The Founding Fathers' Moral Revolution

Part 7 in a series . . .

* I will be traveling next week and then on vacation for a couple of weeks, so production levels here at The Redneck Intellectuals may dip below our normal output!

**I am making the audio version of today’s essay available to all subscribers. Enjoy!

There is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America. The reason is, because the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest. . . . Employment and profit in their private occupations and pursuits is all they wish.

—John Adams to Josiah Quincy

The United States of America is the first nation in history to be founded explicitly on moral principles. At the deepest level, the American Revolution was a moral revolution, the meaning of which John Adams famously captured when he noted in 1815 that the true revolution “was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected . . . in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” This means, of course, that the true American Revolution occurred before War for Independence, though its consequences unfolded for decades afterward.

But what does it mean to say that the American Revolution occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years between 1760 and 1775?

The American Revolution represented, as Adams noted, a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the American people. The former president was suggesting that the root cause of the American Revolution was a reconstruction in the colonists’ moral reasoning and moral principles. The Americans’ intellectual and moral revolution forever changed the way they thought about the individual, society, and government and the relations between them.

Like Adams, Thomas Paine also understood that a revolutionary transformation had taken place in the American consciousness in the years leading up to 1776 and beyond. As Paine put it so strikingly in Common Sense, “a new æra for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.” He described this “new method of thinking” in an extraordinary letter to the French philosophe the Abbé Raynal. Paine told the French cleric that the American “style and manner of thinking ha[d] undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country.” “We see with other eyes,” he explained, “we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.” This new method of thinking involved a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between the individual and society, most notably regarding the motivations that drove human action. What Paine described to Raynal was nothing less than a revolution in the minds of the American people, which transformed the colonists into “another people.”

Paine later identified the precise meaning of that intellectual revolution in his 1790 book, Rights of Man: “the Independence of America” was “accompanied,” he wrote, “by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.” The Americans, he argued, had achieved something unprecedented in history: they founded their new governments “on a moral theory . . . on the indefeasible, hereditary rights of man.” The discovery, development, and adoption of that “moral theory” by the colonists in the years before 1776 is the embodiment of the “real” revolution described by Adams. (This theme is the subject of my book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.)

What exactly was this moral revolution in the minds of the American people of which Adams spoke? And, more precisely, what was this “new method of thinking” and the new “moral theory” associated with the American Revolution described by Paine?

As we have seen already, Paine identified the “moral theory” of the American Revolution with the “indefeasible, hereditary rights of man.” From 1765 onward, American revolutionaries shifted from defending their “rights as Englishmen” to asserting their “natural” rights, a principle famously enshrined in the Declaration of Independence by its author, Thomas Jefferson. A few days before he died, Jefferson described the Declaration's significance:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Jefferson, like Paine and Adams before him, identified the principle of man’s inalienable rights as not only the moral foundation of the American republic but as the cause of any future global revolution to free men and women everywhere from the shackles of injustice and tyranny.

But what view of human nature undergirds the rights of nature and the principle of self-government? More particularly, how did they assess the role of selfishness, self-interest, and self-love in man’s nature and in human relations? These related questions go to the deepest level of the Revolution’s intellectual and moral causes.

This essay addresses our motivating questions directly (though not completely), and it seeks to uncover and examine the deepest layer of the Founding generations’ view of morality and its ultimate source. My thesis is that America’s revolutionary Founders launched—partly knowingly and partly unknowingly—a moral revolution that redefined man’s moral responsibilities to himself and to others. Specifically, this moral revolution was centered around the Founders’ reevaluation of that historically contested and sometimes dubious moral concept: “self-interest” (and related concepts such as “selfishness” and “self-love.”) Ultimately, our goal is to understand how the Founding generation understood and used self-interest as moral principle.

