The American Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson

The aim of the paper is to give a critical overview of the historical context of the intellectual project of the Enlightenment in general, and of the American Enlightenment in particular, through the analysis of the political and economic ideas of three prominent figures of American history: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The paper starts with the conceptualization of the history of the Enlightenment and the 18th century as a period characterized by profound structural and epistemological changes and by the rise of a new socioeconomic system, capitalism. These changes, in turn, influenced the (re)shaping of the political and economic spheres in which the economic was started to be perceived as something objective, natural, with its own internal laws which should be studied and not interfered with, while the discourse of equality, rights and freedom of men was gradually transferred to the political sphere, and became its main component. As this reshaping and differentiating between the economic and the political tends to obscure material inequalities on the economic level and emphasize formal equality on the political level, in this paper the political positions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson will be described and analyzed against the background of their economic theories and attitudes, in order to present a deeper insight into the content and democratic scope of the ideological positions which the they espoused. Along with that, the different structural positions of Franklin, Paine and Jefferson will be presented, in order to see to which extent their different social positions and the different contexts which they stemmed from influenced their attitudes and accounted for the similarities and differences which they exhibited. Thus, through the combination of the wider intellectual, social and material contextualization of the Enlightenment and its American version and the particular analyses of the economic and the political in the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, some light will be shed on the particular positions which they held in 18th century American history