Presenting the fifth in our Colloquium series for the year 2024, Dr. John Pinheiro (PhD in History, Director of Research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty), challenges the common narrative that reduces Thomas Jefferson’s thought in writing the Declaration to the philosophy of John Locke. Dr. Pinheiro was previously professor of history at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he founded the college’s popular Semester-in-Rome and Catholic Studies programs and chaired the history and philosophy departments. He has published and lectured widely, and is author of Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War (Oxford, 2014) and Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (Praeger, 2007). In 2019 he published The American Experiment in Ordered Liberty for the Acton Institute. His current book project is Beyond Burke: the Origins of American Conservatism.
Lyceum Institute Colloquium
Jefferson, Natural Rights, and the Sources of the Declaration of Independence
ABSTRACT: In this lecture, Dr. John C. Pinheiro will argue that the Declaration of Independence is best understood in the context of the organic English constitutional tradition of common law. This means intentionally looking at the Declaration in a non-Lockean way. The result should provide some surprising insight not only into American thinking during the Founding but into Jefferson’s thoughts on human anthropology, that is, on human nature and the implications that nature has for how we think about government. Students should come away with an important lens through which to see the Declaration and the thinking that shaped it and its reception.
This event is exclusive to registered Lyceum Institute members. The lecture will be made available to the public approximately one calendar year from now. Our Q&A session will be held on 18 October 2024 at 7:00pm ET (see event times around the world here).
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