C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind
2019-12-02 · Guest: C. Bradley Thompson (Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism) · 51:55
Moral history of the American Revolution
Bob Zadek and C. Bradley Thompson explore the moral history of the American Revolution, focusing on the Declaration of Independence as a statement of universal natural rights. Thompson explains how the American “revolutionary mind” was forged through a discovery of human nature and later challenged by a “philosophical tsunami” of European ideas that prioritized the state over the individual.
Topics: American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, Natural Rights, Limited Government, Progressivism, C. Bradley Thompson, Political Philosophy, History of Liberty, John Locke, Woodrow Wilson
Speakers: Bob Zadek, C. Bradley Thompson
The American Idea [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are welcoming this morning the city of San Diego to the Bob Zadek network, if I may. Thanks a lot for joining us, city of San Diego. Hope you enjoy the show and remain listeners.
Have you ever wondered or thought about the following principle? The United States of America is, in the history of the planet, the only country which was formed around an idea. No other country before or after the formation of our country was formed to carry out moral, economic, and political principles. Other countries were formed because of borders, commonality of language or culture, or because they were simply there, or because those in control had more power than those around them. No other country has been formed around a series of moral principles. And yet here we are, 240 years later, and it’s easy to despair that we are losing the very moral foundations that gave us our country in 1788.
This morning’s guest, Bradley Thompson, has written an important, wonderful book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, the Declaration being, of course, the Declaration of Independence. And I’ve asked Bradley to join us this morning to remind us how we got here, where we are, and what we must keep in our collective minds if we are to continue the principles on which we are founded. Bradley, thank you so much for joining us this morning and sharing with us what you have learned and what you are teaching your readership in this important book.
C. Bradley Thompson: Bob, thank you very much, and I’m delighted to be here today with you and your audience.
The Clemson Institute and Lyceum Scholars [01:01]
Bob Zadek: And Bradley teaches political theory and American studies in the Institute for Leadership in the Americas. He’s the BB&T Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson, and of great importance, he’s the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. Now, I don’t want to take up too much of our time, but Bradley, if you could just explain to our audience, what is the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism? And I ask you to do that because it’s easy, as for me and for many others who are not on college campuses, to despair about what is happening on college campuses in relation to our founding principles—freedom of speech, capitalism, free markets, and the like. And when I learned about institutes such as yours, it gives me and it will give our listeners hope. So before we get into the book itself, Bradley, and what you have learned, tell us a bit about the Institute.
C. Bradley Thompson: Sure. We are America’s premier university-based teaching and research center dedicated to exploring the moral foundations of capitalism. There are a lot of university-based think tanks concerned with exploring the economics of free market economies, but we focus on the moral foundations, which I think distinguishes us from every other similar kind of program in the country. And our premier academic program is something called the Lyceum Scholars Program, which uses a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American founding, and the principles of moral character. And to your audience, I would say if you have any high school students who are interested in these ideas and that approach to intellectual life, please come to our website at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and look at the Lyceum program and encourage your high school son or daughter to apply to the Lyceum Scholars Program.
The Discovery of Natural Rights [02:41]
Bob Zadek: And Bradley, when you say “the history of liberty,” the thought that occurred to me is that phrase, “the history of liberty,” reminds us all that there was a time that liberty simply didn’t exist. When you say “the history” of an idea, a concept—that means there was a time when it never existed at all on Earth. So, and that’s an important reminder that if there was a time that liberty didn’t exist, there can be a time that it will not exist in the future. And therefore, it prevents us from taking liberty for granted. So that phrase has a strong message attached to it.
Now, in your book and in the Declaration, which we will be referring to throughout this discussion, is the very important concept of rights. And the reason I focus on that word is because in political debate, the concept of rights has been, dare I say, cheapened. And some observers have said just because individuals want something doesn’t mean they have a right to it. So rights are special things. And rights were—the concept of rights was important in Locke’s writings, which was the basis, many observe and it’s true of course, of the Declaration and of the structure of our political system. So let’s start, just to get us into the conversation, with the concept of rights, because we will be referring to it throughout the hour.
C. Bradley Thompson: Yeah, I’d be happy to. So for most of human history, governments have not recognized the idea of rights. This notion of rights, however, did begin to develop in the English-speaking world in the 1300s, but mostly in the form of what we might call the “rights of Englishmen.” And so in 1764, at the very beginning of the imperial crisis that would then launch the American Revolution, even liberty-loving colonial Americans believed in the concept of the rights of Englishmen. But this idea is unique to the people of England, and at the premise of this idea of the rights of Englishmen is the notion that rights are attached to particular peoples at particular times.