To that end, it is worth noting that the discovery and identification of self-interest as a positive moral concept by America’s revolutionary founders has gone virtually unnoticed by scholars of the period, but it is there if you look deeply and broadly enough. The idea of self-interest as a moral concept—as a moral right—represented something new and revolutionary in moral thought and practice. Discovering the Founders’ partial, imperfect, and sometimes even hidden moral sanction of self-interest is the secret key to unlocking the deepest layer of the American story—to understanding the nature, development, and uniqueness of the American experiment with a free society and republican self-government. But this story has either been misunderstood by scholars of the American Revolution, or it has been consciously avoided. At the very least, it has never been told until now.

Natural Rights and the Road to Self-Interest

The intellectual world of the eighteenth century, particularly during the years of the American Revolution, was undergoing a seismic moral, cultural, religious, economic, and political shift. The most dominant moral systems of the preceding two millennia, rooted in classical republican virtue and Christian love, had long viewed self-interest (often equated with vulgar selfishness, i.e., grasping avarice and rapacious greed) as a corrupting vice or sin to be suppressed in favor of selflessness and self-sacrifice. As we saw in “A Brief (Philosophic) History of Selfishness,” this opinion began to change by the end of the seventeenth century and then with increasing speed into the eighteenth century when Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Smith began to reconsider in a much more positive light the nature and meaning of self-interest.

America’s Founding Fathers were not only inheritors and students of these Enlightenment ideas, but they were also the existential embodiment and culmination of Enlightenment philosophy. More precisely, they put into practice what European philosophers such as Locke and Smith could only dream or theorize about. America’s underlying social conditions were much more amenable—indeed, one could say they required—a new understanding of self-interest. Freedom and millions of acres of open space provided the necessary social conditions that would liberate a new reality-based, enlightened self-interest.

The Americans’ reconsideration of the role of self-interest in society grew initially out of their intellectual debates with British imperial officials during the 1760s and 1770s, particularly over the meaning of the moral laws and rights of nature, which was central to the controversy. As is well known, the moral foundation of the new United States of America rested on the moral rights and laws of nature as declared in America’s divorce papers sent to George III and the British Parliament. The discovery, identification, and constitutionalization of these inalienable, natural rights and moral laws of nature were the most obvious instances of the late colonial American moral revolution described by John Adams and Thomas Paine. (John Locke is almost always considered to be the philosophic discoverer of the concept “natural rights.” Interestingly, though, the Englishman almost never used the concept in his Two Treatises of Government. The concept never appeared in the Second Treatise and appeared just once in the Preface to the First Treatise. In fact, nowhere in any of his writings does Locke’s define what a right is.)

The culmination and instantiation of this revolution in the minds of the American people came on July 4, 1776, with the publication of the Declaration of Independence, which announced to the world that the sole purpose of government in the United States was the protection of man’s unalienable rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But how did America’s revolutionary Founders understand what “natural” rights are? With this question, I do not mean to ask for a list of what man’s particular rights are (e.g., life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, etc.). Instead, I would like for us to know how the Founders’ understood what a “natural” right is—by definition.

The theory and practice of the revolutionary era raises, however, a serious problem.

The revolutionary generation, like Locke before them, never defined in any meaningful way the concept and principle of man’s rights or the rights of nature. They just assumed without validation that the American people understood what the concept meant. This was an understandable error given that America’s revolutionary Founders were not philosophers, not to mention the fact they were in the middle of fighting a war against the world’s greatest military power. The best we can do therefore is to piece together from scores of different sources a sense of what revolutionary Americans meant by the concept “natural rights.” (For a fuller understanding of the Founder’s understanding of what rights are, see chapter 6 of America’s Revolutionary Mind.) In the meantime, here is a quick summary of the Founders’ view of what natural rights are.

To understand the full meaning of the Founders’ idea of natural rights, we might begin by interrogating the concept with a few corollary questions. For instance, what is the “natural” in natural rights? What purpose and function are rights meant to serve? What are the qualities and characteristics of a right? To whom or to what does the concept apply? More importantly, what is the source of the rights of nature? In other words, where do rights come from and what do they represent? Finally, how are the rights of nature different from the so-called “rights of Englishmen”?

