Heavily influenced by the scientific thought of Isaac Newton, the Founders like John Adams believed that the same cause would produce the same effect. This idea of cause and effect was applied to history as a rudimentary science of how best to promote liberty and curb power. The Founders believed that power and liberty were in constant conflict, with power consistently overcoming liberty due to humanity’s weak will in the face of the temptation of power.

They found the solution to the corrupting nature of political power in the works of English Republican writers. Republicans argued emphatically against standing armies as they believed that they promoted tyranny. Standing armies promoted tyranny because they paid their members to fight, making them similar to mercenaries. A true patriot fought on behalf of a cause, not a pay cheque. Professional armies were viewed as rapacious mercenaries who would perform anything their masters bidded as long as the price was right. Rather than professional armies providing national defence, they proposed instead the maintenance of citizen militias as a check on despotic power and as a method of promoting and renewing personal virtues.

Long before the Age of Enlightenment, the ancient Greeks believed that the power of tyche (chance or luck) played a key role in human affairs; the Romans characterised fortune as a fickle woman due to her unpredictable nature. Later, medieval Europeans believed that fortune was an officer of God’s will and a “terrifying instrument of divine providence.” In contrast, at the dawn of the Enlightenment Newton’s advances in science portrayed an ordered world with rules governing its every action. Enlightenment thinkers believed that ascribing events to chance simply reflected ignorance of the cause of an event. Humanity was now to be governed by the ordered rules of the universe, rather than the whims of chance.

The language of cause and effect began to dominate philosophical discussion. For example, the analogy of God as a watchmaker was evoked by thinkers such as William Paley: God created the universe, but the universe ran itself based on a set of rules operating without His direct interference. Importantly, it was believed that humans could discover these rules and thus learn how the world functioned. These ideas–cause and effect and the proposition that universal rules govern the universe–were transplanted into the study of history. History was effectively secularized, there was no divine intervention, only human action. Enlightenment thinkers believed that by examining history, they could perfect human affairs. Edward Gibbons, summarising the Enlightenment view of history, exclaimed that “history is the science of cause and effects.”