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Starvard University · The Founding Documents
You read the actual arguments behind the American experiment, not the summaries. Locke supplies the ideas, Paine lights the fire, and Hamilton, Madison, and Jay design the machine, all in their own words.
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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Long ago, some thinkers asked a bold question: why should a king rule us at all? A man named Locke answered that people are born free and that governments only rule because the people agree. A writer named Paine turned that idea into a pamphlet that helped start a revolution. Then three men wrote essays to explain a brand new plan for a country, and their arguments still run the United States today.
This course reads three sets of documents in the order Americans met them. First, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, published in 1689, which argues that political power comes from the consent of the governed and that life, liberty, and property are rights no ruler gives and no ruler may simply take. Second, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the short, plain, furious pamphlet of 1776 that convinced ordinary colonists that independence was both necessary and possible.
Third, the Federalist Papers of 1787 and 1788: eighty five newspaper essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing under one shared pen name, Publius, to persuade New York to ratify the new Constitution. We read numbers 1, 10, 51, and 78 closely, because between them they explain why the Constitution looks the way it does. We also read honestly: some of these arguments for liberty came from men who held enslaved people, and Lesson 8 faces that gap directly.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
John Locke published his Second Treatise of Government anonymously in 1689, just after England had driven out one king and invited in another, and the book quietly changed the world. To explain where government gets its authority, Locke starts before government exists, in what he calls the state of nature, where no one is born anyone else's subject. That state is free, he argues, but it is not lawless. In his words, reason, the law of nature, teaches all mankind “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Rights, on this account, are not gifts from a king. They belong to people by nature, and a ruler who violates them is breaking a law older than his crown.
Property gets the most practical part of the argument. The earth in its natural state belongs to everyone in common, Locke says, yet an apple picked or an acre plowed plainly becomes someone's own. His explanation is labor: “The labour of his body, and the work of his hands,” he writes, are properly his, so when a person mixes that labor with something nature provides, removing it from the common state and improving it, it becomes his property. Locke adds limits. A person may take only while there is “enough, and as good, left in common for others,” and only what he can use before it spoils, since taking more than you can use steals from the common stock.
Those limits deserve an honest paragraph, because later history put the labor argument to a use Locke's readers should face squarely. Land left unenclosed and unimproved, in his term waste, could be taken up by anyone willing to work it. Colonists in America seized on exactly this reasoning to justify taking Native land, arguing that Indigenous peoples who hunted, moved with seasons, and farmed without English style fences and deeds had not truly made the land theirs. It was a convenient reading for the takers, and a devastating one for Native nations whose own agriculture, towns, and tenure systems the argument simply refused to see. Locke's principle that labor creates property is genuinely powerful, and Americans built a nation on it. Its blind spot about whose labor counts helped dispossess the continent's first peoples, and an honest course names both.
Lesson 2
If rights come before government, then government must come from somewhere legitimate, and Locke's answer is consent. People leave the state of nature, he argues, because it has real inconveniences: everyone must enforce the law of nature for himself, quarrels have no impartial judge, and the strong can bully the weak. So free people agree together to form a community and set up a government as a kind of trusted referee, handing it power for stated purposes, above all the protection of their lives, liberties, and estates, which Locke groups together under the single word property. The power is a trust, not a gift. A legislature holds it on conditions, rather as a steward holds an estate that is not his own.
A government that protects rights deserves obedience; a government that systematically attacks them has broken its trust and, in Locke's careful phrasing, dissolved itself. When rulers invade the property of the people, rule by decree instead of law, or block the legislature the people chose, authority reverts to the people, who may erect a new government as they think good. Locke is no cheerleader for rebellion. He insists that people are slow to rise, that they endure many abuses patiently, and that resistance becomes justified only under a long train of abuses showing a settled design against their rights. Readers of the American Declaration of Independence will hear that sentence shape again, because Jefferson borrowed the structure directly: governments derive their just powers from consent, and a long train of abuses can make replacement a duty.
Notice what this theory does to the idea of a king. Hereditary monarchy claimed authority flowed downward, from God to crown to subject. Locke reverses the flow: authority rises from the people, who lend it, watch it, and may withdraw it. His consent was mostly imagined for property holding men; women, servants, and the enslaved stood largely outside his political people, a limit his own principles would later be used to attack. The argument is bigger than its author, and the generations after him, including people he never pictured as citizens, picked it up and widened it.
Lesson 3
In January 1776, most American colonists still insisted they were loyal Englishmen protesting bad ministers, not rebels founding a nation. Then a forty page pamphlet, published anonymously in Philadelphia by a recent immigrant named Thomas Paine, told them to stop pretending. Common Sense opened with a promise: “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” Paine meant the plainness as a weapon. He wrote in short, ringing sentences, using the Bible his readers knew and the kitchen table logic they trusted, and he addressed not Parliament or the king but ordinary farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, treating them as the jury of the whole question. The pamphlet sold in the hundreds of thousands in a population of about two and a half million, was read aloud in taverns and army camps, and did more than any other single text to make independence thinkable.
