Been reading a biography of Samuel Adams and was taken by a line that noted Adams viewed corruption of the people as being a threat to self-governance (believe the quote is: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt”). 

That then led to finding this linked article about how the Founders conceived of “virtue” and what a necessary ingredient it is to having viable self-governance. As we reclaim the founding principles, we should also consider ways to promote the sort of virtue which the Founders considered so essential.


From the article:

As journalist and historian Thomas E. Ricks notes, while virtue has become synonymous in modern America with morality, for the Revolutionary Generation, it had a far more totemic meaning. It was nothing less than “an essential part of public life.”

For the Founders, virtue “meant putting the common good before one’s own interests,” Ricks wrote in his 2021 book “First Principles: What America’s Founders learned from the Greeks and Romans, and how that shaped our country.”

Virtue was, Ricks writes, borrowing from the historian Joyce Appleby, the “‘lynchpin’ of public life — that is, the fastener that held together the structure.” And it ran “like a bright thread through the entire period of the Revolution, and the first decades of the new nation.”

We would do well to get back in touch with the Founding generation’s conception of “virtue.”