The “natural” in natural rights refers to man’s nature. The founding generation understood that man’s nature required that he be free to think and act to pursue and achieve a productive, virtuous, good, and happy life. Given that men typically live in some kind of society, the freedom to think and act must therefore be somehow recognized and protected legally as a critical function of human wellbeing, particularly given that some individuals and governments are prone to violate others’ freedom to think and act through lying, cheating, stealing, and worse.

The concept “natural rights” was discovered in the seventeenth century and then developed and launched in the eighteenth century with the outbreak of the American Revolution. (The concept “rights” had been implicitly and partially recognized in many societies around the world and throughout much of human history.) Starting in the 1760s, though, the American colonists were forced to think more deeply than ever before about what a right is because their traditionally recognized English rights or the “rights of Englishman” were under attack from the British Parliament and George III. Their customary English rights, to which they were highly attached, were a cultural inheritance; they were the product of a particular people, from a particular place, and at a particular time. The rights and liberties of the English-speaking peoples were the product of historical development, cultural inheritance, and they were grants or gifts given to the English people over time by their political rulers.

During the years of the imperial crisis from 1764 to 1776, the Americans came to see that the greatest violators of their traditional English rights and liberties were their English cousins. The actions of the British Parliament and George III forced the Americans to search for moral principles that were stronger and more resilient than their English rights and liberties. Following in the natural-rights tradition of Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the Americans sought to ground their rights in moral principles that were objective, absolute, universal, and permanent. Thus, they turned away from and ultimately rejected their customary English rights as gifts from English kings and parliaments for a new source of rights—rights grounded in, and derived from, man’s nature.

The Discovery of Self-Interest

Embedded in the Founders’ idea of what a “natural right” is, was an even deeper or more fundamental moral assumption that was the most revolutionary of all American moral principles, and that was the idea of self-interest—the idea that man’s pursuit of self-interest is necessary, proper, and moral.

What are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness if not manifestations of, and variations on, man’s right to the pursuit of his self-interest? After all, what could the right to the pursuit of happiness mean other than the pursuit of one’s self-interest?

While it is important to note that only a few of America’s founding generation explicitly identified the relationship between self-interest and their conception of natural rights (and even then, only partially), it also no less true to say that the idea of self-interest and its role in human life was more broadly coming to be understood, appreciated, and promoted in American private and civic life.

To fully understand just how revolutionary the founding generation’s reconceptualization of self-interest was, let us recall, if only in passing, that the reigning moral orthodoxy of not only eighteenth-century America but of 1,700 years of Western history can be summed up in the idea of self-sacrifice (either in the form of Christian love or classical-republican virtue), which, as I’ve shown in previous essays (see here, here, and here), teaches that men and women have a moral duty to sacrifice their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the sake of others. This means that some men claim a moral right to some portion of the lives, liberty, property, and happiness of all men and women in society. Such a philosophy was incompatible with the founding generation’s understanding of natural rights.

America’s eighteenth century moral and political revolution recentered the relationship between the individual and the community. The new dispensation rejected the traditional view which posited the community as the primary unit of moral and political value, the “common good” as the end of government, and self-sacrifice as the individual’s highest duty. The moral philosophy that developed out of the Revolution posited, by contrast, the individual as the primary unit of moral and political value, the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government, and the pursuit of happiness as the individual’s purpose in life.

This new philosophy freed millions of individuals from the various constraints of the old religious-social order that condemned the idea of self-interest as a moral virtue. It sanctioned their efforts to pursue self-interestedly material and spiritual values of their own choosing. Coming out of the Revolution, post-Founding Americans wanted to be left alone to pursue their individual self-interest—self-interest understood not only in economic but also in moral, psychological, social, spiritual, and political terms.

What else could freedom mean if not the freedom to pursue one’s own dreams and aspirations?

