The Constitution’s Liberties Are the Product of Human Experience

Why liberty? If asked that question, America’s Founders would have reflected not merely upon philosophy but upon human experience. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were among men’s God-given “unalienable Rights” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” he distilled millennia of Western experience into fundamental principles of human prosperity.

The Founders learned from history that oppression crushed prosperity and so chose to set America on a different path. Today, though, progressives of the left and the right urge Americans to abandon the principles of the Declaration in exchange for ideas Calvin Coolidge a century ago called “ancient” and “reactionary.” Though alternatively arrayed as progress toward an idealized future or a return to the idyllic past, these ideas, if implemented, would return America to a “time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”

About the Author

Timothy Harper

Timothy Harper is director of constitutional studies at Advancing American Freedom.

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Why liberty? If asked that question, America’s Founders would have reflected not merely upon philosophy but upon human experience. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were among men’s God-given “unalienable Rights” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” he distilled millennia of Western experience into fundamental principles of human prosperity.

The Founders learned from history that oppression crushed prosperity and so chose to set America on a different path. Today, though, progressives of the left and the right urge Americans to abandon the principles of the Declaration in exchange for ideas Calvin Coolidge a century ago called “ancient” and “reactionary.” Though alternatively arrayed as progress toward an idealized future or a return to the idyllic past, these ideas, if implemented, would return America to a “time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”