The Republic of Invention

History tends to confer greatness upon heroic individuals, the lone genius, the solitary inventor, but the authors of the Declaration of Independence knew that collaboration and collective intelligence are more often the source of human achievement. In fact, they bet their lives on it.

The first draft of the Declaration was doubtless the inspired work of Thomas Jefferson, but he was not the sole author of the document we celebrate today. Jefferson was one of the “Committee of Five”, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, who brought the Declaration into being. Each was a fine writer and political thinker in his own right; working together, sharing ideas and drawing upon the works of their contemporaries, they wrote one of the world’s most profound meditations on liberty, equality, and human flourishing. Their clear statement of values and intentions framed a new commitment to the common good and changed the course of history.

The founders’ ideas come to us as gifts, as freely as light and air. They are our shared inheritance, and the world’s, not artifacts, but useful illumination in our current moment of necessity, in which only invention and principled action, everywhere and on a global scale, will restore the health of the earth.

The Declaration itself is a valuable touchstone. It remains valuable, writes political philosopher Danielle Allen, because the way it came into being illustrates “the human mind at work on a scale larger than that of a single individual.” In the story of the Declaration and the civic vocabulary it created, “we can see human intelligence as a collective force, a powerful instrument for grasping the world, effective because it pools the capacities of multitudes of people.”

That was not an accident. The process of writing the Declaration mirrored the authors’ belief in the necessity of a “commons of knowledge.” As the philosopher Lewis Hyde has written, the founders believed that self-governing communities were grounded in, and given life, by the free flow of ideas, which supported creativity in the arts and sciences and enabled citizens to participate in public life. “A republic of knowledge,” writes Hyde, “was taken to be part of the larger political estate the founders were trying to create.”

Within this new estate, liberty was assumed to be “positive liberty,” not just freedom from domination, but “citizenship directed toward acknowledged public ends.” That’s why the Declaration’s list of self-evident truths does not end with “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but proceeds from those individual rights to the collective right of a people to govern themselves in ways that “effect their Safety and Happiness,” the well-being of the community.

For the authors of the Declaration then, liberty and equality empowered one to invent and share ideas, to aspire, as Franklin did, to “produce something for the common Benefit of Mankind.” Indeed, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and James Madison, too, were all dedicated to the proposition that the republic they framed could continually enrich the cultural commons and enhance the public good.

For Jefferson, ideas were meant to be shared: “If nature has made one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself…” Deeply committed to the belief that ideas should spread as freely as fire “from one to another over the globe,” and deeply opposed to patent monopolies, he nevertheless came to a compromise. He saw that rewarding creators inspired ingenuity and ultimately enhanced the cultural commons, but only if monopolies were limited. “Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time,” he wrote. “It is equally certain it ought not be perpetual.”

Madison and Adams shared Jefferson’s distaste for patent monopolies, each seeing them as destructive of democracy, and celebrated ideas “common to all.” Madison declared that “perpetual monopolies of every sort are forbidden by the genius of free government.” Adams wrote that “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue,” should be “diffused generally among the body of the people.”

Franklin, famously, gave everything away. He never patented his inventions and in fact did quite the opposite, sharing them in broadsides and publishing them in his almanac. He was also a consummate collaborator. His contribution to electrical theory grew out of work with three other men who were themselves skilled scientists. He never claimed otherwise. He simply shared the work with everyone. As Hyde notes, Franklin’s discovery was “additive, transformative, associative, cumulative…It built on what came before.”

That is the true nature of invention, and a compelling argument for freely sharing ideas for the benefit of all. We are in a revolutionary moment, a moment of shared necessity, in which an immense amount of creativity is needed to change the course of history. We need to “attract the attention of the ingenious” with just rewards, but we also need innovative ideas and inventions to spread like fire and air, “from one to another over the globe.”

We are a designer and an investor, and like Franklin, we like to make things “for the common Benefit of Mankind.” Like Jefferson, we believe ideas can be healing gifts. In the spirit of the founders, we approach the challenge of restoring the health of the earth with positive intentions, putting values first. And with them, we want to inspire human minds to work on a larger scale than that of a single individual.

We envision a Republic of Invention, an ecosystem of collaboration, in which the collective intelligence of inventors and innovators enriches the world's common wealth of clean water, fresh air, healthy soil, nutritious food and renewable energy. Rewarded by commerce, working for the public good, innovators in every field could strive together to restore the health of the earth, transforming this moment of necessity into a revolution of creativity and human flourishing.

The architecture (or framework) of this republic already exists…