First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks Review + Free PDF Download | EPUB, MOBI

There is something faintly melancholy about a book that argues its subject has been forgotten, when the very argument confirms the forgetting. Thomas E. Ricks’s First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country seeks to restore the classical education of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison to the center of our understanding of the American founding. It is a worthy project, sincerely undertaken, and almost entirely the wrong shape for the problem it describes.

Ricks, a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist, tells us he began this quest on a “gray Wednesday morning” after the 2016 election, when he pulled Aristotle’s Politics off his shelf and embarked on “an intellectual journey that would last four years.” The premise: that the first four presidents absorbed Greek and Roman ideas — about virtue, faction, republican governance — and that these ideas profoundly shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the early republic. He traces their educations (Washington’s lack of one, Adams’s obsession with Cicero, Jefferson’s Epicureanism, Madison’s quasi-political-science approach to ancient confederacies), then follows the classical thread through independence, the constitutional debates, and finally its unraveling in the Jacksonian nineteenth century.

The problem is not the thesis. The classical saturation of the founding generation is well established, and Ricks is honest about his predecessors — Bailyn, Wood, Reinhold, Appleby — who have worked this territory for decades. He freely concedes he is synthesizing, not breaking new ground. What troubles me is how he synthesizes. The book proceeds as a kind of intellectual travelogue: Ricks reads the books the founders read, visits libraries, and reports what he finds. The tone is genial, earnest, that of a bright journalist discovering with genuine pleasure that Cicero appears five times as often as Aristotle in the founders’ correspondence. But the discoveries rarely cut below the surface. We learn that Adams admired Cicero repeatedly, across many pages. We learn comparatively little about what specific Ciceronian arguments did to Adams’s legal reasoning that Lockean ones couldn’t have.

I spent a decade teaching political theory to undergraduates who had never read a word of Sallust, so I’m sympathetic to the project of making this material accessible. And Ricks does land some effective contrasts. His observation that the founders’ classical world was dramatically different from ours — Rome dominant over Athens, Cicero towering over Aristotle, Sparta admired more than democratic Athens — genuinely reframes the landscape. The detail that David Hume noted in 1748, “The Fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decay’d,” earns its place. So does the structural insight that Scottish tutors, products of Edinburgh and Glasgow’s intellectual ferment, transmitted Enlightenment skepticism to colonial America while English universities “sat out the Enlightenment.” These are useful correctives to anyone whose image of the founding runs through Locke alone.

But the book’s strongest material — the last quarter, where classicism collides with Jacksonian democracy, evangelical Christianity, and the steam engine — arrives too late and gets compressed. Ricks covers the entire decline of classical republicanism, the Missouri Compromise, the weaponization of Aristotle by pro-slavery intellectuals, and the Industrial Revolution in what feels like a headlong sprint. Thomas Dew, president of William & Mary, wrapping himself in Aristotle to argue that slavery was “necessary to keep alive the spirit of freedom” — that’s a thread that deserves the kind of sustained attention the book lavishes instead on yet another retelling of Braddock’s defeat. The way Southern senators deployed classical rhetoric to threaten civil war over Kansas, the way Noah Webster in 1828 declared the Roman meaning of “virtue” to be “nearly or quite obsolete” — these are where the real intellectual drama lives, and Ricks skims them.

The slavery question haunts the book without quite organizing it. Ricks acknowledges the founders’ failures squarely enough, quoting Samuel Johnson’s devastating 1777 question about “the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.” He notes that Washington’s false teeth included teeth pulled from enslaved people’s jaws, that Jefferson’s nail-making shop improved output after boys aged ten to twelve were whipped. These details land hard. But they remain set pieces — islands of moral seriousness in a narrative that keeps returning, somewhat nervously, to the reassuring architecture of the founders’ reading lists. I wanted Ricks to sit longer with the contradiction, to ask not just how the founders got slavery wrong but how their classical education specifically enabled the evasion. The tools were there — Aristotle’s passage about barbarians who “have never yet risen to the rank of men” did enormous damage in the nineteenth century. Ricks mentions this. He doesn’t excavate it.

The epilogue, a ten-point program for civic renewal addressed to the America of 2020, confirms what has been quietly true all along: this is less a work of intellectual history than a worried citizen’s brief. Ricks wants classicism to matter again because he wants virtue — public-mindedness, the common good — to matter again. That’s an admirable instinct. But the book’s own evidence suggests the relationship between classical learning and political virtue was always more decorative than causal. Madison, the most rigorous classical scholar of the four, was also the one who abandoned virtue as a foundation for governance, designing a system that assumed self-interest and channeled it through structural friction. The man who read the most Greek did the most to make Greek ideals unnecessary. Ricks notices this irony without quite reckoning with what it costs his argument.

A visitor found the dying Madison in 1833 reading in bed, a “last of the Romans.” On Jefferson’s bedside table when he died: Seneca, Aristotle, and some French pamphlets. The classical world accompanied them to the end, even as the country they built was already racing past it toward railroads, revivals, and the almighty dollar.