This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 27th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

Cato's letters were incredibly influential in the 18th century and many of the ideas presented there were front and center in the American founding

Paul Meany directs libertarianism.org we discussed what Cato's letters communicated to readers and the impact that those letters had on the creation of the United States.

This is part two of our conversation.

Before we get started on sort of the beat the bulk of Cato's letters, let's recap a little bit about what we talked about before, which was

the environment in which these books, these pamphlets, were created.

So I really love the 18th century because I feel it's an odd midpoint in history where people are starting to talk about science and enlightenment ideas, but they're still wearing powdered wigs and there's still lords and ladies and lots of decorum.

So it's kind of a very new period and there's a lot of new things happening and what we start to refer to as capitalism is starting to emerge.

All sorts of local hierarchies and elites are being broken up and there's all sorts of new jobs

rising up, like stock jobers, what we would consider people who trade stocks today.

This is like a new fearful invention.

So much is changing England that it's a time of great flux and what Kido's letters is really trying to do is to say,

amidst all this chaos, there's actually a few simple principles that we can follow,

that we can figure out from history and from reason that we should nearly always follow and

that will produce a free and prosperous society for all.

All right so we're at a time when science and religion are sort of butting heads in a really significant ways in terms of the

scientific revolutions that we're seeing in people's ideas about how that the world practically functions.

How did that inform what these guys wrote?

So, Trenton and Gordon Gordon Gordon were very anti-Catholic.

They constantly referred to people as

papes and papists. They are very critical of the Catholic Church in

...