Natural law

The first philosophical pillar of the American Revolution was its emphasis on natural law, a 17th century construct that emphasized **natural rights, **freedoms that all human beings were guaranteed regardless of family name, wealth, political or religious affiliation. American colonists first connected their natural rights to their status as English citizens, but by the latter years of the 1760s, more American colonists began asserting that their natural rights could, and should, be guaranteed by their own assemblies and courts. The increasing assertiveness of the colonists about their rights as well as their abilities and readiness to govern themselves collided with the British government’s determination to impose and maintain control.

Social contract theory

In the 17th century, the primary English social contract theorists were Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Their respective visions of the social contract, the implicit covenant between the government and the governed, were quite different, though, with the American colonists greatly preferring Locke’s emphasis on natural rights and limitations on the powers of the government. In Leviathan, published in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil and the execution of King Charles I, Hobbes articulated a social contract that obligated the government, presumably a monarch, to protect the lives and property of the citizens, but otherwise allowed the monarch to assume absolute powers to ensure peace within the kingdom; to facilitate the monarch’s absolute rule and maintenance of peace, the citizenry owed total fealty to the ruler. Hobbes may ultimately be most famous for his description of life before citizens agreed to be bound by laws and traditions to monarchs; in this “state of nature,” according to Hobbes, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes’s pessimistic views of human nature, coupled with and influenced by the horrors he witnessed during the English Civil War, led him to conclude that only fear of punishment and/or physical harm would deter people from stealing from and even killing each other.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

These are the bonds by which men are bound and obligated: bonds that have their strength, not from their own nature (for nothing is more easily broken than a man’s word), but from fear of some evil consequence upon the rupture.

In contrast, John Locke’s emphasis on legitimacy being essential to support the social contract required rulers to not merely guarantee peace within the kingdom, but also to heed the demands and wishes of the people. Locke’s *Two Treatises of Civil Government *inspired many of the central tenets of the English Bill of Rights that was written in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution that forced the abdication of King James II and ushered in the reign of King William III, often referred to as William of Orange in reference to his title as Prince of Orange in Netherlands, and Queen Mary II. In the early months of his reign, King William III urged Parliament to enact the Act of Toleration, which recognized greater freedom of worship for non-conforming Protestants, including Congregationalists, successors to the Puritans in both England and its North American colonies, but not to Catholics, Jews, or atheists.

John Locke’s views of human nature were far more optimistic than those of Thomas Hobbes and Locke’s political theories consequently emphasized greater protections of individual liberties and stricter limitations on the powers of the government.

French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau also expounded upon these ideas in his Social Contract. Rousseau’s conception of the “general will” of the people focused on how the laws must be extended to all within a country’s jurisdiction and that these laws must treat all citizens equally; while these concepts are universally accepted within much of the world today, they were not commonly applied at the time, including in Rousseau’s native France.

Consent of the governed

Social contract theory undergirded the emphasis on the consent of the governed, the concept that the people themselves had to actively assent to the laws, policies and taxes of the government. While European monarchs, including the Bourbon dynasty in France, the Habsburg dynasty in Austria, and the Romanov dynasty in Russia, sought to maintain their absolutist rule over their populations, the (partial) ascension of the British Parliament over the kings provided the American colonists, and sympathetic observers such as Charles Louis de Secondat, more commonly known as Baron von Montesquieu, in France with plausible examples of more limited governments and the expansion of individual liberties. Montesquieu would not only express his admiration for the British system but also articulate a principle that would later form one of the primary pillars of American constitutional government: separation of powers.

Adam Smith

As the legitimate roles of governments were being reexamined, new challenges to the tendencies of governments to intervene in the economy were being articulated, most notably by Adam Smith. Frequently referred to today as the father of economics, Smith espoused a philosophy that emphasized the centrality of market forces, such as supply and demand, and the enlightened self-interest of both consumers and producers, rather than the heavy hand of government, to satisfy the basic economic questions of what to produce, for whom, and how to distribute these goods and services. Most countries’ economies were then heavily regulated by their governments, often to ensure that the royal family and its allies remained wealthy and powerful. Smith and later economists, or moral philosophers as they then called themselves, sought to improve the overall efficiency of these economies by removing severe restrictions and regulations, particularly those that reduced the freedoms of individuals and businesses to seek to reach equilibrium through the invisible hand of the marketplace. Smith’s laissez-faire approach to economics contrasted directly with the mercantilist approaches favored by European monarchs in the 18th century.

American identity

As the 18th century progressed, American colonists and their British counterparts grew increasingly estranged for a host of reasons. More American colonists were born in the colonies themselves and had never visited Great Britain. Cultural, economic, legal, political, and religious developments frequently diverged between the colonies and the United Kingdom, and after over a century of salutary neglect, increasing numbers of American colonists began openly asserting that they should seek a new political arrangement with greater autonomy.

When the British government began issuing writs of assistance in the 1760s, James Otis argued that they violated the rights of British citizens. As the confrontations over the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act intensified, John Dickinson published his now famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in which he argued that Americans were now truly different from the British. And in the fateful year of 1776, recent immigrant Thomas Paine in what is arguably one of the most famous pamphlets in American history, Common Sense, called for Americans to break completely from the United Kingdom.

John Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, (1768)

Here then, my dear countrymen, rouse yourselves, and behold the ruin hanging over your heads. If you ONCE admit, that Great Britain may lay duties upon her exportations to us, for the purpose of levying money on us only she then will have nothing to do, but to lay those duties on the articles which she prohibits us to manufacture—and the tragedy of American liberty is finished.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, (1776)

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves are the proper objects for government to take under their care; but there is something absurd, in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.