1. The Tempest:
Shakespeare asks us to consider questions
regarding equality, freedom and political
 GONZALO authority.
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, Who gets the political
And were the king on't, what would I authority to rule and why
do? do they get it? Birthright?
Divine authority? Political
Letters should not be known; riches,
consensus?
poverty,
And use of service, none; contract,
succession, How do Native peoples
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, govern themselves? Are
none; Natives different types of
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; humans than the
No occupation; all men idle, all; English?
And women too, but innocent and
pure; Is indentured servitude
No sovereignty; -- justifiable? Slavery? Why
or why not?

2. The Puritan Worldview: A Covenant
With God and Religious Logic
 When we were come, Oh the number of pagans
(now merciless enemies) that there came about
me, that I may say as David, "I had fainted, unless
I had believed, etc" (Psalm 27.13). The next day
was the Sabbath. I then remembered how
careless I had been of God's holy time; how many
Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly
I had walked in God's sight; which lay so close
unto my spirit, that it was easy for me to see how
righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of
my life and cast me out of His presence forever.
Yet the Lord still showed mercy to me, and
upheld me; and as He wounded me with one
hand, so he healed me with the other.

3. Literature of Revolution and the
Enlightenment
 The fundamental paradox of American
democracy in particular is that it gallantly
emerged as a fragile democratic experiment
over and against an oppressive British
empire- and aided by the French and Dutch
empires-even while harboring its own
imperial visions of westward expansion, with
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Declaration of Independence, principally
written by the thirty-three-year old
revolutionary Thomas Jefferson-who himself
embodied this paradox, being both a
courageous freedom fighter against British
imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic
slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his
beloved Virginia-offers telling testament to
this complex and contradictory character of
the American democratic experiment.

4. Benjamin Franklin
 “Self-evident” is one of the most
meaningful words in the
Declaration of Independence, a
document drafted by Thomas
Jefferson but edited by some of
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According to Walter Isaacson,
author of a biography of
Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson’s
original version used the phrase
“We hold these truths to be
sacred & undeniable” It was
Franklin who deemed those same
truths “self-evident,” to convey
that they were rooted in
rationality, not religion.

5. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (1508-1512) “The
Creation of Adam”
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6. Enlightenment
 We can think of the enlightenment in Europe as a shift in attitude, or a
new “mental map” for understanding the world, brought about by a
number of social, political, and intellectual transformations.
 In part the enlightenment emerged from the breakdown of a “Universal”
Christian religion that had previously secured a relationship between
religious and secular powers (Thirty Years War).
 Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, the enlightenment celebrated
individual use of reason over the idea of an externally imposed authority
or theological dogma. Moreover, as nature was understood as a system of
universal self-regulating laws, philosophers framed human society in
relationship to this natural order.
 Humans start to be considered the highest expression of nature, and the
idea of individual human capacity displaces god at the center of the
mental map. Religious, political, and commercial freedoms become
increasingly associated with a notion of human progress.

7. Jefferson And The Belief in Natural Law and
Human Reason:"I told him they were my trinity
of the [three] greatest men the world had ever
produced"
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8. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
 Man of science who believed that
truth discovered by reason through
observation could promote human
happiness as well as truth
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 Bacon's work suggested that it was
in humankind's power to discover
truth by reason and that by doing
that, humankind could better itself.

9. Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
 A second man of science who studied
gravity and the laws of motion.
Newton's work demonstrated that it
was possible through reason and study
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 Laws governing Earth and Rest of
Universe (Universal natural laws!)
 Newton's work suggested that the
world is governed by laws that you
could discover and understand; that
there's a cause and effect, and that
through reason and study you can
figure out the cause and effect of
nature's laws.

10.  John Locke, whose Second Treatise on
John Locke Government (1689) suggested that you
could apply nature's laws to the political
(1632-1704) world as well, and determine and
understand natural and political rights.
 Basically, Locke believed that people were
born free, unhampered by government and
with certain natural rights — life, liberty,
and property — and that to protect these
rights people decided to voluntarily leave
this state of nature to form a civil
government, contracting some of their
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did so. So civil society was created to
protect humankind's three natural rights —
life, liberty, property.
 If a civil government is a kind of voluntary
contract, this suggests that people have a
right to pull out of that contract if their
rights are being violated.

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 Taken all of that together — Bacon, Newton, Locke, and the logic
of their thoughts — you can see the empowering aspect of
Jefferson's trinity.
 All of those men in one way or another developed ideas that are
empowering humankind. They're suggesting that there are laws of
the universe that could be determined by people and applied to
nature, to government, to science, to society in the hope of bettering
things. They suggested that civil government is a contract created
by and maintained by people, not some kind of a divine creation.