The Americans’ broadened definition of self-interest included the totality of one’s concerns, aspirations, and goals, the purpose of which was to improve one’s own whole life. The pursuit of self-interest became synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. The full understanding of enlightened self-interest what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call “self-interest rightly understood” required of individuals that they have a tripartite knowledge identifying what their self-interest is, why it’s important to their lives, and how they should achieve it. (Implicit in this knowledge is the knowledge of how and why self-interest must be defended.)

This new attitude represented a revolution in moral thought and action because throughout all history self-interest or selfishness was typically regarded by virtually all philosophers and theologians to be mankind’s greatest moral vice. By contrast, the greatest moral virtue for moralists through all history had been, in one form or another, the idea of self-sacrifice and selflessness. The Americans’ moral revolution changed all that.

American Revolutionaries on Self-Interest

After almost two millennia of philosophic and theological denunciations of selfishness and self-interest, revolutionary and post-revolutionary Americans were beginning to liberate themselves (though never completely) from their old views of self-interest and self-sacrifice. A few began to grapple deeply with the role of self-interest in a society moving from a traditional Christian framework toward a modern commercial republic. At the very least, they held the widespread realist view that self-interest is a primary and inescapable motivator of human beings, but a few Americans went further and began to see self-interest as a moral requirement of a virtuous human life.

Initially, from the beginning of the imperial crisis, most American moral thinkers and preachers viewed self-interest descriptively as a dominant—if not the dominant—human passion or motive force. As early as 1765, one New York newspaper noted simply as a descriptive fact that “Self Interest is the grand Principle of all Human Actions.” Almost three decades later, writing pseudonymously in 1794 as “Americanus,” South Carolinian Timothy Ford noted that man’s strongest “motive, is private interest.” Indeed, he continued, self-interest is “the most powerful impulse of the human breast.” Viewed in this way, self-interest was simply a fact of human nature that had to be recognized, sometimes in a positive light and sometimes in a negative light. Some Americans, though, were on the cusp of viewing self-interest as a positive moral principle to be pursued, sanctioned, and defended.

During America’s revolutionary interregnum, the best and deepest thinkers of the emerging nation began to think through the nature and meaning of self-interest. We can see the beginning of this shift as early as January 1776 in a famous sermon delivered by the Reverend Samuel Sherwood from Weston, Connecticut on “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times.” Sherwood there explained to his congregation that the extraordinary growth of population in America was unparalleled in human history, and that there was “no part of the world where its inhabitants, through such a large extent of territory, are under such bonds and obligations, from self-interest, to keep in the strictest union and harmony together.”

That such words would be spoken by a Christian clergyman was remarkable and indicative of shift in American thought and even in Christian thought more specifically. We can see in Sherwood’s sermon a softening and reconsideration of the nature, meaning, and merits of self-interested thought and behavior. Missing from his exhortation is any whiff of moral condemnation of self-interest. Indeed, implicit in Sherwood’s statement is a kind of tacit approval of men and women acting from self-interested motives. Furthermore, following the lead of Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, Sherwood and other American revolutionaries were also beginning to glimpse the utilitarian connection between the pursuit of individual self-interest and the wellbeing of the community or nation. Ironically, at least from the traditional perspective, self-interest led to social union and harmony. A free and thriving nation is in the interest of individuals and free and thriving individuals support the interests of the whole.

Starting in the late 1760s, John Witherspoon, Presbyterian minister, President of the College of New Jersey [i.e., Princeton] and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, began delivering year-after-year a series of lectures on moral philosophy (attended by James Madison), in which he recognized the necessary role of self-interest human affairs. Witherspoon told Madison and the other Princeton students that pursuing one’s self-interest “is a prime part of our duty to ourselves, to guard against any thing that may be hurtful to our moral character.” Notice first that Witherspoon saw a crucial relationship between one’s moral character and self-interest. In other words, good moral character is necessary means to achieving one’s proper self-interest, the summum bonum of which was happiness. Witherspoon went on to recommend as primary moral responsibilities that men ought to 1) “be active and diligent in acquiring every thing necessary for life and comfort”; 2) “take all proper methods to preserve and acquire good both of mind and body”; and 3) “acquire knowledge, to preserve health, reputation, possessions.” The only limits to pursuing one self-interest, according to Witherspoon, is that one “must guard against interfering with the rights of others.”

