Cato’s Letters

One hundred and forty-four weekly essays published in the London press between November 1720 and December 1723 under the pen name “Cato” — taken from Cato the Younger, Caesar’s unyielding opponent — by two Whig writers, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. They began as an attack on the political corruption exposed by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble and widened into a sustained case for freedom of speech and of the press, religious toleration, the danger of standing armies, and the proposition that power is naturally encroaching and must be watched rather than trusted.

The letters matter to an American curriculum because of where they were read. Bound volumes circulated widely in the colonies decades before the Revolution, and the vocabulary the revolutionary generation reached for — corruption, virtue, encroaching power, the jealous eye a free people keeps on its government — is largely this vocabulary. Reading Cato is reading the argument the Founders had already absorbed before they started making their own.

Context: Listed under Political Philosophy in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1100 — the lowest in that genre, which fits: these were newspaper essays written to be understood by a general reader on the week they appeared.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon — the two authors behind “Cato”.
• Free Speech — Letter 15, “Of Freedom of Speech”, is one of the most-quoted early statements of the principle.
• Founding Fathers — the readership that made the letters historically consequential.
• Ideological Family Tree — the portfolio idea: this is an ancestor text, read in order to recognise its descendants in American political argument.
• People Over Politics — the letters’ governing suspicion of concentrated power.
• Enlightenment — the wider intellectual moment.