‘First Principles’ goes back to roots of democracy
New book examines what the Founding Fathers learned from Greeks, Romans.
The 2016 presidential election inspired Thomas Ricks, as it did many other Americans, to ponder existential questions. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author gets right to the point in the prologue to his seventh book, “First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country” (Harper, 416 pp., ★★★☆): “What kind of nation do we have now? Is this what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders?”
To find the answers, Ricks embarked on a four-year intellectual odyssey to determine whether the current state of our nation is what George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had in mind some 240 years ago.
What he determines is that there were few political role models for the Founding Fathers to draw on, certainly not in recent history. So they frequently traveled back in time, as far as two millennia, to examine ancient democracies and early republics. Governance, it seemed fair to conclude, had been backsliding since the glory days of Greece and Rome.
In “First Principles,” Ricks masterfully documents how examples of city states such as Athens and the Roman Republic (before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon) informed the four aforementioned Founding Fathers and their fellow travelers (Alexander Hamilton, among others, drifts in and out of the narrative).
Forget about such philosophers-come-lately as Locke and Montesquieu; the founders, according to Ricks, were fixated on old-school thinkers and doers such as Cicero, Cato, and Epicurus.
It’s no wonder, because education circa 1776 required scholars to master Greek and Latin, and the writings of the ancients were part of the core curriculum. Of America’s first four presidents, only George Washington couldn’t read Latin.
A cursory architectural tour of public buildings in Washington, D.C., such as the U.S. Capitol, reflects the founders’ reverence for ancient Greece and Rome.
So the question lurking throughout this engaging political peregrination is the one the author asks in the epilogue: “Did the founders anticipate Donald Trump?”
Madison did, according to Ricks, who quotes the key architect of the U.S. Constitution thusly: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” The founders had one such example right before their eyes: Aaron Burr, who almost became president when, as Thomas Jefferson’s running mate, he received the same number of electoral votes, but did not do the honorable thing and concede the election to the head of the ticket.
It is worth noting that Burr, a prolific philanderer, was the only vice president in American history to serve while being under indictment for murder – he could never go home again, to New York, where he would have been arrested for killing Hamilton. In 1807, Burr went on trial for treason.
Yet Ricks points out that even iconic political figures often behaved in disturbing ways, just as politicians do today. For example, he writes of America’s third president: “(T)hough raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found myself disturbed by his habitual avoidance of reality.”
Sound familiar?