Novus Ordo Seclorum

"McDonald’s book traces the different sources of intellectual influence that worked on the framers in Philadelphia. He has great background chapters where he describes dominant modes of thinking in the 18th century. He’s got a great chapter, for example, on the nature of law. He has other discussions of how people thought about political economy , meaning the role of the state in managing economic affairs. So he creates a deep intellectual background for the world that the framers inhabited. Then he assesses which authors exerted influence on particular framers. I’m not persuaded that McDonald’s method of mapping intellectual influences works as well as he thinks it does. For example, there is enormous debate about the extent of David Hume’s influence on James Madison. Scholars have been arguing about it for 70 years, but McDonald is an avowed Hamiltonian and finds it hard to take Madison too seriously. There’s no easy way to do it. The framers and the founders were definitely part of the Enlightenment. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton were extremely well read. As provincial intellectuals, aware of their distance from contemporary centres of thinking in Europe, they consciously tried to absorb knowledge. On the other hand – and this is what a lot of my own work is about – they also lived through a revolution. Many of them, particularly Madison, were profoundly convinced that what they had learned by experience was far more valuable than anything that they had ever read."