Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew’s reputation. - Thomas E. Ricks

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

In Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Montesquieu dwelled even more on the peculiar vulnerabilities of republics. “What makes free states last a shorter time than others is that both the misfortunes and the successes they encounter almost always cause them to lose their freedom,” the French thinker warned. “A wise republic should hazard nothing that exposes it to either good or bad fortune. The only good to which it should aspire is the perpetuation of its condition.

Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”55