Age II

Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican monk who attempted to reconcile Christian doctrine by utilizing Aristotelian methods and structure to fashion a philosophical basis for Christian belief in a purposive and loving Creator God. Recognizing the power of the mind, he sought to show that Christianity, as interpreted by the church, was logically consistent. In doing this, he fell within an important tradition in which the human mind was fast becoming the court of final appeal. Aquinas’s perspective was unique because he disagreed with the Stoics, Cicero, the Roman jurists, and the early Church fathers, all of whom maintained that the institutions and laws of men were only historical and conventional. Influenced by his exposure to the natural philosophy of Aristotle and drawing from “The Philosopher,” Aquinas challenged the dogmatic statements of the Church fathers by reintroducing nature into the human. While Aquinas left no one particular student or follower to carry on his work, the Dominican Order itself promulgated Thomatic philosophy and theology with success. Aquinas was canonized in 1323 and The Summa Theologiae soon dominated the field of Catholic Theology, remaining its indisputable basis until the middle of the 20th Century.

Marsilio dei Mainardini, also known as Marsilius of Padua, was the son of a notary, and he received his early education in Padua, completing his arts degree and presumably a degree in medicine at the local university. Marsilius soon moved north to the leading university of his day, the University of Paris, where he became a rector in 1313. The years at Paris, as first a student, then a teacher, were formative for Marsilius as he met other theologians and published his extensive treatise on political power, the Defensor Pacis in 1324. In this work, Marsilius attacked many of the arguments used to support the political and temporal authority of the papacy. Going beyond this, Marsilius further attacked the absolute authority of the papacy within the administrative structure of the Church. The principal idea upon which Marsilius established his political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty. All power is ultimately vested in the people. The secular monarch exercises his political authority not because he receives it as a divine right but because he derives it from the citizens of the state.

Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch humanist scholar and theologian who is known for his satirical book, The Praise of Folly, and his contributions to Biblical scholarship. As a privileged insider, he used his wit to critique many authorities of his era in both the church and among the nobility. Erasmus famously debated Martin Luther on the question of free will and advocated for the use of reason, common sense and tolerance of opposting points of view over dogma and superstition. Despite his disagreements with Luther, his encouragement for church reform helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Nevertheless, Erasmus sought to promote unity within the church and cautioned against religious persecution, earning himself critics and enemies among both dogmatic Protestants and Catholics.

Niccolo Machiavelli was a diplomat and statesman during the Italian Renaissance in Florence. He navigated tumultuous political change during his life and career, managing to achieve success and prominence in Florentine government yet also suffering torture and imprisonment himself towards the end of his life. While his writing covered a range of subjects including history and war, he is most well-known for The Prince, a political treatise with far-reaching, polemical influence.The political advice Machiavelli gives in his most famous work has been condemned by many for its support of ruthlessness, deception and cruelty. Yet others have appreciated his perspective as a pragmatic approach resulting from the deviousness and deception he saw in the complex Florentine power struggles around him. His work acknowledges more forthrightly than most that this is a dangerous world — power is hard to get and harder to hold on to. Machiavelli’s bold, controversial ideas have resulted in him having a lasting influence on modern political science and philosophy.

Martin Luther was a German monk and theologian whose unflinching critique of the Roman Catholic Church and passionate challenges to its authority led him to become the father of the Protestant Reformation. Thanks to the printing press, Luther’s ideas were more easily and quickly disseminated than those of religious reformers who came before him. What began as an academic, theologic questioning of the church’s unpopular practice of selling indulgences as a means for salvation evolved into rejection of Catholic theology and eventually a religious and political revolution within all of Europe. Because of his convictions, Luther also sought to make Christian scripture more accessible to the everyday person and produced a translation of the New Testament in the German language. This contributed to the standardization of the German language and set a new precedent that opened the doors for the Bible to become accessible in a variety of vernacular languages (not just Latin). Luther’s emphasis on the importance of the Bible, the centrality of grace and church community (as opposed to church authority) continue to have a lasting influence within Protestant Christianity.

