On this July 4

The Fourth of July holiday celebrates community, both national and local. Parades featuring people in uniform — scouts, firefighters and police, as well as our military — are traditional fixtures.

Military uniforms remind us of the role war has in our past and present. That in turn introduces a key point about this holiday. We gained our independence from Great Britain and that nation’s global empire through our Revolutionary War, which began in 1775 with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, as it was known then.

The Declaration of Independence, formally proclaimed by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, made the break with Great Britain official. The document was a collective enterprise but largely written by Thomas Jefferson.

Our Revolution was a hard struggle, lasting until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The war proved bloody and lengthy.

There is a temptation, less today than in the past, to glorify war while glossing over or ignoring the inherent brutality of organized killing of opposing armed forces as well as civilians. The First and Second Industrial Revolutions, which began in the 18th century and lasted through the early 20th century, have only made war vastly more destructive and lethal.

July 4 independence ceremonies sometimes obscure the fact that our nation was founded on an idea that was truly revolutionary in the eighteenth century: equality. In subtle ways, the concept of equality remains challenging.

The proposition that we all have inherent rights, including the right to rebel, turned the status quo of that era upside down.

The revolutionary focus was, and remains today, on the rights of the individual — not the state, not the monarch, not a corporate entity, not a particular economic or social class and certainly not the military. How to organize public authority, or the state, to reflect this was both essential and difficult.

The Articles of Confederation, our initial governing document adopted in 1781, was a weak framework combining the original 13 colonies of Great Britain, now declared sovereign states.

The reality that this document was not effective enough led to a second effort, this time successful. The Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789.

John Locke (1632-1704) was a shy, mild-mannered and extraordinarily productive English scholar and physician who literally changed the course of history. His “Two Treatises of Government” developed the case for natural rights, including the right to rebel against established authority.

Locke experienced firsthand the extraordinarily bloody English Revolution and Civil War, and its associated political turbulence. For a time, he lived in exile. A brilliant recent examination of his impact on the United States can be found in “America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life” by Claire Rydell Arcenas.

Also in March 1776, the classic “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith (1723-1790) was published in Great Britain. In fascinating fashion, Smith described and insightfully analyzed the rapidly expanding Industrial Revolution, initiated by steam power, which transformed the British Empire and eventually Europe and the world at large.

Smith is sometimes mistakenly described as advocating for an unfettered, unregulated commercial free market. This is false. In fact, while he celebrated the free market, he also warned against collusion and other corrupting business practices.

Open but regulated commercial activity, greatly expanded by the Industrial Revolution, is a wonder.

The American Revolution went hand in hand with the economic revolution that transformed political, social and commercial life around the globe — one that continues to unfold.

Arthur I. Cyr (acyr@carthage.edu) is author of “After the Cold War: American Foreign Policy, Europe and Asia” (Macmillan and NYU Press).