And I think at the deepest level of what the American Revolution was all about was the Americans’ claim that no, rights are natural, that there are rights of man that transcend place and time. And in many ways, at the very heart of the American Revolution, beginning in 1765 with the Stamp Act, the Americans appealed not to the rights of Englishmen, which they had before always appealed to, but to the rights of nature, or the rights of man, or man’s natural rights. And I think that is the most important moral revolution of the 18th century, because it’s this idea of individuals having natural rights which would then not only free the American people, but then would also go on, for instance, to be at the heart and soul of the abolitionist and anti-slavery movement in the 19th century.
Bob Zadek: So the concept of—and what I think is important and you point out in your book—is that it’s not as if scholars sat down and thought up rights. What is important during the Enlightenment period, and reason started to triumph over superstition, that by the operation of the rational mind, rights—the rights that all humans have simply because of their humanness—were rights that were observed to exist by understanding how humans behave amongst one another. In other words, it wasn’t created artificially the way a statute might be created. A statute gives you the right to a check when you’re 65, but that’s not a natural right, of course. But certain rights transcend everything and are arrived at by observation of humanness. Therefore, they have a scientific, rational basis. It’s not like just what somebody or some ruler decided.
C. Bradley Thompson: I think that’s exactly right. Rights—this idea of natural rights—these are not created by government. These rights are, in a sense, they’re not inherent in man. It’s not like you can put a man through an MRI machine or open him up and find his natural rights. Rights are, in effect, a discovery. They are a discovery by examining human nature. So it begins with the idea of the individual as the primary unit of moral and political value. And it says that rights are necessary and objective requirements of human life.
And what that really means is that there is a natural standard of what is right and wrong for human beings in the way that they ought to live. Rights recognize, in effect, what man is—that is to say, that he’s a rational and volitional being. And these rights of nature, they define man’s moral requirements in a social context, given what man is. So rights recognize that it is necessary and right that man should be free to choose and pursue actions required to support his life. Rights say that it is necessary and right for man to freely exercise his rational faculty, that it’s necessary and right to act in order to acquire, keep, use, and dispose of one’s property, that it’s necessary and right to benefit or suffer from one’s own choices and actions in life. So rights are a discovery, and the concept of rights was discovered by Enlightenment philosophers, most notably John Locke, and then was institutionalized, I think first and most importantly, by America’s founding fathers.
The Purpose of Government [05:31]
Bob Zadek: And when you say “institutionalized,” that goes to the very formation of government. In other words, as many scholars, including of course you, have observed, there’s often a phrase that one hears: “rights first, government second.” The existence of rights preceded the existence of government. And if you just read—just read the plain words of the Declaration, which we will be discussing today, the Declaration teaches us that governments, which come after the realization, the discovery if you will, of rights—that governments were formed because it was essential that once we understand what rights humans have, those rights are fragile and must be protected. And they can best be protected by government. And that explains to the world why our country was formed. What was the purpose of the country? And Bradley, help us understand how clearly the Declaration sets that forth, that very simple principle: once we discover rights that exist, and we discover them through a rational analysis, then the next step is they are so important they must be protected. And that is the framework of the Declaration. So walk us through how the Declaration accomplishes that and what it teaches us.
C. Bradley Thompson: Sure. Well, I would say the first thing to know is that American revolutionaries didn’t all come to this idea of the rights of nature immediately during their conflict with British imperial officials. It was something that they came to over the course of a 10-year period before 1776. Now, there were some leading revolutionaries like the Adams cousins, John and Samuel, who from the very beginning started using the concept of the rights of nature. But most colonial Americans, you have to remember in 1765, they were British subjects and they were loyal British subjects, and they also believed in this concept of the rights of Englishmen.
