In this March 14, 2026, Promethean Action weekly class, Charles “Chuck” Park argues that America’s true intellectual origins have been censored and traces a centuries-long fight between a British oligarchical worldview (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton) and a Renaissance conception of man as Imago Viva Dei.
He highlights President Trump’s January 25, 2025, order reestablishing the 1776 Advisory Committee and centers the presentation on James Logan’s suppressed 1730s manuscript, Of the Duties of Man, which Philip Valenti rediscovered in the 1970s.
Park says that Logan, influenced by Gottfried Leibniz and mentoring Ben Franklin, refuted Hobbes’s social contract, Locke’s empiricism, and Newton’s vacuum theory, thereby shaping the early American intelligentsia and, later, the American System of economics.
He links these ideas to current political debates and closes with a poem, “The Divine Spark.”
Chapters
00:00 Class Introduction
01:26 1776 Committee Context
03:15 Two Views of Man
07:21 Leibniz and Happiness
13:22 Logan Manuscript Rediscovered
16:02 Refuting Hobbes and Locke
20:56 Leibniz vs Newton Science
26:15 Logan Mentors Franklin
31:57 Göttingen Network and Kepler
39:52 American System Today
45:50 Finish the Revolution
46:39 Divine Spark Poem
President Trump issued an Executive Order on January 25, 2025, re-establishing the 1776 Advisory Committee to restore the true history of America.
Much of this material is documented at length in Phil Valenti’s original study of Logan and the other intellectuals surrounding Benjamin Franklin.
Trade Advisor Jamison Greer just made that clear in his speech at Davos on January 20, 2026.
• From Hamilton to Today: Trade and U.S. Economic Strategy
