Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course. This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky

Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course. This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky considers his anarchism a straightforward extension of the principles of enlightenment political philosophy to industrial society. There's a layered irony, of course: most of the founding fathers were members of a political and economic elite which openly favored aristocracy and commerce over the 'regular folk.' Not all of them of course. The American Revolution was a strange tenuous cooperation between an economic elite that saw independence as the way out of a mercantile demand on the part of Britain, and a political class which was versed in Enlightenment political philosophy and saw an opportunity for using Locke and Montesquieu as a handbook for a new kind of government.