In this year between the 250th anniversaries of the Revolution’s start and the Declaration of Independence’s signing, it seems appropriate, here in Lexington, to reflect on the political values that animated our Founders. We might sum those up in a single word — liberty — as the signs around town do, and that might sufficiently capture it. But what did the Founders mean by liberty, and do we still agree with them?
Jefferson, for example, defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” For him and his compatriots, liberty meant having one’s individual rights protected (such as those to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness) — not simply living under law.
This idea appears again in the Bill of Rights, where Congress is forbidden to pass laws of many types, even when the legislators are duly elected. This suggests another political value — this time, one that the Founders rejected: ‘democracy.’ Great students of history, they had seen democracies wreak havoc, from the time of Socrates to the Italian city states to an early American state or two, like Pennsylvania. John Adams, especially, was never tired of denouncing it and wrote the Massachusetts constitution as an alternative. This perspective was a principal motivation behind their drafting our innovative national constitution, which was to supersede both monarchy and democracy.
For the Founders, democracy was a system in which elected officials were granted total power to legislate according to the will of the people. By contrast, a free society was one in which the legislative power was strictly limited — by written constitutions, bills of rights, checks and balances, separations of powers, independent judiciaries, etc — to enforce a single standard: individual liberty. Perhaps today such distinctions sound like mere historical semantics. But I wonder what the people who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor would make of what their creations have become — national, state and local. And of our terminology. We don’t have to agree with them, of course. But perhaps, while we’re celebrating, it’s worth taking another look.