The Founders and the Classics

Where I heard about it

• Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum published on Substack in December 2025, in the Ages 13–99+ band under History. It is the book that explains why a list like that exists at all: an account of a canon being used deliberately to form citizens, which is the curator’s stated purpose.

About this edition

Richard works from the school and college curricula the founders sat through, the books in their libraries and the authors they quoted; the categories he traces are mixed government, the cycle of constitutions, virtue and corruption, and the fear of standing armies and demagogues. His further claim — that the classics mattered at least as much as Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment — is a position in a long scholarly argument about the sources of American political thought.

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.