CRITICAL ANALYSIS

The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World

The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World

The Five Thousand Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World is a book that was published in 1981 by the late anti-communist and conservative author Cleon Skousen. The book asserts that the United States is a Christian nation whose Founding Fathers were guided by the Bible, and that the U.S. Constitution is a brilliant document.

The Five Thousand Year Leap is a best selling book records the 28 fundamental beliefs of the Founding Fathers which they said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desired peace, prosperity, and freedom. These beliefs have made possible more progress in 200 years than was made previously in over 5,000 years.

The book is written by W. Cleon Skousen who spent a lifetime studying the Founding Fathers and our American heritage. His wealth of knowledge and understanding will help anyone who desires to restore our nation to what the founders really intended.

The book lists twenty-eight fundamental beliefs based on the words of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others, which Skousen asserts have resulted in more progress than was achieved in the last 200 years than in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined.

The premise of the book is that because of the free market system that took root after our Constitution was enacted, the United States literally made a 5000 year leap of progress in the time since then. The author, W. Cleon Skousen, discussed the changes from the time of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the early 1980s when the book was written. In discussing Jamestown, he said: "The most striking thing about the settlers of Jamestown was their startling similarity to the ancient pioneers who built settlements in other parts of the world 5,000 years earlier. The whole panorama of Jamestown demonstrated how shockingly little progress had been made by man during all of those fifty centuries."

He went on to say, "The settlers of Jamestown had come in a boat no larger and no more commodious than those of the ancient sea kings. Their tools still consisted of shovel, axe, hoe, and a stick plow which were only slightly improved over those of China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. They harvested their grain and hay-grass with the same primitive scythes ..."

He then discussed the Constitution that was developed by the Founders. It took 180 years for them to put it all together from the beginning of Jamestown in 1607 to the enactment of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. He goes through the inspirations and sources for their thoughts in explaining how the U.S. Constitutional system came about.

Dr. Skousen contrasted the situation described in Jamestown above to the present day. He talks about the phenomenol results produced by the free enterprise system. Some of the incredible inventions and changes that he cites are as follows: the internal combustion engine, ...