Ben Franklin Would Endorse Individual Responsibility

Neal Lane offers his thoughts on how Benjamin Franklin might, were he alive today, encourage scientists to become social activists (Physics Today, October 2003, page 41 ). To justify this, he describes several of Franklin’s many scientific and social accomplishments and then posits a modern sense of social responsibility as motivation for these achievements.

Franklin was a self-made man, an individualist in the first society to recognize and codify individual rights—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He would argue that individuals are responsible for their own lives and accomplishments, unaided—and unfettered—by government. It is only the modern concepts of rights as entitlements and government as a welfare agency that can invert (and destroy) the true meaning of Franklin’s accomplishments into an argument for expanded government. The motivations of Franklin and his generation of patriots are probably best summarized by the Jeffersonian adage, “That government is best which governs least.”