The Making of the American Mind by Matthew Spalding

How did our national consciousness evolve? How did our perception of ourselves as Americans form, and from whence did it come? Argues historian Matthew Spalding, it came from the Declaration of Independence.

Before 1776, Americans did not think of themselves as Americans. They were British subjects who were members of their own colony: Virginians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians; each colony had its own leadership, its own predominant social class, be it the farmer of Massachusetts, the printer from Pennsylvania, or the Virginia aristocrat. They were brethren, yes, but they were not yet a people. When the immortal words “We hold these truths” were written from the Continental Congress, that all began to change: a new nation would form. By 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, declaring that "four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," the transformation was complete. For Lincoln, as for the founders, America was a nation, but not only a nation, not a mere nation; it was a nation founded upon an idea.

Spalding begins his work by discussing a term we have all heard mentioned: patriotism. Spalding writes that a true understanding of this term, which can mean so many things to so many people, “has always been the civic antidote to what C. S. Lewis called ‘the poison of subjectivism.’” Borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French philosopher who toured America in its first couple of decades, Spalding posits that there are two types of patriotism: the first can breed the nationalism of Otto von Bismarck or the self-serving, self-interested geocentrism that has today gained a foothold in some of our governmental institutions. This is not a patriotism based on anything longstanding or permanent; it is mere loyalty, a sheer blind love based only on a sense of community and on nothing more. The second type of patriotism is the American brand: the type that allows soldiers to fight the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy and to plant the American flag on Iwo Jima. It is not because we hate what is in front of us, as Chesterton wrote, nor yet because we like what is behind us, or feel some sort of emotional attachment; it is because we understand that the principles for which we fight are longstanding, permanent, and true. It is because they are all these things that we can give our last full measure of devotion, as did the Union soldiers during the Civil War.

The clarification of terms, such as patriotism, that Spalding does in the early pages of this work makes it easy to follow, yet not easy to skim. It makes you think, as great books do, yet does not cloud your judgment through vague terminology.

Quoting Augustine, Spalding makes clear from the start what the purpose of this book is. Nothing, according to the great theologian of the early church, can be truly loved unless the object of love is known. For us today, that means that for true patriotism, selfless in its purpose, determined in its cause to exist, we must understand exactly why the Declaration of Independence was written, how it was written, and what that changed.

The story of the Continental Congress is not new. Many books have been written on this critical period. The chapters that Spalding spends discussing the history of the Congress, the roles of its players, the international response, and its broader geopolitical place are clear in purpose but vague in accomplishment. For those well versed in American history, nothing illuminating will be gained from these chapters. Similarly, Spalding focuses a large part of his time on the particulars: what the complaints laid out in the Declaration were. This is, of course, important for a political historian, much less so for a philosophical one or for the average reader. Certainly, the validity of the claims made by Jefferson and others played a central role in their day, yet it becomes difficult to see how they could make any difference to ours.

The real strength of this book is its philosophy. Why is it that there are certain “unalienable rights”? What makes these “self-evident”? Who determines that among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? The answer takes us back into intellectual history. From the Greeks' understanding of reason (logos), which was then transmitted down to the Christian church, for proof, simply read John 1:1, came the realization that as human beings endowed with the imago Dei, we have the capacity, through our reason, to reach truths about our life, about the human condition, about our telos. From a Christian perspective, which the author shares, it is this knowledge that enables us to know the moral law in the first place, and then realize that we have transgressed against it, which in turn forces us to recognize our depravity and need for redemption. In the political arena, this means that the law can be known without being spelled out. Critically, before the Bill of Rights, there was already a bill of rights written in the universe. Before the Constitution, there was a constitution written on the mind. For this reason, the founders did not appeal to English common law, as some would have wished them to do. Jefferson understood that even without English common law, even without the Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution, their cause would still be just; the universe would still have the same moral structure and natural law because it would have the same architect and the same lawgiver.

This understanding carries profound implications for modern political thought, especially in jurisprudence. We have come to see law as simply that which guarantees the greatest good for the greatest number; this utilitarianism would have been alien to the founders. We have also come to see government as the institution that preserves our rights. This is, of course, exactly what the founders intended, yet today, some carry it a step further; they reason, wrongly, that if government preserved the rights, then government gave the rights in the first place. Yet if government gave, government could take away. However, if they originate in nature and nature’s God, then government is subject to a higher tribunal, and the Supreme Court is not really the Supreme Court.

Jefferson’s ideas did not simply come from looking up at the sky and racking his own brain, using his own reason to determine that certain rights existed and were being usurped by Parliament and the King. He had come from a rich philosophical and theological tradition that dated back from Augustine and Aquinas, down through Algernon Sidney and John Locke. This was the more political side of philosophy. With natural law come natural rights. Unlike contemporary monarchical systems, which saw the monarch as the divinely appointed leader, the founders saw such a concept as flawed. They saw government as a servant of the people, and the people as servants of God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” wrote Thomas Paine. “I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.”

