Jesse Wegman

Thanks for having me.

That's a great question.

And I was at first having trouble remembering how radical these ideas were at the time.

They aren't particularly new to us now.

They weren't even particularly new then.

I think a lot of people were saying bits and pieces of these things, obviously.

You know, the consent of the governed goes back to Locke and before.

And many of these ideas are floating around, but nobody took them up with the clarity and the vigor of Wilson.

And I think that that came through in this essay, which he writes as a 26-year-old who's just come over from Scotland on a boat a few years before to the colonies and

And, you know, apprentices in law and quickly becomes one of the sharpest and most sort of forward-thinking lawyers in the colonies.

So he writes this essay in 1768 in which he says, all men are by nature equal and free.

No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent.

All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.

So these are words and phrases that we actually know very well because –

Several years later, they end up only slightly altered in the Declaration of Independence.

And so when I see these words coming, you know, eight years before the Declaration of Independence comes out, I think, who is this guy?

You know, how did I miss him?

Did I skip some class?

Because, you know, Wilson seems to be at the center of everything from almost the moment he arrives in America.

James Wilson was like a few of the framers of the Constitution.