The ideas of the Enlightenment influenced American colonists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson because they read the works of Enlightenment thinkers and adopted similar views on politics and society. Political philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that using reason will guide us to the best ways to operate in order to create the most beneficial conditions for society. This included a conviction that all human beings have certain natural rights which are to be protected and preserved. The Enlightenment ideal was that individual freedom and equal rights and opportunity for all would be promoted and protected. Each individual's well-being (life, health, liberty, possessions) should be served by the way government and society are arranged. The American founding fathers accepted these Enlightenment views and acted on them.
Further detail / example:
John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), had expressed the idea of natural rights in the words that follow. Notice the similarities to what was later stated in the American colonists' <em>Declaration of Independence</em> (1776).
<em>The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.</em>
Tyrants came to power in many Greek polis regions as a result of "<span>b. Inheritance," since this meant that they needed no formal approval of either a king or the general populus. </span>