Tyndale was an English scholar who completed the first English translations of both the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. He was educated at Oxford and worked both as a linguist and chaplain. Influenced by Martin Luther, Tyndale believed in the importance of creating versions of the Bible in vernacular languages in order to make Christian scripture more accessible. He completed his translations in defiance of church authorities who forbade such practices at the time and also challenged the theological validity of Henry VIII’s desire for annulment to his first wife. Tyndale was ultimately arrested on grounds of heresy, imprisoned, tortured and executed. However, his English translations of the Bible went on to be used by many others and have had a lasting influence in Biblical scholarship as well as the English language itself.

French Protestant reformer John Calvin’s theological doctrines had tremendous influence, particularly in the Puritan sects of England, Scotland, and America. Calvin had an early background of humanism; as a student of Latin and Greek, he was familiar with the writings of Plato, Seneca, and St. Augustine. Because of the radical Protestant views expressed in a public speech he wrote in 1533, to be delivered at an inaugural ceremony at the University of Paris, Calvin was forced to flee the capital and soon France as well. Calvin’s pessimistic interpretation of Christian doctrine was coupled with a repressive attitude toward pleasure and frivolity. The zeal with which his followers taught and imposed his views assured his position as one of the most influential theologians in the West.

Richard Hooker was an English theologican whose seminal work, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, defined the core distinctives of Anglican theology. He emphasized the importance of scripture, church tradition and humanity’s ability to reason. Influenced by the writing of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Hooker took a more moderate view compared to his Puritan contemporaries in Elizabethan England and disputed their beliefs connected to both theology and governance. Hooker’s political ideas deeply influenced later thinkers such as John Locke and the authors of the American Constitution. His contributions to religion, philosophy and government can be seen as a bridge from medieveal thought to more modern conceptions of natural law.

Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher, is best known for his political thought. He is the founding father of modern political philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he has set the terms of debate about the fundamentals of political life right into our own times. Few have liked his thesis, that the problems of political life mean that a society should accept an unaccountable sovereign as its sole political authority. Hobbes makes very strong claims about the proper relation between religion and politics. He was not (as many have charged) an atheist, but he was deadly serious in insisting that theological disputes should be kept out of politics. For Hobbes, the sovereign should determine the proper forms of religious worship, and citizens never have duties to God that override their duty to obey political authority. Hobbes insists that terms be clearly defined and relate to actual concrete experiences – part of his empiricism. Hobbes approves a mechanistic view of science and knowledge, one that models itself very much on the clarity and deductive power exhibited in proofs in geometry. It is fair to say that this a priori account of science has found little favor since Hobbes’ time. Hobbes believes the specific error about liberty that has caused all the trouble is the belief that freedom is a matter of living independently of arbitrary power, and thus that we can only hope to live as free-men under free states as opposed to monarchies.

John Milton, the great English poet who was also a schoolmaster, urged students to turn to the ancient writings of Greece and Rome and study them, not for their form but because they contained all that man needed for a happy life. He believed that the best possible education was to be obtained from the study of these classical writings. Milton, as a Londoner, lived in the heart of London during the 17th century, when London was the center of immense political turmoil, with violent swings from monarchy to republicanism to restoration. He was a major advocate for political liberty. He possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of history and myth and had closely read the classics of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literature in their original languages. He was a poet rivaled only by Chaucer and Shakespeare, a gifted linguist and scholar, a political man of immense skills, an uncompromising polemicist who wrote pioneering essays on divorce and freedom of the press, a sophisticated Puritan theologian, and a political thinker who believed passionately in liberty.