His case moves in steps. First, government itself: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.” Society, people helping one another, is a blessing; government, at best, is a necessary evil that exists only because we cannot trust ourselves unruled. Second, monarchy comes in for open contempt. Hereditary succession, Paine argues, is an absurdity and an insult: nature never meant one family to rule forever, the first kings were not chosen by heaven, and a system that hands a continent to whoever is born next invites fools and children to the throne. Third, reconciliation with Britain, still the respectable hope of 1776, is dissected and dismissed. A parent country that makes war on its children has forfeited the name of parent; trade follows advantage, not affection; and a growing America shackled to a small island's quarrels in Europe will be dragged into every British war forever.
Finally Paine turns practical, and the practicality is part of the genius. When you read it today, notice how modern its method feels: a short text, in everyday language, going around the gatekeepers of its age straight to the public. Paine did not fire a shot in 1776. He did something the British feared nearly as much. He made a revolution sound like common sense.
Lesson 4
A decade later the question had changed. The colonies had won independence under the Articles of Confederation, a loose league of thirteen states, and by 1787 the league was visibly failing: Congress could not tax, states quarreled over trade, paper money fights turned violent, and foreign powers treated American promises lightly. A convention in Philadelphia, sent to patch the Articles, instead proposed a whole new Constitution, and each state had to vote on whether to accept it. In New York the fight was close and bitter, and in October 1787 the first of a planned series of newspaper essays appeared, signed with the Roman pen name Publius. It was Alexander Hamilton, and he knew exactly what was at stake. The essays that followed, eighty five in all by Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, became the Federalist Papers.
Hamilton frames the decision as an experiment for all mankind: whether societies can build good government “from reflection and choice,” or must forever depend “on accident and force.” Americans, he says, are not merely choosing a government for themselves; they are testing whether republics can be designed deliberately, by reasoning together, instead of stumbling out of war and chance. Hamilton then states his own position without disguise. He believes the Union's survival is at stake, that the proposed Constitution is the best plan on offer, and he says plainly that he will argue for it, inviting readers to weigh his arguments knowing where he stands.
Just as striking is his warning about how the argument itself will be conducted. Hamilton predicts that opponents and supporters alike will be tempted by passion, jealousy, and ambition, that toleration will be preached by people who do not practice it, and that wise and good men can be wrong on both sides of a great question. Read Federalist 1 today and it plays like a user manual for every constitutional argument since: state what is at stake, declare your own interest honestly, steelman the other side, and keep returning to the design question. Can free people choose their government by reflection? The remaining eighty four essays are the long attempt to prove the answer is yes.
Lesson 5
Federalist 10, by James Madison, is the most famous essay in the series, and it begins with a definition every student should own. A faction is a number of citizens, a majority or a minority, united by some common impulse of passion or interest that runs against the rights of other citizens or the permanent interests of the community. Factions, Madison argues, are not a bug in free politics that better rules can patch out. They are “sown in the nature of man”: differences of opinion, religion, attachment to leaders, and above all the unequal distribution of property guarantee that people will always sort themselves into groups that want incompatible things.
That last image is Madison's own, and it carries his whole logic. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” he writes, an aliment without which it instantly expires. You could abolish factions by abolishing liberty, or by giving every citizen identical opinions, but the first cure is worse than the disease and the second is impossible. Since the causes cannot be removed, a wise constitution must control the effects. Pure democracy, where citizens assemble and vote directly, offers no cure at all, because a majority faction can simply vote its appetites into law. A republic, meaning government by elected representatives, helps twice over: representatives can refine and enlarge public views, filtering snap passions through deliberation, and a republic can cover far more territory and people than a direct democracy ever could.
That second point becomes the essay's famous surprise. Conventional wisdom said republics had to be small. Madison argues the opposite: extend the sphere, enlarge the republic, and you make majority factions less dangerous, not more. In a large union of many states, interests and parties multiply, so any single unjust majority is harder to assemble; a grievance burning in one state finds fewer ready allies in distant ones; and coordination across a continent is slow and difficult. Size, diversity, and distance become safety features. Madison counted on distance and slowness to cool factions, which raises a fair student question for our instant age: what happens to his design when communication never sleeps?
Lesson 6
If Federalist 10 asks how to keep factions from capturing the government, Federalist 51 asks the next question: once the government exists, what keeps its own parts from grabbing too much power? Madison's answer is the most quoted mechanism in the Constitution. The great security against one department swallowing the others, he writes, lies in giving the people who run each department both the constitutional means and the personal motives to resist encroachment. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The interest of the officeholder is tied to the rights of the office, so a president defends executive power, legislators defend legislative power, and judges defend judicial power, not from virtue but from pride and self interest. The machine polices itself because its parts are jealous.
