BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Forrest McDonald is the author of a terrific book on the intellectual origins of the Constitution: Novus Ordo Seclorum.  I've read a little over 1/3rd of it and I've been very impressed with how readable it is considering that it's a scholarly work.   It's also chock-full of more things I didn't know and that includes this nice warning about the difficulties of tracing intellectual influence. From pages ix-x:

A few words regarding methodology seem germane. It is with reluctance that I have used the word origins in my subtitle, for tracking down the sources of an idea or the means by which it is transmitted is a tricky business. Let me illustrate the difficulties with one of the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence. That the central argument of the Declaration is based mainly upon John Locke's Second Treatise is indisputable, I believe, whatever ancillary bodies of thought were also of influence; but Jefferson, as is well known, departed from Locke's trinity of "life, liberty, and estate" and substituted "the pursuit of happiness" for the third of these. Whence did he derive the concept, or did he think of it independently? It seems evident that the first eighteenth-century philosopher to have developed the idea was Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, but it is not certain that Jefferson had read Burlamaqui's Principles of Natural and Politic Law. Gilbert Chinard pointed out many years ago that Jefferson had copied into his commonplace book extensive extracts from James Wilson's 1774 pamphlet, Considerations on the . . . Authority of the British Parliament, and that that pamphlet draws heavily upon Burlamaqui. The phrase in question, however, was not among the passages that Jefferson copied from Wilson. Alternatively, Jefferson might have drawn the idea from Sir William Blackstone, whose treatment of natural law was based upon Burlamaqui's work, or from Emmerich de Vattel, who studied under Burlamaqui at Geneva.1 Again, Jefferson might have taken it from John Adams's Thoughts on Government, written in January of 1776 and circulated among the Virginians in Congress, or from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason and adopted on June 12, 1776. Jefferson might even have found it where Burlamaqui did—in Aristotle.

McDonald makes many other great points some of which I will post in the near future.