God, Liberty & Epicurus

On April 29, 1778, two great figures of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire, met at the Paris Academy of Sciences. As Voltaire saw Franklin approaching, he declared “Behold the man who tamed the lightning!” Then, stretching his hands over the Philadelphian’s accompanying grandson, Voltaire anointed the young Franklin with the words “God and Liberty.”

The American delegation to Europe used this moment to great effect as a stroke of propaganda. In a bid to win greater diplomatic support from the royal courts where thinkers such as Voltaire were fashionable, Franklin sought to tie the newborn American Republic to the Enlightenment in European minds. But not every American was so enthusiastic about philosophes and radicals. In his latest book, University of Florida professor Aaron Zubia, for instance, cites Abigail Adams’s 1783 warning to her husband John about their sons’ education:

I have a thousand fears for my dear Boys as they rise into Life, the most critical period of which is I conceive, at the university; there infidelity abounds, both in example and precepts, there they imbibe the speicious arguments of a Voltaire a Hume and Mandevill. . . These are well calculated to intice a youth, not yet capable of investigating their principals, or answering their arguments. Thus is a youth puzzeld in Mazes and perplexed with error untill he is led to doubt, and from doubting to disbelief. Christianity gives not such a pleasing latitude to the passions. It is too pure, it teaches moderation humility and patience, which are incompatable, with the high Glow of Health, and the warm blood which riots in their veins.

The status of the Enlightenment in American politics is, ultimately, a source of great tension. For every Franklin or Jefferson who saw the Founding as the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought, one could cite an Adams or a Morris who may have offered a different, more counter-revolutionary account. Any final judgements about the Enlightenment and the Founding, though, must reckon with David Hume’s role in shaping the intellectual environment of the eighteenth century. It is for this reason, then, that Zubia’s book The Political Thought of David Hume (2024) can help us understand the nature of the American regime.

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