The U.S.A. Culture
ABSTRACT
In the following paper, you will find an informative description of the birth and development of the United States of America. This birth was born from a project called the American Enlightment Project and sculpted the culture that we are part of today. You will learn of the individuals whom were a part of this project along with the contract that made our political structure, economy, and social society possible.
The American Enlightenment occurred during the eighteenth century among thinkers in British North America and United States and was based on the idea of bringing light to the Dark Age. In the American context, thinkers such as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin invented and adopted revolutionary ideas about rationality, religious acceptance and political organization that would affect the development of the new becoming nation. They combined science and religion known as deism, asserted the natural rights of man in the doctrine of liberalism, and expressed ideology of harvesting virtue,
enlightened leadership and community through republican thinking. The resulting six beliefs into American Enlightenment thinking were deism, liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, toleration and scientific progress. The Englishman Thomas Paine wrote the famous pamphlet The Rights of Man which described the abuses of the North American colonies under the leadership of their English masters. This would cause a revolution that shaped a new system of government on liberal and republican principles. These principles and ideas are documented in such works as the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the United States Constitution.
American Enlightenment had reached its latest stage by1780 ending with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. This began the rise of the Four American Enlightenment Thinkers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams. They would begin the American Enlightenment. European and American figures were critical of democracy. Skeptical of democratic institutions, Plato believed that democracy led to tyranny. Aristotle believed that democracy was the absolute worst form of government. John Adams and James Madison pushed the idea that to invest too much political power into the uneducated and property-less people would put society at risk of social and political turmoil. Although several condemned democracy, others were supportive to the idea of popular rule known from earlier European social contract theories. Thomas Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke’s social contract theory.
Thomas Paine followed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. In the Two Treatises on Government dated 1689 and 1690, Locke argued against the divine right of kings. His belief was in government grounded on the consent of the governed as long as the people agreed to hand over some of their liberties which were exchanged for the protection of basic rights to life, liberty and property. On the other hand, if the state defaulted contract by failing to protect the citizen’s natural rights, the people would have a right to revolt and form a new government. The more democratic Rousseau insisted in The Social Contract dated 1762 that allowed citizens to have a right of self- government. This allowed for them to choose the enforcing rules that they would govern their lives by along with the judges they wanted enforcing those rules. If the relationship between the will of the state and the will of the people is to be democratic, mediation should be held to only a few institutions.
The claim that private individuals have fundamental God-given rights, such as to property, life, liberty and to pursue their conception of good, began with John Locke, but continued in the expression of Thomas Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, guarantees a schedule of individual rights based on the liberal ideal. The Jefferson Memorial records how Thomas Jefferson viewed constitutions: “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.” As cited in (The Creation of the American Republic, Wood, G.,University of North Carolina Press, 1969.)
During the constitutional convention, James Madison responded to the anti-Federalists’ demand for a bill of rights as a condition of ratification of a list of twelve suggested amendments to the Constitution such as free speech, religious liberty, right to bear arms, habeas corpus and so on. In 1791, however, ten of them were ratified but one would not be ratified until 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. Heralded as the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison was a man of letters, a politician, a scientist and a diplomat who left an enduring legacy on America.
He jointly authored The Federalist Papers with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Madison’s worry that the Bill of Rights shouldn’t apply only to the Federal government would be corrected with the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 as cited in (The American Enlightenment, Ferguson, R., Harvard University Press, 1997.)
Classical republicanism is a belief that a nation ought to be ruled as a republic, in which meant the highest public official be determined by a general election instead of hereditary right.
American Enlightenment followed the belief that society should be controlled by a higher political head which was also the ideology of the Republicans. The Jeffersonian idealism represented the eighteenth-century American as both a hard-working agrarian and as a citizen- soldier devoted to the republic. George Washington famously protested a royal title and chose the republican title of President. Conservatism emerged in the last stage of the Enlightenment, mainly as a reaction to the French Revolution. Conservatives attacked social contracts believing them as mythical. Conservatism was strongly instilled in American Enlightenment thinking.