Sidney was a pioneer in natural rights theory. Sidney was not totally opposed to the monarchy. He believed the best governments of the world have bin [sic] composed of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy. The difference therefore between good governments and ill governments is not, that those of one sort have an arbitrary power which the others have not, for they all have it; but that those which are well constituted, place this power so as it may be beneficial to the people,and set such rules as are hardly to be transgressed, whilst those of the other sort fail in one or both these points. But he did believe uncompromisingly in the right of revolution. He saw government as a contract among the people. Sidney saw history largely as an eternal conflict between virtue and vice. Sidney’s idea of equality did not even resemble the corrupt concept of equality that is worshiped in the world today. Agreeing with Aristotle that man is a rational animal,Sidney believed that a life of virtue was a life of reason. He not only knew that a free society would prosper—he knew why a free society had to prosper. In 1683, Sidney was indicted for conspiring and compassing the death of the king. The last days of Sidney’s life were spent in drawing up his Apology and in discourse with independent ministers. He was beheaded on the morning of December 7, 1683.

John Locke, English philosopher, was born six years after the death of Bacon, and three months before the birth of Spinoza. In 1646, he entered Westminster School and remained there for six years. Westminster was uncongenial to him. Its memories perhaps encouraged the bias against public schools, which afterwards disturbed his philosophical calm in his Thoughts on Education. When Locke was young, he believed that what was called general freedom was general bondage, and that the popular assertors of liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unfitly called its keepers. John Locke was opposed to the doctrine that the king rules by divine right and that he has absolute power to govern men as he wills. Locke held that the original and natural state of all men was one of perfect freedom and equality. Since all men are free and equal, no one has the right to take away another’s life,liberty, or possessions. The main purpose of law, Locke taught, is to preserve the social groups and thus it must be limited to the public good of society. Beyond this, men are to be left free. After his death in 1704, when it was confirmed that the internationally renowned author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had also written the anonymously published Two Treatises of Government, Locke was widely taken to represent a distinctive type of political theory based on individual rights and the social contract.

Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu was a French philosophical historian. In the guise of letters written by and to two Persons of distinction travelling in Europe, Montesquieu not only satirized unmercifully the social, political, ecclesiastical, and literary follies of his day in France, but indulged in a great deal of the free writing that was characteristic of the tale-tellers of the time. The literary and philosophical merits of Montesquieu and his position, actual and historical, in the literature of France and of Europe are of unusual interest. Montesquieu’s idea of a harmony among the classes was “philosophic” and liberal. For a generation after his death, he remained indeed the idol and the great authority of the moderate reforming party in France. He was really the founder, or at least one of the founders, of the sciences of comparative politics and of the philosophy of history.

Benjamin Franklin was born January 17th, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. Franklin held many positions throughout his life including postmaster, clerk of the General Assembly, and organized the first police force and fire company in the colonies. He taught himself French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin and could read these languages with some ease. In 1749, he and twenty-three other citizens of Philadelphia opened an academy that eventually became the University of Pennsylvania. He led in the organization of a militia force, and in the paving of the city streets, improved the method of street lighting, and assisted in the founding of a city hospital. Franklin gave to nearly every measure or project for the city of Philadelphia. He was the first American economist, and his writings on economics argued that an abundance of currency would make interest rates low. Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to varied aspects of history rank him as one of the influential memebrs of American history.

David Hume was a English philosopher, historian, and political economist. From his earliest years, he began to speculate upon the nature of knowledge in the abstract, and its concrete applications, as in theology,and that with this object he studied largely the writings of Cicero and Senecaand recent English philosophers (especially Locke, Berkeley, and Butler). Hume’s eminence in the fields of philosophy and history must not be allowed to obscure his importance as a political economist. Hume was the first to apply to economics the scientific methods of his philosophy. His services to economics may be summed up in two heads: (I) he established the relation between economic facts and the fundamental phenomena of social life, and (2) he introduced into the study of these facts the new historical method. Thus, though he gave no special name to it, he yet describes the subject-matter, and indicates the true method of economic science.

In 1751 he was elected professor of logic at Glasgow, and in 1752 was transferred to the chair of moral philosophy, which had become vacant by the death of Thomas Craigie, the successor of Hutcheson. In 1759 appeared his Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying the second portion of his university course, to which was added in the 2nd edition an appendix with the title, “Considerations concerning the first Formation of Languages.” As a moral philosopher Smith cannot be said to have won much acceptance for his fundamental doctrine. This doctrine is that all our moral sentiments arise from sympathy, that is, from the principle of our nature “which leads us to enter into the situations of other men and to partake with them in the passions which those situations have a tendency to excite.” The Wealth of Nations is the more famous of Smith’s works. As is often the case with “great” works, there is not much in it that was really “new” when it was published in 1776. Its success lay in its timeliness, in what was perceived as a sensible and simple explanation for complex phenomena, and its enthusiastic advocacy of a set of prescriptions for contemporary problems.