But once the British government, beginning in 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act, started violating the rights of the Americans, and then through the Townshend and Tea Acts and then finally the Coercive Acts in 1774, the Americans launched an examination, a search for new principles on which to found their government. And the most important discovery was this idea that man’s natural rights, or the rights of nature, ought to be the moral foundation of government. And so in 1776, when they declared their independence, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson himself says, as the third self-evident truth of the Declaration, it says, quote, “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That means that the sole purpose of government is to secure man’s natural rights. It doesn’t say that the purpose of government is to provide men and women with free stuff. It doesn’t say the purpose of government is to make men good or virtuous. It simply says that to secure these rights, governments are instituted. That’s the sole purpose of government. And the kind of government that is created with that moral foundation would, by definition, be a limited government, a government that has narrow functions, a few functions, all three of which—the sole purpose of which—and the three functions of government would be to protect us from external force, foreign invaders; to protect us from criminals inside our nation, so you need a police force; and you need a court system to adjudicate disputes between conflicting individuals. That’s it. That’s the limited night-watchman kind of government that was promoted by America’s founding fathers, and it rests on the foundation of the objective, absolute, permanent, universal rights of man.
The Unholy Union of Pro-Slavery and Progressive Thought [06:31]
Bob Zadek: And what is so important is that given that limited purpose of government, that is not arbitrary. As Bradley has pointed out, that is founded upon rational, scientifically concluded principles of the relationship of humans to one another. What are the inherent rights of humans? So you start with that truth—and the word “truth” is in the Declaration—you start with that absolute, that truth. And therefore, any change in the role of government done well had better be founded on a more compelling truth than the truth on which our country was founded, rather than founded on, “Well, people deserve it,” or “There are some people who need,” or “There are social policies that it would be nice to accomplish.” That erosion of the moral and philosophical basis—that erosion was never based upon an equivalent, equally powerful truth. It was based simply upon the operation of the political system and the inherent power that government has been given. So there has been over time a clear—Bradley, don’t you agree, and we can discuss the reasons—an erosion of those founding principles, but the erosion is not based upon the same level, the absolute truths that the founding principles were.
C. Bradley Thompson: Oh, I think that’s exactly right, Bob. The first attack on the principles of the Declaration of Independence in American history, interestingly enough, begins in the late 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, when pro-slavery writers began to turn against the principles of the Declaration. They rejected the very idea that there could be absolute, certain, permanent truths. Instead, they adopted the ideas of 19th-century German philosophers like Hegel, who believed that history is changing, that manners and mores are changing, that in fact one’s rights are changing. And so along with their rejection of the principles of the Declaration, and more particularly their rejection of the Declaration’s first two truths, which are summed up in one word each—equality and rights—they did not believe that all men were created equal, and they did not believe in such a concept as natural rights. They believed that rights were specific to historical times and places, thereby justifying the institution of slavery.
The Rejection of Absolute Truth [07:31]
C. Bradley Thompson: Now, what’s really most interesting in American history is that in the late 19th and then in the early 20th centuries, progressive thinkers adopted a view of the Declaration of Independence that is virtually identical to that of the pro-slavery writers of the antebellum period. They rejected the idea of truth, right? So it is now said we live in a post-truth society. That idea of a post-truth society actually began in the late 19th century and then into the early 20th century with philosophers such as John Dewey and political thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, who, like the pro-slavery writers, rejected all the core principles of the Declaration of Independence, including truth, equality, and rights. And then with this transformation in the idea of rights, what you now get—what we got by the 1930s—is the idea that rights are rights to things, not the right to be free in order to act, in order to pursue one’s own interests, but rather we now, beginning in the 1930s, have a right to food, clothing, shelter, education, and then of course coming up into the 21st century, healthcare, etc., etc. This 20th and 21st-century notion of rights completely undermines and rejects the founders’ view of rights.
Bob Zadek: One of the things that was so instructive in your book is that parallel between the philosophical underpinnings of the pro-slavery thinkers in the 1830s and the like to the Progressive Era—Woodrow Wilson et al., Teddy Roosevelt perhaps—is how similar they are. And it almost sounds like, when you read the book, you start to get this scary feeling—it almost reads like a descent into the Dark Ages where reason is rejected in favor of something else, or at least the absence of reason.
And I want to close with a quote which I think was in your book, a Woodrow Wilson quote that was really scary. And Woodrow Wilson said in a speech—and remember, he was the president of Princeton, he was a president of the United States, he was up there intellectually—and he said, quote, “The signers of the Declaration did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own.” In other words, he challenged the intellectual honesty, the integrity of the founders. And that was—he represented maybe the very top of intellectual and political life in America at the time he said it. Kind of scary and Dark Ages-like in its concept. This is Bob Zadek, and I’m speaking with Professor Bradley Thompson. Bradley has written an important new book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Lots more to come. Please stay tuned. We’ll be back in 30 really short seconds.