Behind the mechanism sits a clear eyed view of human nature, in the essay's most famous sentence: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” And if angels governed men, no controls on government would be necessary either. In framing a government of men over men, Madison says, the great difficulty is this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and then oblige it to control itself. Everything in the essay flows from that double task. Dependence on the people, through elections, is the primary control, but experience, he writes, has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions, and the separation of powers is chief among them. The legislature, strongest in a republic, is itself split into two houses with different terms and constituencies, dividing the most dangerous branch against itself.
Madison then stacks a second protection on the first: the federal system. Power is divided twice, once between the national government and the states, and again among the departments within each, producing what he calls a double security for the rights of the people. Notice the temperament of the whole design. It assumes officials will be ambitious, factions permanent, and virtue unreliable, and instead of preaching at human nature it builds channels for it, the way an engineer channels a river rather than ordering it not to flow.
Lesson 7
Federalist 78, by Hamilton, takes up the judiciary, the branch the Constitution's critics feared as a future engine of tyranny, and Hamilton's opening move is to shrink it to size. The judiciary, he writes, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse.” It commands no army and controls no revenue. It can neither tax nor fight; it can only judge, and its judgments depend entirely on the executive even to take effect. From these facts Hamilton draws his famous conclusion: the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments, the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution, because it has the least capacity to attack them.
The shield only works if judges can hold their ground against political weather, so Hamilton defends the Constitution's provision that federal judges serve during good behavior, in practice for life. Permanency in office, he argues, is an indispensable ingredient of the court's character: a judge who must be reappointed, or who can be removed when a ruling displeases the powerful, will trim his decisions to please somebody. Independence is the price of impartiality. The same independence makes possible the essay's boldest claim. Where a statute flatly contradicts the Constitution, Hamilton argues, judges must prefer the Constitution, the fundamental law made by the people themselves, over the act of their mere representatives. This is judicial review, the power courts now exercise to strike down unconstitutional laws, stated here plainly in 1788 as a simple consequence of a written constitution's supremacy.
Hamilton is careful to deny the larger fear: judicial review does not make judges superior to the legislature, he insists, only the people's Constitution superior to both. Honest readers will note that later history has argued about 78 ever since. Lifetime tenure that protects judges from pressure also insulates them from accountability, and the power to void laws has decided some of the largest questions in American life. Hamilton's essay remains the starting point for every side of that argument, and after reading it you can follow a modern confirmation fight or a Supreme Court controversy and recognize, underneath the shouting, the exact questions he posed: who guards the limits, and what guards the guardians?
Lesson 8
Here is the exercise that turns this course from history into a tool. Take one story from this week's news, any story where power is being used, checked, or argued about, and bring the three sets of authors to the table. Ask Locke's questions first. Whose life, liberty, or property is affected? Did the people affected consent, through representatives they actually chose, or is power being exercised over them by decree and habit? Is the government keeping its trust or breaking it, and if trust is broken, is this one grievance or part of a long train? Then ask Paine's question, the pamphleteer's question: how is this being explained to ordinary people, in plain words or in fog, and who benefits from the fog? Paine teaches you to distrust language that makes the simple sound impossible.
Then bring in Publius, and the questions turn structural. Federalist 10: what factions are at work in this story, what passion or interest unites each, and is a majority faction trying to use the machinery against a minority's rights, or a minority faction capturing the machinery outright? Federalist 51: which branch or level of government is reaching beyond its place, and which ambition is positioned to counteract it, a rival branch, a state government, a court, an election? Federalist 78: if the courts are involved, are they guarding the Constitution's limits or substituting their own preferences, and what evidence would tell the difference?
One last reckoning, plainly faced. The men who wrote these arguments for liberty lived inside a society built partly on unfreedom. Many founders held enslaved people; Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal, enslaved people his whole life; the Constitution itself counted enslaved people as three fifths of a person for representation and protected the slave trade for twenty years, and Locke himself had investments tied to companies in the slave trade. But notice what happened next, because it is also part of the record: the words outlived the men. Abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights marchers took the founders' own principles, quoted them back at the nation, and demanded the promises be kept. The papers you have just read are both an inheritance and an unfinished argument. Reading today's news with them open beside you, arguing with their authors as freely as they argued with kings, is exactly what they were written for.
Sources
This course is taught from three sets of founding era texts, all free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You have read the case for natural rights and consent, the pamphlet that made a revolution feel like common sense, and the essays that explained a new constitution to a doubting public, all in the authors' own words. The arguments are now yours to use, test, and answer. Congratulations, and the next time a headline makes you angry or afraid, open Federalist 10 beside it and see what Madison helps you notice.
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