A British statesman and political writer, Edmund Burke was born in Dublin and served as a member of Parliment in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party.

The second president of the United States, John Adams first made his influence known as the leader of the Massachusetts Whigs. Adams was a member of the Continental Congress from 1774-1778. His influence in Congress was great, and he led the charge for seperation of the colonies from Great Britain. He was appointed on a committee with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Livingston and Sherman to draft a Declaration of Independence. Differences of opinion
with regard to the policies to be pursued by the new government gradually
led to the formation of two well-defined political groups – the Federalists
and the Democratic-Republicans. Adams became recognized as one
of the leaders of the the Federalists. In
1800, Adams was again the Federalist candidate for the presidency, but
the distrust of him in his own party, the popular disapproval of the Alien
and Sedition Acts and the popularity of his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, led to his defeat. He then retired from poltics. On July 4th, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Thomas Paine’s most widely recognized works – Common Sense, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The Crisis Papers – ”became the four most widely read political tracts of the eighteenth century.” His vision of a decent and happy life for ordinary people in this world is still “alive and universally relevant, undoubtedly more relevant than that of Marx, the figure most commonly identified with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political project of bringing dignity and power to the wretched of the earth.” In fact, it was written: “not only is Paine’s bold rejection of tyranny and injustice as far-reaching as that of his nineteenth-century successor, but his practical proposals . . . are actually more radical than Marx’s, mainly because they managed to combine breathtaking vision, a humble respect for ordinary folk, and a sober recognition of the complexity of human affairs.” Paine had scarcely landed in the New World in November 1774 before he began writing short pieces for the newspapers, taking the American position in the imperial crisis. It was as if the first thirty years of his life, spent in poverty and obscurity and pressed close to the bottom of English society, had primed him to think like an American… Paine in January 1776 suddenly burst upon the world with his pamphlet Common Sense. His life and the world would never again be the same. To him more, perhaps, than to any other one person, we owe both the beginning and the happy ending of the Revolution, for it was his keen mind that both helped in drawing up the Declaration of Independence and in persuading the signers of that document to translate it into terms of reality.

The third president and a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13th in Virginia. Jefferson
began his public service as a justice of the peace and
was chosen as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 and of
every succeeding assembly and convention of the colony until he entered
the Continental Congress in 1775. George Washington, president at the time, ushered a reluctant Jefferson into secretaryship of state in the new federal government.

Considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement from the European perspective. Geothe was one of the few figures of Germany’s 18th-century literary renaissance who grew up bourgeois – a town child from a rich family in an essentially middle-class world. When Geothe left home to study law in Leipzig in 1765, he has in almost-finished biblical play and a moralistic novel when he entered university, but burned them as unworthy of his now advanced taste after reading them to his friends. He then started to write erotic verse and pastoral drama, including Die Laune des Verliebten (1806; “The Lover’s Spleen”) and Die Mitschuldigen (1787; “Partners in Guilt”). Goethe did not finish his law degree due to temporary health concerns, but went on to complete his doctorate. After traveling across Europe for many years to continue writing prose and expanding his intellect, Goethe found long-awaited inspiration in Italy and wrote the play Torquato Tasso (1790). By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had completed the collected edition of his works, including a revision of Werther, 16 plays and a volume of poems. The only fragmentary drama included was Faust, which appeared in print for the first time in 1790 and he saw no chance of finishing at the time. It wasn’t until 1797, when he continued his work on Faust for the next five years following his involvement in the French Revolution. It was in 1800 when he decided to divide the play into two parts, of which the first could be completed soon and the second a year before his death in 1831. Goethe was, in classically liberal fashion, in favor of free trade in both goods and ideas, and opposed to the kidn of state centralization then popular among the “Enlightened Despot” crew. He never embraced democracy and found the idea that once could promote both liberty and equality as either devious or naive. Instead, he was an aristocratic liberal who found true liberty equally threatened both by monarchy and the popular classes. The pursuit and advance of “culture” through his travels and thought, rather than glory or weatlh, marked his aristocratic liberalism and made him in many regards the spiritual cousin of men like Jefferson.