American Enlightenment thinkers like James Madison and John Adams criticized the rise of revolutionary France. In the forty-ninth Federalist Paper, James Madison deployed a conservative argument against frequent appeals to democratic publics on constitutional questions. Madison’s conservative view was opposed to Jefferson’s liberal view that a constitutional convention should be convened every twenty years.as cited in (http://www.iep.utm.edu/amer-enl/html.)
For America’s founders, the fledgling nation was to be a land where persons of every faith or no faith could settle and thrive peacefully and cooperatively without fear of persecution by government or fellow citizens. Ben Franklin’s belief in religion led him to donate funds to every church in Philadelphia. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson drafted a religious liberty bill for Virginia to disestablish the government-sponsored Anglican Church—often referred to as “the precursor to the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment” was later passed with the help of Madison.
Before the revolution, the scientists and philosophers belonged to the Royal Society until 1768. This is when Benjamin Franklin helped create and then served as the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became one of the most famous American scientists during the Enlightenment period due to his inventions and work on the properties of electricity. John Adams was also a founder, statesman, diplomat and eventual President who contributed to American Enlightenment thought. Among his political writings, three stand out: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1776), A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Against the Attack of M. Turgot (1787-8), and Discourses on Davila (1791). Adams writes: “Consider that government is intended to set bounds to passions which nature has not limited; and to assist reason, conscience, justice, and truth in controlling interests which, without it, would be as unjust as uncontrollable” as cited in (http://www.iep.utm.edu).
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What in recent times has been characterized as the ‘Enlightenment project’ is the general idea that human rationality can and should be made to serve ethical and humanistic ends? The American Enlightenment project signifies how America has taken a leading role in promoting Enlightenment ideals during that period and promoting a belief of “social contract” which has been used and enforced by philosophers like Plato, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes as an explanation for the origins of society, justification for the social structures, and as justification for the nature of society as opposed to other social systems. The concept is that any human whom is living independently should freely choose to bind to each other in a social system. Each person should voluntarily surrender some of their independent freedoms in order to benefit from protection within a group or social structure. However, theorists have expressed the belief of a “social contract” to justify greater government involvement in people’s lives which is more evident in modern day America. According to John Rawls, society should be constructed from behind a “veil of ignorance” as cited in (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the American Republican Tradition, Pocock, J., 1975).
The Mayflower Compact of 1620 is often cited as one of the foundations of the US Constitution, which is understood to be the foundation and beginning creation of The United States of Americas as we know it today. There were 102 men, women, and children aboard who colonized Plymouth, formerly Massachusetts Bay. The colony declared themselves independent from any previous governing body and in turn created their own government under the compact which was a social contract agreement binding them to the new government’s laws in exchange for shared protection.
Our society today is stilled enforced under this social contract ideology. We as a society have stopped questioning where our rights have gone and why we are forced to adhere to certain
obligations and laws for what seem like no known factor. We continue to allow political rule from a “veil of ignorance” and accept what we are told is mandatory or without option. We operate under the provisions that the prisoners are subject to and yet no one has educated themselves as to why this is the case. We have lost the rights to defend ourselves from government involvement, we ultimately have no single handed control over the rights to our family and property mainly because through enforcement of the government, they inevitably own all American citizens whom contract under their social contract. This is why we have to apply for social security cards, birth certificates for our children which in turns give permission to the state to claim ownership, marriage licenses are contracts and so are driver’s license along with many more. IT baffles me that people don’t question these things and are so uneducated about why their rights in certain instances do not exist and how it is possible. Social contract may have sculpted our country at first but it has in my opinion forced a communistic rule on our society. We have a military and police state of control that allows for miniscule teetering or adjustment. We are constantly faced with a fear of a complete communistic takeover. Our people have been lied to for so long that they are blindsided and just compliant with all that is America now without giving another thought because of a “veil of ignorance” that was utilized well by the individuals with the majority of gain that come from these practices. Social contract will continue to increase until it takes all of the remaining rights that citizens have away. Without social contract, there is no government and I believe that would not be so bad.
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References
1. Ferguson, Robert A. The American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
2. Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, American Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu.
4. Pockock, John G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the American Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
5. Pockock, John G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the American Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975