The author dives into the theological background of the Declaration. The fact that the first entity mentioned in the Declaration is not the King of Britain, but the King of Heaven, at least signifies that these were writers who believed in a divine Providence. “As in its opening, the Declaration here appeals to a standard above and beyond human events to vindicate its cause. And the appeal, as before, is not to some overarching sense of history or to ‘the opinions of mankind.’ But it is also not to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ which man knows through reason. This appeal of the Declaration is to an omniscient God who not only knows all men but also knows the intentions of each man’s heart. While they declared their cause to the opinions of mankind, in the end the Continental Congress seeks a ruling from a higher court.” Spalding goes further, arguing that they had a specifically Christian understanding both of the role of government and of the role of man in relation to government. Writes Spalding: “Only a truly benevolent King, one who is divine and not subject to the passions of man, could be an absolute sovereign. And since governments are instituted among men and not angels, and no individual on this earth has the divine wisdom and authority to rule absolutely, the powers of government must be limited, divided, and checked to ensure the rule of law rather than the arbitrary reign of worldly men.” The Declaration’s signers were not all orthodox Christians; certainly the author, Jefferson, had some unorthodox beliefs, but they were all, down to the last man, versed in the basic presuppositions of Christianity that were predominant in the late eighteenth century, and it was these presuppositions that were basic in the writing, drafting, and approval of this document.

Inextricably linked to a Christian understanding of God is a Christian understanding of man, which the signers also had. These were Protestants, with the exception of Charles Carroll, but they were Protestants familiar and comfortable with the natural law beliefs and writings of Richard Hooker. Man was a rational animal, capable of understanding right and wrong, if not of actually choosing right and eschewing wrong. “It is by his reason, not by allowing the passions to rule or blindly following conventional mores, that man distinguishes between reality and myth, good and evil, the just and the unjust. Nature, as a structure of reality that is unchanging and permanent, and that can be accessed by reason, is the standard of right in making these distinctions. And as man seeks relationships with others to fulfill that nature, man is a political animal, as Aristotle famously observes, men come to live in communities based on agreed purposes and a common understanding of justice.” The author then makes an even more stunning, but likely accurate, claim: “This argument is the basis of Western thought about man and politics.”

Of course, reason is not the only reason. There is a place for faith; in fact, faith is necessary in a Christian society, though not necessarily in the way modern secular critics often imagine. Spalding’s discussion of human nature is especially enlightening in this regard; society today seems to oscillate between two extremes: the utopianism of Marx, Rousseau, and the Romantics, which assumes that human beings are fundamentally good and that social problems can be solved through proper institutions, and, on the other hand, sheer cynicism, such as that found in Thomas Hobbes, which sees humans as utterly depraved, needing a government to compel them to some form of social stability. Instead, Spalding writes, the founders had a diametrically opposed conception of man: “This is not Thomas Hobbes’s brutish world of man against man, violently seeking to avoid death, or of petty man constantly dominated by narrow self-interests and lowly desires. This is a sacred conception of man, altogether human yet willing to sacrifice and suffer for the highest of ends.”

Spalding demonstrates that the Founders understood liberty not as the freedom to do whatever one wishes, but as the freedom to do what one ought. Rights existed alongside duties; freedom existed alongside virtue. The American experiment depended not merely upon constitutional structures, but upon the character of the citizenry itself. People incapable of self-government could not remain free for long. A people who do not know what they love will not love it for long. Failing to understand where we came from will result in a failure to go where we ought.

Review Written by Caleb A. Gerber

June 3rd, 2026

First Principles: What America's Founding Fathers Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How that Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks

Is it possible to remake the founders in the image of progressive liberalism? In this book, purportedly focusing on the Greeks and the Romans but using almost any excuse to move away from the actual influence of the former to illustrate examples of the founders as modern-day, anti-populist progressives focused on social welfare, author Thomas E. Ricks attempts to recast the debate of constitutionalism versus progressivism as a debate between constitutionalist progressivism and populist conservatism.

