Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Blackstone were all part of a movement called the Age of Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason. During the 1600s and 1700s, thinkers across Europe began using logic and reason to challenge the idea that kings had the God-given right to rule however they pleased. For centuries, most people accepted that authority came from God and that questioning it was dangerous. The Enlightenment changed that. It created a culture of debate, discussion, and new thinking about government, rights, and the relationship between rulers and the people they governed.
These ideas spread quickly. Books, pamphlets, and papers moved across Europe and eventually across the Atlantic Ocean, finding their way into the hands of educated colonists who were hungry for new ways of thinking. America's founders were serious readers who sought out these works and debated them deeply. Thomas Jefferson owned nearly 10,000 books and once wrote that he could not live without them. John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin all spent years reading and wrestling with the ideas that came out of the Enlightenment.
The founders came to the challenge of building a new government with the writings of Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers fresh in their minds, shaped by years of reading and debate. What these thinkers had written about government, rights, and power had given the founders a way of seeing the world, and that way of seeing the world would shape every decision they made.