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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
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• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: John N. Gray, John Stuart Mill: Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations
• I: Legal Philosophy
• Hayek and the Rule of Law
• Law, Telos, and Authority
• Aquinas and Natural Law
• Legal Naturalism and Just Legal Systems
• Lon Fuller and Natural Law
• Legal Realism Vs. Morality
• Legal Philosophy and the Founding Fathers
• Law and Scientific Inquiry
• Freedom of Inquiry Vs. Critical Theory
• Horwitz: Law and Economic Interests
• II: Republican Ideology
• Civic Virtue, Mercantilism, and Liberalism
• Republican People's Militias
• Gibbon On Virtue, Property, and Militias
• The Unwritten Common Law
• Republicanism and Inheritance
• Abraham Clark's Radical Republicanism
• Herman Husband's Republican Vision
• John Taylor and Republicanism
• Adams, Factions, and a Balanced Constitution
• Republican Farmer-citizens and Free Trade
• Madison and Scotland
• Non-lockean Thought and the Declaration
• Republicanism: Virtue Or Lockean Individualism?
• Jefferson's Declaration: Lockean Or Scottish?
• III: Self-interest, Social Harmony, and Aggression
• Cultural Evolution As Spontaneous Order
• Spontaneous Order In Human Action
• Aggression: a Sociobiological View
• Sociobiology's Program and Weaknesses
• Aggression Vs. Cooperation
• Natural Values and Individual Decisions
• Sociobiology and Ethics
• Self-interest: an Invisible Hand For Social Good
• Is Market Self-interest Socially Responsible?
• Is Egoism a Valid Ethic?
• Egocentric Altruism
• Individual Assertion Vs. Aggression
• Constructive Assertiveness
• Liberalism and Self-interest
• Sociology: Holism Vs. Individualism
• IV: Iv Economic Schools and Analysis
• Ancient Greek Economic Thought
• Scholastic Economic Thought
• Scholasticism and Austrian Economics
• Mercantilism Vs. Economic Liberalism
• The Social Meaning of Economic Liberalism
• Adam Smith Scholarship
• Jevons and Laissez-faire
• Social Sciences and the “methodenstreit”
• The Limits of Mechanistic Economics
• The Limits of Mechanistic Economics
• Austrian Economics Vs. the Mixed Economy
• Macroeconomic Formalism Vs. Human Action

Legal Philosophy and the Founding Fathers

Alfons Beitzinger

• Notre Dame University

“The Philosophy of Law of Four American Founding Fathers.” American Journal of Jurisprudence 21 (1976): 1–19.

The Founding Fathers John Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and James Wilson were generally united in a common purpose; however, their conceptions of the philosophical foundations of law and government differed.

All four men believed that moral principles are self-evident. But only Adams and Hamilton believed that such principles were ultimately derived from rational intuition. The end of law, thought Adams, is public happiness achieved through justice and respect for rights and consent. Law-givers should be concerned with utilizing reason as well as those passions which support the dictates of natural law as a psychological base upon which to build law and government.

Hamilton claimed that natural justice was based on a divinely ordained eternal law which “reason, unwarped by particular dogmas” could discover. Hamilton believed that the natural law required that “origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact” that respects “absolute rights.” Hamilton also distinguished between the majority of men, who are “entirely biased by motives of self-interest,” and the few who dispassionately discern the “dictates of reason and justice.”

In contrast to Adams and Hamilton, Jefferson denied that moral principles are rationally intuited and that there could be a demonstrative science of morals. For Jefferson, the foundation of morality is the individual pursuit of happiness or pleasure, which is made social through the pleasure-attending acts of benevolence. By giving morality a hedonistic underpinning, Jefferson was led by his hedonistic morality to view systems of laws as utilitarian superstructures. Natural rights are grounded in natural wants and needs. Jefferson did agree with Hamilton and Adams, however, that “nature provides every society with an aristocracy of the virtuous and the wise.” Since Jefferson saw the law and Constitution as an instrument for promoting the pursuit of happiness, he argued that each generation might restructure society as it chose.

James Wilson seems most strongly in the Thomistic tradition. For Wilson, every human mind can directly intuit the first principles of metaphysics and moral excellence. Man's political life is to be governed by applying the divine natural law to particular circumstances through human positive law. But the power of the state to implement the natural law is limited to those powers ceded to the state in the social compact.