Although the author is talented and clearly understands the Greco-Roman world deeply, and although his writing style is both clear, informative, and intriguing, the opinions which he presents as facts make this book both unreliable and intellectually frustrating. He discounts, as an example, any religious influence on the founders, presenting them as thoroughly secular deists skeptical of organized religion and worshipping instead the goddess of what he labels “virtue,” as seen in the Greco-Roman world. To be clear, there is nothing wrong, per se, with his representation of the civilization of antiquity. His descriptions of Cicero, Cato, and Cincinnatus are enlightening; the problem is when he makes the startling claim not that these figures played a role in the lives of the Founders, but that nothing else did. Straining against the historical narrative, Ricks recasts the revolutionary period not as a conflict between monarchical belief and natural rights, which indeed it was, but rather as a conflict between the force of progress, which he paints in an almost Hegelian way, and the populist frenzy which he claims dominated the next century, in contrast to the founders’ desires.

Furthermore, interspersed within the narrative is a social commentary on today’s political arena which makes unsubstantiated claims, such as the assertion that white supremacy is both alive and thriving, and the claim that the current presidency of Donald Trump is comparable to the treason of Aaron Burr and something which the founders, although providing for it, would have dreaded. Also adding his personal opinion that the welfare state would have been wholeheartedly endorsed by the Founding Fathers, he makes claims about their perceptions of morality, such as asserting that they supported homosexuality and that it was only later, with the advent of religious fervor in the nineteenth century, that this came to bear a moral stigma, a claim which ignores both the religious context of the founders and the actions of the government of the time.

The richness of the Founders’ moral, philosophical, and theological influences—including the pervasive role of Protestant Christianity, Enlightenment notions of natural law, and classical republican ideals—is flattened into a single narrative of secular virtue and administrative foresight. This book illuminates the past only insofar as it is bent to mold the present; it is accurate only insofar as it can be contorted to fit the author’s preconceived worldview. While Ricks certainly quotes scholarly authorities such as Gordon Wood and Arthur Herman, giving a rich intellectual background to the founders in that they were influenced by both Scottish realism and English empiricism—though, interestingly, not English constitutionalism—Ricks quotes the founders themselves only selectively, refusing to even consider any religious or ethical considerations beyond an abstract Greek sense of virtuous living, something which, incredibly, Ricks pairs with Epicurean pleasure.

Ultimately, while informative, this book fails to achieve the mark of a serious critique or elaboration on the lives and ideas of the founding generation. The author, at the outset, has an evident bias against certain founders, such as Adams, and ignores potential critiques, circumventing them with quotes taken out of context. Additionally, although bias is an irreducible part of human nature, the excessive use of modern examples to illustrate past problems is both distracting and untrustworthy. It saddens me not to be able to give this book approved status, yet the central claims invalidate the benefits that the reader may obtain from a purely informative viewpoint.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 29th, 2026

Mere Natural Law by Hadley Arkes

A critique of modern conservative jurisprudence from a legal scholar and natural law expert. Hadley Arkes makes the argument that conservatives have been failing not because they don't have good arguments to make, but because they aren't making them. We have borrowed turf from our enemies, using their legal positivism as a defense of life and constitutional liberty instead of rejecting it as wholesale nihilism in the realm of jurisprudence. It isn't working, Arkes makes clear. The solution, he argues, is not to return to the moral ambiguity of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, but to go back still further, to the Founders of our nation, who recognized that even without a Constitution, without a Bill of Rights, without a Declaration of Independence, our rights would still exist, and would still be necessarily defensible, because, ultimately, they are founded on the unchanging law of righteousness, as President Calvin Coolidge wrote.

We must stop our treatment of moral rights as if it were a question of judicial propriety. Courts cannot avoid making moral judgements; the question is not to judge or to judge not, but rather to judge rightly, or to judge wrongly; and what we base our judgements on. What the court bases its judgements on cannot be only the law of a certain state or the letter of the Constitution; rather, Arkes understands the spirit of the laws. It was the reason for which the Constitution was drafted; the reason why the colonists of our nation broke with the British Empire. It was the reason that the founders of our nation could understand the same principles as we today can and do, yet they, of course, did not have the Constitution to guide them; they had only their souls, their inner conscience, the realization that all laws come from The Law.

Arkes makes several further points, arguing strongly against a “States' rights” understanding of abortion, and rather as a fundamentally moral issue. He also spends several chapters of this book contrasting the segregation of the twentieth century with the abortion of the twenty-first, and the Supreme Court’s correct decision but with flawed reasoning on both issues. Some of the points which he makes may seem controversial to the more libertarian-minded reader; he does not hesitate to argue that the state should punish some forms of what he terms “hate speech”—including, interestingly, the use of profanity in a public setting. While this may seem polemic, Arkes defends his thesis well, and the facts and data he uses are substantive. 

Ultimately, this book is one that those interested in jurisprudence and law should read with open eyes, open ears, and open hearts; we may reject some of the conclusions he arrives at, but as an intellectually rigorous work, with flawless logic, the ultimate conclusion, the end destination at which all the strings tie together, is a conclusion that is impossible to dismiss.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 7th, 2026