Essential Reading

The foundational work is that of H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won: America’s Untold Story, 1630-1754, EIR, 1987. 498 pp. This book is a masterclass on how ideas shape history—in this case, the battle raging simultaneously in London and the American colonies in the first decades of the 1700’s, between nation-builder factions allied with Leibniz’s outlook and initiatives, and a rising British imperial faction rooted in oligarchical methods brought forward by England’s “Venetian Party.”

Four outstanding articles from the 1995-2005 period, specifically develop the Lowry thesis with rich detail, taking the fight fully into the period of the American Revolution itself. They merit the closest reading.

They are:

1) The anti-Newtonian roots of the American Revolution, Philip Valenti, EIR Vol. 22, No. 48, Dec. 1, 1995, pp. 12-31. “One of the most persistent, destructive historical myths, is the one which claims that the American Revolution against Britain was inspired by British liberal philosophy…. The hub of falsehood around which that Anglophile’s myth revolves is the baseless supposition, that the strongest influences on the American founders include the political philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704) and his predecessor Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), as well as the allegedly rational-scientific system of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In this report, we examine some of the documentary proof that exactly the opposite was true. The characteristic belief of the leading Americans, as typified by the case of Benjamin Franklin, was their commitment to eradicate any influence of Locke or Hobbes upon the law and political institutions of these United States.” This opening statement is amply proved, based on citations from primary sources. A sub-head, “Locke’s war against America” has devastating documentation of Locke’s promotion of slavery, child labor, forced impressment of unemployed laborers as seamen in Britain’s navy, and the looting of the American colonies through Britain’s Board of Trade (established in 1696 with Locke as a founding member).

2) Valenti’s companion piece, The Leibniz Revolution in America, 1727-1752, EIR Vol. 31, No. 32, August 13, 2004, pp. 19-37, outlines how the “pagan worship of Isaac Newton,” in Lyndon LaRouche’s words, “had been established as the official cult doctrine of the budding British Empire by no later than 1727,” the year of Newton’s death, and how the battle against its entropic, mechanistic view of the universe (with attendant implications for human affairs), included leading figures of the American colonies.

“This is why the successful American revolution against the British Empire needs must have been preceded by the passionate rejection of Newtonianism by the intellectual leaders of the North American colonies, especially among the youth, as these leaders embraced the cause of the greatest political and philosophical adversary of British liberalism, the German universal genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). More than this, it was the Americans’ bold challenge to Newtonian orthodoxy, which strengthened the resistance to the British-imposed intellectual dictatorship over continental Europe at a crucial point, inspiring the work of Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719-1800) and his collaborators and students, and leading to the revolutionary breakthroughs of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).

“As new historical researches confirm, it was the debate and dialogue over Leibniz’s ideas among the circles of Kästner, with the leading anti-Newtonian American intellectuals of the day—James Logan (1674-1751) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) of Philadelphia, and Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) of New York—which set America on its course of independence….”

One passage of Valenti’s on Colden’s contributions succinctly conveys the core of the battle: “The fundamental premise of Colden’s treatises is a rejection of the Newtonian dogma of matter as passive, inert, and ‘dead,’ and therefore subject to the inevitable entropic ‘winding down’ into chaos and doom. The Universe is composed of principles of action, Colden argued, not hard, irreducible particles of dead matter.”

3) Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: How the Natural Law Concept of G. W. Leibniz Inspired America’s Founding Fathers, by Robert Trout, Fidelio magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1, Spring 1997, pp. 6-27. “The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians. Key to this struggle, was the work of the Eighteenth-century jurist, Emmerich de Vattel, whose widely-read text, The Law of Nations, guided the framing of the United States as the world’s first constitutional republic. Vattel had challenged the most basic axioms of the Venetian Party, which had taken over England before the time of the American Revolution, and it was from Vattel’s The Law of Nations, more than anywhere else, that America’s founders learned the Leibnizian natural law, which became the basis for the American System.” Trout stresses Vattel’s promotion of one of the key concepts of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, ending the Thirty Years War, that “The first general law that we discover in the very object of the society of nations, is that each nation is bound to contribute everything in its power to the happiness and perfection of all the others.” An American translation and printing of Vattel’s Law of Nations on the eve of the Revolution became one of the main sources consulted by the delegates to the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774, according to the librarian of the library used by the Congress, and Franklin reported in late 1775 that he had been given the book “in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations. Accordingly, that copy which I kept has been continually in the hands of the members of our congress, now sitting….”

4) Leibniz to Franklin on ‘Happiness,’ by David Shavin. Fidelio, Vol. XII, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 45-73. “In 1766, ten years before the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin met and discussed, with the German scientific republican Rudolph Erich Raspe, the Leibnizian idea of forming a nation based upon ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ In 1765, Raspe had just edited and published the first edition ever of Leibniz’s suppressed manuscript, New Essays on Human Understanding, in which Leibniz had systematically torn apart the colonialist apology of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Shavin then expands this crucial point: “The Founding Fathers did not confuse ‘happiness’ with pleasant entertainment, a ‘good time,’ or material possessions. Happiness, or felicity, was and is the composition of the universe by the Creator, such that the physical, objective conditions of existence—life!—are uniquely addressed and solved by the free exercise of man’s subjective, playful, agapic capacities—i.e., liberty. It would not be Leibniz’s ‘best of all possible worlds,’ had the Creator flubbed it, and created a universe where the freedom of man was not uniquely necessary for life. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ is not a laundry list of rights. They are, and were for Benjamin Franklin, an encapsulation of Leibniz’s political philosophy.” Shavin continues: “That Franklin actually met with the men who broke the tyranny of the suppression of Leibniz’s manuscripts, a tyranny run personally, for fifty years, by the Hannoverian kings George I, George II, and George III of Great Britain, is a story that needs to be told.” And Shavin does it, brilliantly.

Additional Reading

Further groundbreaking material on the subject is to be found in:

Leibniz, Halle, and the American Revolution, by Edward Spannaus. Fidelio, Vol. XII, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 33-44. Spannaus develops the significance of the exchange of letters between a principal Leibnizian in Europe, August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), and the American intellectual giant of those years, and mentor of Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather (1663-1728), in defending Francke’s sponsorship of nurturing orphanages and educating the poor, against the attacks of Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, who decried such practices. Mandeville wrote that “Going to school in comparison to working is idleness.” (Locke, by the way, urged forcing indigent children to work from age three to fourteen, rather than go to school). Highly relevant: H. Graham Lowry’s Cotton Mather’s Leibnizian conspiracy, EIR, Vol. 22, No. 48, Dec. 1, 1995, pp. 42-43.

America’s ‘national party’ spearheaded the battle against British ideology, by Anton Chaitkin. EIR, Vol. 22, No. 48, Dec. 1, 1995, pp. 32-42. Chaitkin shows how Hamilton’s American System of Political Economy grew out of the ideological battles against Britain’s apologists for empire, brought to the surface in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.