The American Founders' Most Dangerous Idea
UT's Thomas Pangle
America was founded on a revolutionary idea: Greed is Good.
How highly America’s founders elevated acquisition & wealth is unprecedented in the history of ideas.
For Plato, producers are the lowest of the tripartite division in the Republic
The Confucian tradition ranked merchants as the lowest class
In Hinduism, workers are the lowest caste with merchants being the second lowest.
The Bible depicts labor on earth as a punishment for humanity’s transgressions: you will eat bread by the sweat of your brow.
The common thread within these classical traditions is the idea that work is undignified and that a life focused on wealth produces a petty soul.
What’s surprising about America’s founders then is not just how highly they elevate acquisition but why they did so. They valued the formative consequences of acquisition on the character of citizens! Their reasoning flips the classical traditions on its head: work is the most fertile soil to produce virtues necessary for scientific enterprise, familial life, and civic action.
The founders didn’t just embrace commerce. They reconceived human nature around it. They built a system where work becomes your identity, where acquisition has no natural limit. And they knew what they were giving up. The founders looked at the imagination, at religiosity, at Plato’s Eros -- the deepest longings of the human soul -- and ejected them for being too dangerous for a commercial republic.
On America’s 250th, I’ve invited the legendary UT philosopher Thomas Pangle to discuss the magnificent power and terrible cost of turning greed from vice to virtue, and whether America’s founders would be happy with those tradeoffs if they saw America today.
What we cover:
0:00 0. Introduction
0:34 1. Commerce and the Republic
22:26 2. Human Nature and the Life of the Mind
55:27 3. Religion and the Founding
1:07:04 4. America’s Political Innovations
1:23:45 5. Has America Betrayed Its Founding Principles?
1:31:54 6. The Great Thinkers that Influenced America