“Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph in that day’s transaction.”

– John Adams

This week’s selections invite readers to reconsider the Declaration of Independence not as a settled creed, but as a moral standard that has guided and unsettled the American republic from its founding to the present. The essays explore how the Declaration’s principles of equality, natural rights, and consent have been invoked, contested, and reinterpreted across changing political and social circumstances, shaping debates over justice, legitimacy, and self-government. These reflections consider the power of ideas alongside the limits of human nature and political necessity, tracing how moral principle and civic responsibility have remained in productive tensions that are central to the endurance of a free society.

Anything But Compromising

Christa Dierksheide, A Call to Liberty

Reading the Declaration of Independence in the context of a wartime civil conflict, the essay contends that the document was less a compromised statement of abstract ideals than a forceful act of political mobilization. By establishing moral authority and collective purpose, it helped create the unity and capacity necessary for independence, while framing equality as a foundational principle to be pursued over time through experience and republican self-government.

Adam Smith's 'Coarse Clay' Political Realism

Ryan Griffiths, Adam Smith Works

Situating Adam Smith’s discussion of religious establishment in Book V of The Wealth of Nations, this lecture presents Smith as a political realist who accepts that a free society must be designed for imperfect people. Rather than treating Smith’s limits on liberty as ad hoc, it highlights a consistent priority of stability over time and justice, especially in the risky alignment of persuasion and coercion.

Aiming at Ordered Liberty

Jeffrey Bristol, Law & Liberty

Examining claims that the American Constitution is ordered toward a singular vision of the Common Good, this essay argues instead that the republic’s final purpose is ordered liberty. Drawing on Aristotelian causes and the Founders’ design, it contends that American institutions exist not to impose the good, but to enable individuals and communities to pursue it for themselves.

Eicholz, Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence

Lucas E. Morel, Online Library of Liberty

Placing Thomas Jefferson’s writings before and after the Declaration of Independence in historical context, the piece argues that apparent tensions in his thought reflect moral deliberation rather than hypocrisy or bad faith. By reading the Declaration alongside A Summary View of the Rights of British America and Notes on the State of Virginia, it presents Jefferson as consistently committed to natural rights and consent while confronting the political limits of his time.

Adam Smith on Capitalism and the Common Good

Erik W. Matson, Econlib

Reflecting on contemporary calls for a “common good capitalism,” the argument turns to Adam Smith to show that economic liberty itself is a central moral foundation of a free society. By emphasizing the limits of human knowledge, the benefits of the division of labor, and the duties of justice under law, it presents Smith’s system of natural liberty as one that serves the common good indirectly through individual choice and responsibility rather than centralized direction.

Podcasts

Philip Hamburger on the Threats of the Administrative State

The Future of Liberty

Religion and the Republic

The Law & Liberty Podcast

Videos

Gordon Wood on Defending English Rights for America

Liberty Fund

Drawing on the revolutionary debate over English rights, Gordon Wood shows how American colonists initially framed their cause as a defense of constitutional liberty rather than a rejection of it. Independence emerged only when the inherited tradition of rights was seen as irretrievably corrupted, transforming the struggle for English liberty into the foundation of a new republic.