The Philosophical Tsunami from Europe [11:11]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thank you so much for joining me this Sunday morning in my conversation with Bradley Thompson. Bradley has written America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Brad, help me understand, in your opinion, how did it happen? How did it become fashionable? What was the motivation for challenging the moral underpinnings of the American Revolution, of the Declaration of Independence, the principles of the Declaration, and therefore our founding principles? It seemed to me, given those principles and the country that was created to protect them, Americans had it all. It couldn’t get any better than that. Can you help us understand the dynamic of how, when you have it all, how it starts to slip away, including just listening to nothing other than the political discourse today in the upcoming presidential election? Nobody yearns for a returning to America’s founding principles. They are—nobody defends them. What’s happening?
C. Bradley Thompson: Well, this is a long and sordid history. I believe that ideas have consequences, and therefore any political, social, cultural change that you see in the United States is ultimately a result of a change of ideas, which means principally a change of the ideas that are taught in America’s universities. The rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, as I indicated earlier, began in the 1830s. And what the story really begins with is when the ideas of European, particularly German, philosophers were brought to America. And interestingly enough, it was the ideas of the German 19th-century philosopher Hegel who were initially brought to the United States by a Southerner, by a pro-slavery Southerner in the 1830s.
And pro-slavery intellectuals during the entire antebellum period became America’s first great advocates of this German philosophy, which rejected right down the line all of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And more particularly, the Southern intellectuals rejected the very idea of an absolute, certain, permanent, universal truth. They also accepted the ideas of socialism. Now, this is one of the truly great ironies in American history. Pro-slavery defenders like George Fitzhugh defended the peculiar institution on the grounds that it was, quote-unquote, “the beau ideal of communism.” The first pre-Marxian Marxists in America were pro-slavery writers. They were trenchant critics of limited government and of free market or laissez-faire capitalism.
And then in the post-Civil War period, a whole generation of American graduate students and intellectuals received their graduate training at European and more particularly German universities. And so there was a kind of philosophic tsunami that crashed upon American shores beginning in the 1870s that just brought in all of these ideas of Hegel, of Karl Marx, of Friedrich Nietzsche. And in one generation, they transformed America’s universities. And so that’s when you really get the strongest critique of not just the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but of the Constitution. So Woodrow Wilson, for instance, not only did he attack the principles of the Declaration, but also the principles of the Constitution as well. And in its place, and in place of the idea of a limited night-watchman government, they also imported the ideas of German statecraft, of the Prussian state. And so that’s when you get the first big movement in American intellectual and political life for the creation of a statist government.
The Spirit of Liberty and Moral Integrity [12:41]
Bob Zadek: But what I don’t understand is, in the founding era, the Americans—though they weren’t called Americans then, the colonists—had it pretty good as compared to the rest of the world. They weren’t sharecroppers. They had a relatively large amount of freedom. And yet they were willing to reject it all in favor of a world of—or a country where their natural rights were protected. They were intellectually free, they weren’t bound to support a particular religion. But they rejected a pretty good life under British rule as British subjects for something better. That was—they were highly motivated. When these ideas at the end of the 19th century start to get a toehold, why wasn’t there the same large group of Americans who said, “No, we want the same principles, we value them as much as the founding era”? Why was it so easy for America in that period to surrender—and maybe because it was gradual—to gradually surrender the moral principles on which the country was founded? Because for sure they were slipping away.
C. Bradley Thompson: Bob, this is a great question, and it’s one that I have been contemplating for the last 25 years. And unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to it. I mean, it is a fact that in the post-Civil War period, the ideas of the classical liberal tradition in America not only did they come under assault, but they also just imploded, they collapsed in on themselves. You cannot find any really great political thinkers in the post-Civil War era up through really up through World War II who defended the idea of the principles of the Declaration, of the Constitution, or more broadly speaking, of the classical liberal tradition. This is, I think, one of the great mysteries of our history, and I think it’s a great dissertation topic for some young graduate student out there who wants to try and solve that question.
