There is a constant stream of books and articles telling us, often strenuously and at great length, that the American Founders got the ideas they used for the Founding from the British philosopher John Locke. The Founders would be puzzled by this ongoing effort. They knew different.
Locke's Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1690. The articles by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay that became The Federalist began appearing in American newspapers in 1787. Quite a lot had happened during that intervening century. The greatest development of all during that time was the onset of the American Enlightenment, that explosion of human genius that gave America and the world the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist. The Founders carried out a revolution in thinking about the meaning and possibilities of human life unlike anything the world had ever known before — and by 1776, they were only getting started. Thomas Jefferson later called The Federalist "the best commentary on the principles of government, which ever was written." He was right about that. The distance in thought between Locke's Two Treatises and The Federalist is simply enormous.
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