The clearest statement of the world-transformative moral revolution that was then occurring in America during the revolutionary period can be found, not surprisingly, in the writings of the French immigrant, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who settled on a farm in upstate New York in 1759. Published in 1782 but written in the years leading up to 1776, Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer attempted to explain to a European audience how and why life in America was different from that of the Old World. Crèvecoeur was not the first nor would he be the last Frenchman to write about life in America, but he was certainly the first to do so while living in America as a permanent resident rather than as a tourist.

In the Letters, Crèvecoeur—confirming John Adams’s observation that there had been a revolution in the minds of the American people in the 15 years before Concord and Lexington—identified the single greatest difference between conditions in the Old and New Worlds. Life in America, he wrote, had created a new kind of man, who was able, unlike his forefathers, to keep the fruits of his labor, “without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.” This new man, he continued, was acting “upon new principles” that liberated him from “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor.” As a result, “the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour.” What this meant for Crèvecoeur is that a man’s “labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest.”

Morally speaking, Crèvecoeur had turned a corner. For this transplanted Frenchmen, self-interest was not merely an impulsive psychological drive but the very basis of productive labor and virtuous action. This linkage of “nature” and “self-interest” represents a radical departure from the Old-World view, where labor and virtue were often coerced and their fruits expropriated by a hereditary aristocracy or put in the military service of kings. In America, self-interest became the engine of a just and natural social order. Crèvecoeur’s identification and elevation of self-interest as a virtue is one of the first instances in the history of moral thought in which this long-condemned characteristic of human nature was treated as a positive good rather than as a necessary evil.

So too with the connection between self-interest and the great triad of man’s highest earthly pursuits, namely, the quest for wisdom, virtue, and liberty. American thinkers were coming to see that it is in one’s self-interest to pursue wisdom, virtue, and liberty as man’s highest values, and therefore that it is also necessary to protect these values from those who would take them. In an election sermon delivered to the General Court of the state of New Hampshire in 1791, Israel Evans told state legislators (and the American people by extension) that they should always be “awake” to their “own interest,” which he connected to the protection of their natural rights and the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and liberty. American moral thinkers were beginning to see that economic or material self-interest were not possible without first seeing the necessary relationship between self-interest and wisdom, virtue, and liberty.

One of America’s best economic writers in the post-revolutionary era, Pelatiah Webster, was also beginning to see (following Aristotle’s teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics) the critical connection between self-interest and moral virtue. According to Webster, “if a man’s regard to his own character, fortune and family is not a sufficient inducement to make him careful, industrious, and thrifty, it is not to be presumed, that any regard he may have to the public can make him so; a man’s own interest always lies nearest his heart, i.e., self-love is the strongest of all passions and motives.” Increasingly, America’s most astute observers of human nature were coming to see that self-interest was more than just a psychological fact of human nature; they were beginning to see the pursuit of self-interest as morally necessary and good and connected to the moral rights of nature; they were also beginning to see the necessary relationship between moral character and self-interest.

The Founders’ “regime” was the first in world history to liberate individual self-interest in the name of self-improvement via the pursuit of material and spiritual happiness. In 1785, Noah Webster (no relation to Pelatiah), the great lexographer and educator, declared, “Self-interest, both in morals and politics, is and ought to be the ruling principle of mankind,” but he also understood that enlightened or rational self-interest “must operate in perfect conformity to social and political obligations.” Webster was the first American thinker to explicitly bridge the is-ought dichotomy on the question of self-interest.

A year later, Princeton’s John Witherspoon asserted that while not all men are philosophers, they are certainly “good judges of their own profit.” Witherspoon did not think that coercive government power or meddling politicians could or should take the place of an individual’s “immediate, apparent, and sensible personal interest.” Individuals should be left alone to take care of their won self-improvement. The Founders’ appeal to the moral rights and laws of nature was, at root, designed to both liberate and guide self-interest as an inalienable right that should not be interfered with by government force.

