The Founders and the Classics

A study of the classical education of the American founding generation and what it did to their politics. Richard works from the school and college curricula they actually sat through, the books in their libraries and the authors they quoted — Plutarch, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, Polybius — and argues that Greek and Roman material supplied not just ornament but the working categories: mixed government, the cycle of constitutions, virtue and corruption, the fear of standing armies and demagogues.

His further claim, that the classics mattered at least as much as Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment in shaping the founders’ thinking, is a position in a long scholarly argument about the sources of American political thought.

Context: This is the book that explains why a list like this one exists at all — it is an account of a canon being used deliberately to form citizens, which is the curator’s stated purpose.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from, and a modern instance of the practice the book describes.
• Carl J. Richard — the author.
• Founding Fathers — the subject.
• Cicero and Plutarch — two of the authors the book shows them reading hardest.
• Rome — the republic they took as the nearest precedent, and the warning.
• Enlightenment — the rival source of their ideas, and the book’s argument about relative weight.
• Patriots (Langguth) — the narrative counterpart on this list.
• Education — what the book is finally about: a curriculum with a political purpose.