In what ways does she consider him an example of virtue?  What does she specifically admire in his devotion to the cause of America?
  2. How does Wheatley understand liberty?  What relationship does she emphasize between liberty and peace?
  3. How does the Declaration understand human nature, and how does it present the role of government in light of this conception of human nature?  How does this understanding of government’s powers and duties compare to those of other authors we’ve read in this course?
  4. The Declaration accuses King George III of seeking to establish “absolute despotism” and “absolute tyranny.”  On what specific grounds?  Are any of the enumerated reasons more or less compelling than others?
  5. Which specific characters does Cowley present as especially admirable, and on what grounds?  Which specific characters does she present as especially detestable, and on what grounds?
  6. Several different characters in these opening acts describe themselves and others as either “tyrants” or “slaves.”  Which characters are given these labels?  On what grounds?  How do these portraits of tyranny and slavery compare to others that we’ve met in the course?
  7. How is the play’s happy ending brought about?  In what ways can the relationships that are cemented by the end of the play be understood through the lens of liberty and independence?

Readings:

  • Plutarch, Selection from “Life of Lycurgus”
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, Part 1, Ch. 2, pp. 27–44
  • Edmund Burke, Selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France and Letters on a Regicide Peace
  • The Federalist, Excerpts from Nos. 1, 14, & 38

Discussion Questions:

    1. Would you like to live in Lycurgus’s Sparta? In the colonial New England Puritan regime described by Tocqueville? How do these systems differ from America’s form of liberal democracy?
    2. Alexander Hamilton asks in Federalist 1 whether it is possible to establish good government by “reflection and choice,” or whether men are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on “accident and force.” Does Edmund Burke suggest that accident may be preferable to choice and that founding is something best to avoid?
    3. In what way do America’s founders believe that they made “improvements” on the ancient mode of “preparing and establishing regular plans of government” (Federalist 38)? Were Madison et al. seeking to replace Lycurgus as the greatest of founders?

Readings:

  • John Locke, Selections from Second Treatise on Government
  • James Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved”
  • John Dickinson, “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer”
  • Declaration of Independence
  • Jefferson, Excerpts, Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825; John Cartwright, June 5, 1824; Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826

Discussion Questions:

  1. What was the basis of the colonists’ objections to the British government and rule prior to the Revolutionary War?
  2. What do these authors mean when they refer to a state of nature and natural rights?
  3. Why is taxation without representation wrong? What does Dickinson mean by “slavery”?
  4. The ultimate ground or foundation to which the Declaration appeals is stated to be the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God; what were the possible alternative foundations, as mentioned in the letter to John Cartwright? What are the implications of making “nature” the main foundation?
  5. What does the Declaration mean by a natural right to liberty? By the truth that “all men are created equal?”

 

Readings:

  • Hamilton, Jay, Madison, Federalist Papers, Nos. 10 & 51
  • Brutus: “Federal v. Consolidated Government”
  • Centinel, “Argument Against an Extended Republic”
  • Articles of Confederation (skim over quickly)
  • Madison’s Personal Note, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” April 1787
  • S. Constitution, Articles I–IV
  • Herbert Storing, Chapter III, What the Anti-Federalists Were For
  • Federalist Papers, Excerpts from Nos. 15 & 23
  • Martin Diamond, Excerpt from “Ethics and Politics: The American Way”

Discussion Questions:

  1. What type of citizen is necessary in the new republic?
  2. Why is the “extended republic” of the Constitution an innovation?
  3. What were some of the main objections to the Constitution?
  4. What were the Federalists’ chief arguments against the Articles of Confederation?
  5. Why study the Anti-Federalists? Have the fears of the Anti-Federalists been borne out?

Readings:

  • Thomas Jefferson, (excerpt), Letter to John Cartwright, June 5, 1824
  • Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789
  • Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816
  • Federalist, No. 49
  • S. Constitution, Article V

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is a written constitution? How did it revolutionize the relationship between government and the people? For good or for ill?
  2. Is it a wise idea to “sunset” the Constitution every generation?
  3. Should a constitution be rigid (i.e., difficult to amend) or flexible (i.e., easily amendable, such as by permitting amendments to be approved on a mere majority vote of the legislature and citizenry, empowering the people to initiate constitutional changes, and requiring a periodic popular vote on calling a revision convention)?

Readings:

  • First Amendment
  • Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance
  • Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation
  • Washington, Note to Touro Synagogue
  • Washington, Note to Quakers
  • S. v. Reynolds (1878)
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)
  • Lee v. Weisman (1992)

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why, in Madison’s view, is a separation of church and state good for religion?
  2. Taken together, do the three selections from Washington add up to a coherent view of the role of the state in relation to religion?
  3. You are a member of the Supreme Court. How would you decide each of the three cases?

 

Readings:

  • First Amendment
  • Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance
  • Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation
  • Washington, Note to Touro Synagogue
  • Washington, Note to Quakers
  • S. v. Reynolds (1878)
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)
  • Lee v. Weisman (1992)

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why, in Madison’s view, is a separation of church and state good for religion?
  2. Taken together, do the three selections from Washington add up to a coherent view of the role of the state in relation to religion?
  3. You are a member of the Supreme Court. How would you decide each of the three cases?

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Justin Driver

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes on constitutional law and is the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. He has written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In 2021, President Biden appointed Driver to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2024, President Biden appointed him to serve on the U.S. Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.

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Adam J. White

Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.

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Robert C. Bartlett

Robert C. Bartlett is the Behrakis Professor of Hellenic Political Studies at Boston College. His principal area of research is classical political philosophy, with particular attention to the thinkers of ancient Hellas, including Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. He is the co-translator of a new edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.