book club

— Perhaps it helped that many of the Founding Fathers – think of it as a powdered-wig book club – were reading some of the same 17th and 18th century European philosophers of the Enlightenment, writers such as John Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, who praised scientific advances, and preached that human beings had “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property, ideas that were already rippling through intellectual circles around the globe.