How to Think About the American Revolution

Why it’s on the list: Essays by the Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa arguing that the Revolution’s principles are stated in the Declaration of Independence and are philosophical claims about equality and natural right, not merely legal claims about inherited English liberties. The sharpest statement of the natural-right reading of the founding, and the opening move in a long intra-conservative argument about what the Declaration is for.

Where I heard about it

• Charlie Kirk — on @j_bambrick’s compilation of every book Kirk recommended across his episodes and videos, September 2025.

About this edition

Several of the pieces are polemics — against historians who read the founding as an accident of interests, and against conservatives who would keep the Constitution while discarding the Declaration’s premises, which Jaffa argues is the move Lincoln refused to make.

Connections

• Declaration of Independence — the text Jaffa argues is the founding’s philosophical core.
• Abraham Lincoln — Jaffa’s subject everywhere else, and the reader of the Declaration he defends.
• The Federalist (Dawson edition) — the other half of the founding argument, already in the anti-library.
• Ideological Family Tree — where this sits on the tree: an internal dispute, not an external one.