An Empire of Reason - The Fear of Power

American Political History · Jul 4, 2023 · 32m

In 1765 the British laid a modest tax on the colonies, and the colonists answered as though chains were being fastened on their wrists — crying slavery, conspiracy, a deliberate design against their freedom. To London it looked like hysteria. It was not. This episode takes down the third and most combustible of the founding’s intellectual inheritances: the commonwealth tradition, the fierce “real Whig” vision that taught the colonists to see all politics as a war of liberty against power and corruption.

Here are its prophets — Algernon Sidney, executed for a book, whose defiant motto became…