Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA)—The Hoover Institution opened its yearlong commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary with a discussion on how Enlightenment arguments and classical models shaped the United States at its founding, and how those ideas still drive today’s debates on issues of freedom and citizenship.
Hoover Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin set the tone at Ideas That Made U.S.: Dialogues on Freedom at Hoover on February 11, 2026, with broad questions about national purpose and civic responsibility.
“We are here with you to talk about America,” Kotkin said. “Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is freedom? How do we advance freedom?”
Kotkin framed the anniversary as a chance to examine traditions that stretch back before the birth of the republic and to acknowledge that Americans still argue about what those traditions mean. He described disagreement as normal in a democracy, but he urged the audience to keep asking how the country can widen liberty without bringing about acrimony, polarization, or a future loss of America’s ability to govern itself.
He also emphasized the need for the American public to go deeper, to know how America’s traditions and foundations came about before criticizing or proposing changes to them.
“Our first proposition to you is that before you can decide whether to endorse or criticize a tradition, you need to know America's traditions,” he said.
Echoing this sentiment was moderator Jonathan Gienapp, a Hoover Research Fellow and Stanford historian, who said the goal of the yearlong program is to push past slogans and think clearly about first principles. He described the 250th anniversary as a moment to take stock of the nation’s ideas, or to “think deeply and seriously about its political, intellectual, and moral foundations.”
Fellow panelist and Stanford history and American studies professor Caroline Winterer argued that the founders did not treat Greece and Rome like museum pieces; they used the ancient world as a practical set of examples from which to form their own system. Classical history offered to them stories about the rise and fall of republics, the risks of factionalism, and the need for civic virtue. It also gave Americans a shared language for public debate, especially among the educated leaders who wrote constitutions, laws, and political essays.
Winterer also tied the classics to the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment writers read the ancients and created arguments using their ideas. So too did the American founders. In her view, the founding was less a clean break with the past than a mix of old lessons and new claims about rights and consent.
Senior Fellow and Stanford professor of French, political science and history Dan Edelstein emphasized the Enlightenment’s role in giving the American Revolution a moral argument that could reach beyond local disputes.
Edelstein also stressed that Enlightenment ideals did not mean the founders ignored history. The Constitution’s structure reflects caution about human nature and power. In his telling, the founders tried to combine high principles with a design meant to prevent abuse. Edelstein drew common linkage between the Declaration’s use of the terms “free and independent” with those words’ use throughout history, all the way to ancient times.
As far back as 1781 in Massachusetts, Edelstein pointed out how that language was used by slaves in court to secure their freedom.
“As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States, I think we would do well to take seriously these words as the founding generation did,” Edelstein said. “And the extraordinary power that they held not just as a source of inspiration, but as a legally binding text.”
Stanford associate history professor Anne Twitty pushed the group to keep the practical side in view. Big ideas mattered, she argued, but the meaning of liberty and citizenship was shaped by law, property, labor systems, local institutions, and the norms of the era. Early American life forced constant decisions about who counted as a full member of the political community, and related decisions concerning the acceptance of slavery or the marginalization of Indigenous peoples often clashed with universal language about rights.
“The Declaration’s assertion that all men were created equal, and other similar such phrases found in founding-era texts, was not merely an expression of principle but a statement imbued with potentially explosive legal consequences specifically for the institution of slavery,” Twitty said.
Twitty highlighted a basic tension in the founding inheritance. Classical republicanism often calls for civic virtue and sacrifice for the public good. Enlightenment liberalism puts more weight on individual rights and private freedom. Americans tried to carry both traditions forward at the same time, but the strain showed up in legal categories and social boundaries.
Hoover Senior Fellow Barry Strauss returned to the founders’ close reading of ancient history. He described the classics as a source of warnings: Athens and Rome showed how republics can lose their footing when ambition grows and norms break down. Those stories from the Roman Republic and Greek city-states made checks and balances feel like more than theory. They felt like protection against patterns that had already played out before.
Strauss also stressed that the ancient world gave the founders a moral language. Ideas like honor, duty, and citizenship helped them describe self-government as something that requires character, not just rules. That emphasis, he suggested, remains a live issue in modern politics, where people often disagree about whether institutions alone can hold a free society together.
“Let's restore the centrality of citizenship as the guarantee of liberty and freedom. Let's return to the ennobling power of oratory,” Strauss said. “And oratory that while democratized and brought down from its highfalutin’ perch is nonetheless eloquent and uplifting. And let's rededicate ourselves to the liberating quality of education.”
A key point of friction on the panel was how to describe the relationship between these different traditions. Some speakers leaned toward the view that the founders made a workable blend. Others emphasized that the blend contained real contradictions that could not be solved on paper.
“When you’re actually in the field of action starting a new nation,” Gienapp said, “you can have a pragmatic cast to your approach in which you try to fit together things [where], from a different perspective, one might see tension.”
Kotkin closed by returning to citizenship as the thread connecting the classics, the Enlightenment, and American political development.
“As you heard, the category ‘citizen’ was universal in principle but exclusionary in practice,” Kotkin said, adding that “over time that universalism and principle became more and more actual, more real.”
Kotkin argued that closing the gap between principle and practice has always required struggle. In that sense, the panel’s history lesson doubled as a civic challenge. The Enlightenment and the classics helped Americans explain freedom. But the country’s record shows that freedom expands through argument, political action, and reform, not through good ideas alone.
The February 11 event was organized in concert with Stanford’s Department of History and its College 102: Citizenship in the 21st Century course.
The event launched a series of Hoover efforts that will continue through the anniversary year, with future discussions and published products focused on freedom, citizenship, and the ideas that helped shape the American republic.
Learn more about Hoover’s programming on the United States’ 250th milestone here.
