Episode Details

Where do three of the most famous words in American life — the pursuit of happiness — actually come from? This episode follows the last great stream of the founding mind back to its source in Scotland, where a professor named Francis Hutcheson taught that every human being is born able to perceive right and wrong as directly as the eye sees light. It is the hidden philosophy behind “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” and the radical foundation of the whole democratic faith: that ordinary people, equipped by nature to know the good, can be trusted to govern themselves.

But a people that can perceive justice still has to be protected from power — so the same generation built a second thing, as cold as the moral sense was warm: the machine. Montesquieu’s separation of powers, the Newtonian dream of a government engineered like the lawful clockwork of the heavens, Blackstone’s higher law, and Cesare Beccaria’s war on torture and cruelty. The heart tells a free people what is right; the machine keeps power from crushing it. And with both, the library is finished — leaving only the question of where on earth such ideas could ever be built.