But let me also say one other thing. You are absolutely correct. In 1765, the American colonists were at that time the freest and probably the wealthiest people anywhere in the world at that time, if not in the history of the world. And so the question is, how and why would they risk it all? And they were also, by the way, loyal subjects of the British crown. So how and why would they, you know, give it all up and risk it all in a battle against the world’s greatest military power? And I think it speaks to what I’ve called in my book the American spirit of liberty. I don’t think that there was a people anywhere in the world at that time or since that time that has genuinely appreciated and loved liberty as the Americans did in that time. And so if you think about it, the Stamp Act of 1765 really was in many ways a kind of small tax, but it served as a tripwire, a kind of intellectual and moral tripwire which triggered the Americans in defense of their liberty. And at every step along the way in that 10-year period between 1765 and 1775, up through the battles at Concord and Lexington, the Americans resisted every attempt by British imperial officials and the Parliament and the King to either impose taxes on them or to try and control and regulate their freedom or the ability to govern themselves.
The Word “Necessary” in the Declaration [14:01]
C. Bradley Thompson: And it’s, I think, in the end—I mean, if you consider, for instance, the very opening line of the Declaration of Independence, when it says, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” etc., etc. Now, the key word is “necessary.” Right? Why was it—why did the Americans think it was necessary? There’s a sense in which it wasn’t necessary. They didn’t have to; there was no one forcing them. But the point is this: the Americans believed that if you’re going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. They believed that there was an intimate relationship between moral theory, moral principles, and moral practice. And the virtue which connects them is the virtue of integrity. And so if I had to identify one virtue of America’s founding fathers which separated—has separated them from all other generations, it was the virtue of integrity. They connected their moral principles with moral action. And when the time came a decade later to declare their independence, they did it knowingly and they did it willingly, and they did it because it was the right thing to do.
Bob Zadek: And in your book, that was a wonderful discussion of that word “necessary.” And what you explain in the book is, when you say it’s necessary, that doesn’t make it optional. It’s an absolute. And “we hold these truths”—truth is an absolute—“to be self-evident.” It’s evident, no discussion. So the Declaration is such a self-confident statement. And that shows the commitment of at least the authors and then the colonies who rallied behind it. There wasn’t any doubt in their mind that this was the right thing to do. And the drafting made this so clear. There was a feeling of self-confidence that is stirring when you read it.
C. Bradley Thompson: No, I think that’s absolutely right. In fact, I like the phrase you’ve just used, “moral confidence,” and Bob, I have to tell you, I wish I’d used that in the book. That’s, I think, exactly right. American revolutionaries began with a kind of moral premise—what philosophers call a conditional imperative. It’s an “if-given-then” moral imperative. It says, “If you want to live in a free society, given the actions say of the British Parliament during that 10-year period between the Stamp Act and the Coercive Acts, then you must take the following steps in order to achieve or to keep your freedom.” And that is how and why, in the context of the Declaration of Independence, it was necessary for the Americans. Right? Their moral constitutions told them that it was necessary that they dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, as the Declaration says in its last sentence, to the sacred cause of liberty. And that’s precisely what they did, because there’s a sense, as you have just said and as I write in the book, that there’s nothing that says it’s necessary that you sacrifice or you dedicate your life and your principles. You have to choose that. Right? And it was—it in a sense, you could say, was optional, and many people, certainly the loyalists and a lot of people who didn’t—couldn’t make up their mind by 1776, they didn’t choose to support the American cause of liberty. But the fact of the matter is, those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the Continental Congress, for them, it was a moral necessity. Right? It’s as though they had no choice. Given their moral principles, it was absolutely necessary that they take these actions because they believed in the principles and in the life of a free society. And if you want that, then you have to dedicate—you have to dedicate your life and your honor and everything on defending that which they regarded to be absolutely true.
Restoring the Founders’ Vision [15:31]
Bob Zadek: And the signers of the Declaration could not have been more “all in” than that. Once you commit your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor, there’s not much else left. So every sentence of the Declaration—putting aside Jefferson’s indictment of the King, that was sort of a separate purpose—but the statements of principles were all—they were all in. It was absolute. This is it, no discussion, sign here. And I am always puzzled how we have—and this is one of my takeaways from the book—how we seem to have lost that, and how we get it back. That commitment to principle instead of, when we cheapen rights as you pointed out, to the right to cheap housing and the right to be paid more than you are worth or the right to free stuff. That cheapens to the point of oblivion the important concept of rights. And I am hopeful that institutes such as yours at Clemson will educate people so that the concept of rights gets its rightful—no pun intended—place in conversation. How do we get it back? How do we re-establish the concept of rights to its original meaning?