Put differently, the Founding generation understood the principle of individual rights to be a manifestation of self-interest applied to life in a civil society. Thus, their understanding of self-interest did not mean doing whatever one wants, irrespective of other people or the principles of morality. Quite the opposite. John Taylor of Caroline assured his readers that self-interested actions, particularly when it comes to the acquisition of property, must always be “guided by good moral principles.”

At the very least, then, the doctrine of self-interest had to be tamed and guided by reason, mediated by the moral rights of nature, and pursued with the appropriate virtues. In 1823, Thomas Jefferson told a correspondent that America’s experiment in self-government meant that self-governing individuals would and should be free to pursue their self-interest in a social context: “We believed that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves and to follow their reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed than with minds nourished in error, and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence and oppression.”

Increasingly, America’s Founding and post-Founding generation came to understand that for an idea or action to be in one’s proper or true self-interest, it had to be in accord with one’s genuine, long-term self-interest. Self-interested actions had to be directed to one’s long-range self-interest.

Self-Interest, Freedom, and Virtue

Early republic Americans understood that a truly free society—a society where individuals were free to be self-interested and self-governing in the full sense of the term—must also be a moral and virtuous society.

In an election sermon delivered in 1802, Jeremiah Atwater, then President of Middlebury College in Vermont, told his audience that “the more virtuous a people are, the less need is there of the restraint of civil government, to promote order.” Three years later, Robert Williams, governor of the Mississippi Territory, reminded the members of the territorial general assembly that the laws of a free society should “breathe the spirit of moderation, justice and virtue,” and that to be “conducive to the public weal and peace and quiet of the people . . . there should be as few laws as possible.” The existence of many laws, he continued, indicates “the depravity of society, for they are not made for the virtuous, but for the vicious, and to protect and enforce the rights of the former against the attacks and injustice of the latter.” A year later, Caleb Strong, Governor of Massachusetts, told the citizens of his state that there was a necessary relationship between a free society and individual virtue: “Government is necessary to preserve the public peace, and protect the persons and property of individuals; but our social happiness must chiefly depend upon other causes; upon simplicity and purity of manners; upon the education that we give our children; upon a steady adherence to the customs and institutions of our ancestors; upon the general diffusion of knowledge, and the prevalence of piety and benevolent affections among the people.” All these things could and should be done not by government but by private, self-interested individuals.

The Americans’ new ideal man used the freedom that defined the American social landscape to pursue his enlightened and rational self-interest. The pursuit of one’s highest end, namely, happiness, was not only viewed as a moral right but as a moral good, provided it did not infringe upon the equal rights of others. The result was a new kind of man who was largely rational, independent, honest, just, and a new kind of society that affirmed the individual’s right to pursue a flourishing life.

The Americans were on the road to solving one of the most perplexing moral-political problems that had vexed philosophers for two millennia: the problem of self-interest and social order. Starting with Plato, philosophers and theologians had always been assumed that selfishness or the pursuit of self-interest injured the “common good” and therefore had to be controlled by State coercion. The Founders squared a philosophic circle by demonstrating for the first time in history that the pursuit of self-interest was moral and produced a virtuous and civil society.

This is not to say that the Founders abandoned the Christian emphasis on charity or the classical republican concern for virtue. Instead, they began to redefine these concepts for a new-world order where the pursuit of individual self-interest was no longer viewed as morally repugnant or socially destructive. A new understanding of virtue emerged in America (what came to be known as bourgeois virtue) that was grounded in what we might call a reality-based approach to life. This new understanding of virtue could be summed up in the idea of self-governance and included virtues such as rationality, diligence, industry, and the responsible management of one's own affairs—qualities essential for the pursuit of one’s rational self-interest. The new moral calculus suggested that a nation of hard working, striving, self-interested individuals would, in the aggregate, create a more prosperous and harmonious society than one based on selfless and coerced sacrifice.

And this is the true American Revolution, rightly understood.