America’s 250th Anniversary — The American Revolution: Striking Against Absolutism

Editor's note: This is the first in a five-part series of essays on American history by Uyless Black. 

There are many reasons for celebrating America’s 250th anniversary as a nation. Here is one of the most consequential.

The American Revolution, with its spirit of 1776, was the culmination of over 100 years in which humans in the Western world were profoundly altering the way in which they lived.

In his book "Leviathan," Thomas Hobbes describes past centuries of humans’ “nasty, brutish and short” existence. It is only recently that the race began changing its miserable lot in life.¹ It came about during the first years of the enlightenment (the late 1600s), in which thinkers like Hobbes, Bacon and Spinoza went against the tide of conventional thinking. In regard to America’s founding, perhaps the most influential man of those times was John Locke.

Rebelling from centuries of state and church repression and educated by these visionaries, our ancestors learned.

If people could transform their minds, they could change their lives, and together with others they could change their communities and beyond. Against the fixity and fatalism that underlay the authority of state and church, Locke put this potential, this humble seed, in the human mind with world-altering possibilities. For centuries, people were understood — and understood themselves — to be born corrupt, damaged by sin, torn between dueling impulses toward good and evil and threatened with eternal damnation. Locke wiped the slate clean; he gave people the possibility of starting the world anew.²

The same held for the founding of America. It started anew. A colonial American hit the bull's-eye in 1776 with these thoughts.

Few opportunities have ever been offered to mankind of framing an entire constitution of government upon equitable principles. Perhaps America is the only country in the world wholly free from all political impediments, at the very time they are under the necessity of framing a civil constitution.³

Following in Locke’s wake, adhering to his legacy and the legacies of other enlightened thinkers, America struck blows at the pillars of state and church absolutism. ... Absolutism was replaced by a civic order founded on the consent of the governed in which the people possessed inalienable natural rights to “Lives, Liberties, and Estates.” The people were sovereign, and government and church were responsible to the people for action or inaction.⁴

These ideas and words found their way into the Declaration of Independence and America’s doctrine for governance.

¹ Except for a few privileged rulers and property owners. 

² James MacGregor Burns, Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2014), 35. 

³ Ibid., page 85.

⁴ Ibid., paraphrased from page 37.