Following the election of Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks asked himself what kind of nation we had become and whether it was what the Founding Fathers had intended.
Realizing that 18th-century Americans were greatly influenced by “the thinkers of the ancient world,” Ricks writes in First Principles that he set out to explain how Rome and Greece helped shape the revolutionary generation. Focusing on the first four presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — Ricks says all of them found inspiration and guidance in antiquity, but to varying degrees and in different ways.
Washington embodied the Roman conception of “virtue,” by placing the common good above self-interest. Adams “cast himself as a modern Cicero.” Jefferson’s Epicureanism worked its way into the Declaration of Independence. As for Madison, his classicism “was leavened by a greater cosmopolitanism” and by his belief that “virtue” has its limits.
In fact, “the ancients” eventually lost their appeal as mounting partisanship, life-changing technological advances, expanding materialism and hostility toward elites became the American norm.
Ricks periodically digresses, but his asides and detours are illuminating. We learn, for example, that Madison’s spoken French was unintelligible because, having learned the language from a Scottish tutor, he spoke French with a Scottish accent.
This is on my bedside table. The intellectual connections among the ancient Greek philosophers and the emergence of the 18th and 19th century Western democratic thinkers has interested me since high school. Thanks for the review, Paul. A four-star rating from you is good enough to move the title up a few books in my reading pile!
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