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207 conclusion Hobbes’s Gamble and Franklin’s Warning I n Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787), Noah Webster asked a question that was on the minds of all the founders—a question that if adequately answered would solve all of the problems posed by the nation-building project: “In what consists the power of a nation or of an order of men?”1 Significantly, he returned to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes to answer this question. “The present situation of our American states is very little better than a state of nature,” Webster reported. In a state of nature, there was no government, and “Suppose every man to act without control or fear of punishment— every man would be free, but no man would be sure of his freedom one moment. Each would have the power of taking his neighbor’s life, liberty or property; and no man would command more than his own strength to repel the invasion.” “From such liberty, O Lord, deliver us!” Webster concluded.2 Webster was a brilliant lexicographer, and we know him today because of his inescapable red-white-and-blue-covered American 208 Conclusion Dictionary. His Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution revealed that he was also an astute student of power. In 1787, Webster discovered a philosophical foundation for political power in Hobbes. A land of fascinating contradictions, the United States is founded on multiple ironies. The most obvious is that the Declaration of Independence , written by a slave owner, proclaimed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inalienable rights. While not as glaring, two further ironies were central to the post-Revolutionary moment. The first was that while the founders publicly claimed that sovereignty rested with “the people,” common citizens neither authored America’s Constitution nor ran the first governments. Sovereignty in the early Republic was delegated to representatives , and thus, Dr. Benjamin Rush observed in 1787, “all power is derived from the people, they possess it only on the days of their elections . After this it is the property of their rulers.”3 This statement was misleading; many elite politicians hoped that citizens would exercise sovereignty only on election days. In actuality, the idea of popular sovereignty in the early United States had little to do with voting and everything to do with the ultimate threat. The people possessed sovereignty because of the precedent of 1776: if things got bad, they could legitimately stage a revolution and start over. Only this never happened, for the American political system was designed to prevent this possibility. The second irony, then, had to do with how the founders managed to tell the people they had the right to scrap the whole system, while ensuring that this right would never be exercised. This was paradoxical, because as the founders pragmatically tested their ideas about governing against reality, they—like Noah Webster—were led back to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Born from a revolution against monarchy, the republican founders of the United States returned to the playbook of kings. Given his philosophical doctrines, Hobbes had an auspicious birthday : April 5, 1588, the eve of the Spanish Armada’s invasion of England. “My mother was filled with such fear,” he later joked, “that she bore twins, me and together with me fear.”4 Hobbes was a tutor in Paris during the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651, and as the royalists fled to the continent, Hobbes befriended many refugees and tutored the young Prince of Wales. His philosophy was molded in response to a civil war Hobbes’s Gamble and Franklin’s Warning 209 that claimed over 180,000 lives, including King Charles I. His two major treatises were published in 1651: Leviathan and an English translation of De Cive, “On the Citizen,” which had originally been published in Latin in 1642. Both works were driven by the desire to theorize how the acquisitive individual—the modern subject—could be persuaded to submit to a sovereign power. Grasping the transforming power of fear better than any thinker of his generation, Hobbes premised his answer on a nightmare.5 To convince self-interested individuals, desirous of power above all else, to band together into nations, Hobbes contrasted the security and prosperity of nations with the “perpetual fear of death” in the state of nature, before nations, laws, or government.6 In Hobbes’s state of nature, humans lived in perpetual terror because they were equal to their...

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