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consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.
    Crucially, Locke maintained that the social contract, as it was formed willingly, can be dissolved freely when the government no longer abides by its terms.
    When any one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new legislative, as they think best, being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who without authority would impose any thing upon them. Every one is at the disposure of his own will, when those who had, by the delegation of the society, the declaring of the public will, are excluded from it, and others usurp the place, who have no such authority or delegation.
    French philosophes such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire further refined the notion of personal sovereignty and popular sovereignty, as did the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Founders distilled all these disparate influences into a “liberal philosophy” that emphasized the personal sovereignty and dignity of the individual. As Bailyn explains, “Borrowing from more original thinkers, they were often, in their own time and after, dismissed as mere popularizers. Their key concepts—natural rights, the contractual basis of society and government, the uniqueness of England’s liberty preserving ‘mixed’ constitution—were commonplace of liberal thought at the time.” 6
    Though commonplace at the time, these ideas were expressed in the Declaration of Independence with such clarity and conviction that the
document would give birth not only to a country, but to an ethos that, to this very day, resonates throughout the world.

ENGLAND’S FIRST VENTURES IN AMERICA
    Though they regarded themselves as British, the Founders were conscious of their special status in the New World. They were the progeny of refugees, immigrants, utopians, and frontiersmen, living free from many of the ancient artifices and institutions of Europe, with the opportunity to import social structures or invent their own. For them, the intuitive claims of history could be reasoned and tested against rival notions before being accepted. America in effect became a great laboratory for experimentation.
    The initial colonists’ successes and failures gave rise to an American way of thinking about how to confront challenges, adapt, survive, and thrive. Alongside its European philosophical influences, the Declaration of Independence also reflected the colonists’ unique struggles and the resulting worldview that affirmed self-reliance and individual responsibility in the face of utterly new circumstances.
    The first English settlement in the American colonies was an abject failure, providing a valuable lesson for future efforts. The settlement at Roanoke under Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1580s had confused aims, feuding leaders, and unprepared participants. Furthermore, as historian Paul Johnson notes, Roanoke “had no religious dimension ... [no] God-fearing, prayerful men” 7 —a crucial quality that infused other, successful settlements with a common purpose. Amidst debilitating infighting, the expedition’s fleet simply sailed off without the colonists. War with Spain and the invasion of the Spanish Armada prevented their re-supply, and the colonists vanished before a return expedition arrived.
    The Founding Fathers took inspiration from the hard-won success of the two subsequent English colonies in the New World, at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation. Although the two colonies had different aims, comprising capitalist adventurers and Christian idealists, respectively, both groups were convinced that England, like Biblical Israel,