The fourth president of the United States and author of the United States Constitution, James Madison is referred to as the “Father of the Constitution” through his authorship of the three-fifths compromise, nine admendments in the Bill of Rights, and the “Virginia plan” when considering population representation in Congress. Through his paper, The Vices of the Political System of the United States, he concluded that no confederacy could long endure if it acted upon states only and not directly upon individuals. Among the features of the plan, which were not embodied in the constitution, were the following: proportionate representation in the Senate and the election of its members by the lower house “out of a proper number of persons nominated by the individual legislatures”; the vesting in the national Congress of power to negative state acts; and the establishment of a council of revision: (the executive and a convenient number of national judges) with veto power over all laws passed by the national Congress. Madison, always an opponent of slavery, disapproved of the compromise postponing to 1808 the prohibition of of the importaton of slaves. Besides this involvement, he always took a leading part in the debates of the convenion, of which he kept full and careful notes, afterwards published by the order of Congress. His labor was not finished with drafting the Constitution, in order for it to be accepted by the people, met the objections by writing the Federalist Papers alongside Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Most important of all, he proposed nine amendemtns to the constitution, included in the Bill of Rights. As a proponent for religious freedom, as president, Madison helped pass the Religious Freedom Act and added it to the consitution. As secretary of state under President Jefferson, helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase and lead the country through the War of 1812. Following his presidency, he and Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia where he served as senior official for a decade until his death.

American statesman and economist, Alexander Hamilton was born as a British subject on the island of Nevis in the West Indies. In 1774-75, he wrote two influential anonymous pamphlets, which were attributed to John Jay. He organized an artillery company, was awarded its captaincy on examination, won the interest of Nathanael Greene and George Washington by the proficiency and bravery he displayed in the campaign of 1776 around New York City, joined Washington’s staff in March 1777 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and served as his private secretary and confidential aid for four years. After a year’s service in Congress in 1782-83 following the war, he settled down to legal practice in New York. A delegate from New York, he supported James Madison in inducing the Convention to exceed its delegated powers and summon the Federal Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia. Though fully counscious that monarchy in America was impossible, he wished to obtain the next best solution in an aristocratic, strongly centralized, coercive, but representive union. His plan has no chance of success; but though unable to obtain what he wished, he used his great talents to secure the adoption of the Constiution by writing his greatest work, The Federalist alongside James Madison and John Jay, in what remains to be known as a classic commentary on American constitutional law and the principles of government. When the new government was inaugurated, Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury of Washington’s cabinent. There came from his pen a succession of papers that have left the strongest imprint on the administrative organization of the national government – two reports on public credit and a a report including 1020 arguments for a national protective policy. Once reisigning his position, he returned to practice law in New York where he died in a duel with Aaron Burr.

Mary Wollstonecraft earned her way with two statements of human freedom: A Vindication of the Rights of Man, written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790,and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, written two years later. Both works use the inequality of women under the Ancient Regime as the basis of a global critique of that society. A firm believer in education and progress, she saw the emerging middle classas as the vangaurd of fundamental change in which the old value of privilege and tradition would be replaced by the broadest notions of equality and freedom. Wollstonecraft is often heralded as the first modern feminist, and the power and clarity of her prose may maker her th ebest in that now long tradition. What makes her writing in this genre compelling, and some ways unique, is her insistence that women accept their complicity in creating a socity that infantilizes them. The improvement of womens’ condition, she argued, will come when they improve themselves, not when external conditions are somehow made to conform to their new expectations. This gospel of women’s self-reliance resonates today with all genders alike.