C. Bradley Thompson: Well, let me just first say in response to what you’ve just so eloquently said, and that is: we have to understand that there is no right to violate rights. So in other words, there is no right to food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, a free laptop, because that would require the redistribution of wealth, that would require that we violate somebody else’s rights. And no man is the slave—no man ought to be the slave of another. And if your rights are being violated to provide the false rights of somebody else, then there is a sense in which—so take healthcare, right? There is no right to force or enslave doctors to serve somebody else. It’s only a dictate of those who are in charge of government. But in nature, there is no such right.
Now, how do we restore the founders’ original understanding of rights? Well, I hope I can say without too much immodesty that it begins, I’d like to think, with books like mine. We have to re-appreciate and come to understand the principles of the American Revolution, how and why America’s founding fathers, for instance, developed this idea of the rights of nature. And what we need is a kind of intellectual revolution, because as I said earlier, ideas have consequences, and all ideas run through the universities in this country. And so we have to find some kind of platform in America’s universities to teach these ideas. And if we can’t do that, if we’re barred from the universities, then we have to do what we claim to do best, namely thinking entrepreneurially and either create new programs or even, if necessary, new colleges.
Bob Zadek: And what the truth of the concept of natural rights is—I think this is what I’m about to say is accurate—but while there has been in the history of the planet mass migrations of the population from one place to another—and I’m not talking about for things like the weather and stuff like that, and migrations because of famine and natural causes—but because of the quality of political life, because of freedom, there has never been other than the mass migration to America during the 19th century and early 20th century. Never has there been any migration of that magnitude, relative magnitude, from one system of government to another anything like the movement to America. And it wasn’t the weather. It had to be the freedom that America then offered at that time in comparison to all others. So now we have Americans in the late 18th century who gave up pretty much everything in support of an ideal. We have people on this planet from all over the globe who are drawn to America who again give up everything, the little they had, they gave it up to come here in search of this ideal. And here we are, spoiled brats, ignoring the ideals that caused so many people to give up so much to be drawn to. And we are—we have it, and we are in our public discourse rejecting it. And I don’t understand how we have so much lost our way.
C. Bradley Thompson: Well, the one thing we know is that freedom is a moral magnet and has been for people all over the world for the last 250 years. If you are a land of freedom, people want to come here and/or people want to emulate it. So, if you look at what’s happening in Hong Kong right now, those students and young people are defending freedom, and they’re defending freedom on the basis of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And it’s one of the great ironies of the world in which we live today is that you have tens of millions of people who want to come to this country for its freedom, while at the same time you have an entire intellectual class of Americans who want to get rid of that freedom. It’s really just one of the truly worst ironies of our life today.
Bob Zadek: Brad, in the few minutes we have left, open your heart and tell us what motivated you to write this book. Writing a book—you’ve written five, I believe—is a substantial undertaking of time, intellectual energy, surrendering time you could otherwise spend doing other things. What drove you to write this book in the several minutes we have left?
C. Bradley Thompson: Well, I’d say the first and most important thing is that when I was seven years old, living in Ontario, Canada, I read a book called The How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution. And from that moment forward, I knew I was an American born in the wrong country. So I’ve had a lifelong love affair with the United States. And a few years ago, I read a horrible book on the Declaration of Independence by a Harvard professor that I was so deeply offended by that I decided that I had to write my own book on the Declaration of Independence. And so I started writing that book, and then very quickly into the process, I read that quotation that you mentioned from John Adams when he describes the American Revolution not as the war, but as a revolution in the minds of the people in the 15 years before Lexington and Concord. And at that moment, I realized that the true story of the American Revolution was this intellectual, moral revolution in the 10 or 15 years before independence. And so then I broadened the scope of my book from writing a book just on the Declaration of Independence to trying to write a much broader book on the American Revolution and what I consider to be the deepest causes of the revolution, namely its moral causes.
Bob Zadek: Bradley’s book is America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Bradley is the Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, an important institution. And Bradley mentioned to me that their admission rate is lower than that of Harvard, as it should be. Bradley, thank you very much for the Institute and most importantly for the book. The audience will find it to be an important read and an introduction to lots of other books that you reference. Thanks a lot to Bradley, thanks to my listeners. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a good rest of the day.
C. Bradley Thompson: Thank you, Bob.