The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed.
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The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.
Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.
The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.
The whole basis of the Constitution was a restriction of power, and the whole basis of the federalist system was that there was not one sovereign centralized power from which all authority flows.
Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country.
In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule.
We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.
The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
The American Republic was bound - is still bound - to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome.
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