Don't overlook Thomas Jefferson. Master of deceit. Claimed he was interested in family farms and local democracy -- in real life, a slave-holding believer in a global American Empire. (See Gary Wills on this point.)

The last chance we had to do more good than harm was in 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt's Human Rights Declaration began the discussion of trans-national standards of liberty. The Bretton Woods system we strongarmed the world into led to the best quarter century that poor people have known. The IMF and World Bank did some good things before the Reagan movement transformed them. Our occupations of Germany and Japan, and especially letting them retain control over their own capital, was a rebuke to the idea of liebensraum and eat or be eaten militarism - but now the US itself has destroyed international law in that realm. If only we had followed through with the 1946 Baruch Plan and given up our nuclear weapons. But the odds against successful UN control of nukes were fantastic.

Mostly, the evils of America's post-war vision were based on the belief that all-out, unimpeded growth would solve the grievances of poverty. Was it sincere? Instead the population explosion and attendant pollution and energy crises have left the US with no positive vision for the world besides neo-Victorian hypocrisy.

I think you're close as Athens, Spatra and Rome were all modeled. Plato's Republic was and is very influencal. You also need to look at Hume, Locke, and Hobbes, and at those that influenced them (Trace those footnotes). Baylin's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Wood's Radicalsim of the American Revolution are very revealing, as are their footnotes/sources.

As I mention elsewhere in this thread, one needs time to learn what must be learned. And learning from books or other sources of information pays very poorly. Thus the rationale for the hypothesis that only the well to do have the time to learn what must be learned in order to govern or vote for those who will govern properly. Amazingly enough, Protestantism is the root cause of this rationale's undoing, as its prime postulate is that everyone know what the Bible says so that s/he may be closer to God. That of course meant learning to read, the basis of learning and self government.