FROM DIVISION TO INACTION

 

In continuing with the topic of the last posting, this one further shares Daniel Elazar’s review[1] of the obstacles the founding fathers faced.  That is developing a national governing model that remained true to their collective bias for republican / federalist values.  In short, the obstacles were a vast land mass and a diverse populous.  The history of such efforts seemed to always count on despotic rule to provide effective governance.

          Of any hope, at least as one studied the situation, was to either follow the model of Great Britain which was a single unified polity but that honored the diversity of the governing population or to establish a loose confederation of independent / sovereign states united only for purposes of mutual defense and foreign relations. 

The latter option was looked upon dubiously out a fear that it could degrade from inadequate rule even in terms of foreign relations.  And, as mentioned in the previous posting, the unified option – a la Napoleon and France – was popular among the military.  One of its “sons,” though, Alexander Hamilton would argue for a constitutional monarchy – a la the British model – at the Constitutional Convention.  Instead, the founders first chose the second option, the loose arrangement, by adopting the Articles of Confederation and in a few years determined that that was an unworkable model.

One thing the founders learned was that the “loose” option only led to elite factions undermining the liberties of sizable numbers within the political landscapes of the various states.  Those who represented these factions – one can by implication count Patrick Henry in Virginia – maintained their staunch support of this option.  Later, they will make up the Anti-Federalist contingency during the debate over the ratification of the federal constitution.

So, what was chosen – option one or option two?  Neither.  The founders instead invented yet another option.  They first acknowledged that a single nation had evolved in the years since the first settlers made their way to North America.  Two wars and common challenges cooked up this resulting American people. 

That meant that a sufficient common culture and way of being existed, albeit barely, to create a single polity.  But there was enough distinction among the states to not ignore the diversity that existed.  And their steadfast determination to not cater to those who advised despotism should not be underestimated in understanding what happened.

If the experiences taught them anything, it taught them that “smallness” did not guarantee a protection from despotic tendencies and even its actuality.  Smallness could be despotic just as well as bigness.  And another lesson learned was that democratic majorities can also be despotic.  Pure majorities can and had overrun the rights of individuals and minorities.  Therefore, they set out to establish a qualified majority rule arrangement.  As Elazar puts it,

 

Pure democracies, in particular, were subject to the sway of passion and hence to the promotion of injustice, and even republics were susceptible if faction was allowed to reign unchecked.  As friends of human liberty and popular government, they felt it necessary to create a political system that would protect the people from despotic governments whether they be large or small, democratic or not.[2]

 

The proposed solution was one of countervailing forces; a federalist model provided such an approach. 

How?  By allocating sufficient powers to various levels so that they could then compete in arenas of vying, opposing interests.  In this way no one faction could control what transpires as these conflicting interests work out their differences in local and national arenas.  Among the resulting balances would be the overall limits on governmental excesses and popular passion.  For example, federalism allowed for national governmental entities to compete with regional (state) governmental entities while maintaining a popular governmental model.

          In short, the founders devised a “republican remedy for republican diseases.”  Was it a centralized remedy or decentralized remedy?  It was a non-centralized one.  That is, the devised system has no central body with sole sovereign power.  Instead, an original shared sovereign approach was instituted with the resulting constitutional instrument the founders developed in 1787. 

Yes, one level, when the chips are down, has final say – that being the national government – but an honest respect for the sovereignty of each level was to be maintained – and it has been.  Students of this innovation gave it a name, “checks and balances,”[3] and civics students learn that this attribute is one of the Constitution’s principles.  And given that within each government there were divided powers, the overall polity was to be set up to deny any element within it too much power, but yet with enough power to meet those responsibilities that element was created to meet.

And this separation of power, writ large, extended to other political institutions such as political parties (with national and state organizational structures) that the founders did not even foresee.  The federal model, therefore, became culturized or institutionalized within the various political entities including private ones such as corporations.  The result is the “infiltration” of federalist principles among the diverse array of institutional elements of the civil society. 

One can look at the arrangements by which the public school system of the nation – that is, the fifty different public-school systems – and how educational policy is issued and implemented.  This does not preclude problems arising from this structure, but that it exists no one can doubt, and no one can ascribe a despotic control over the American educational system.

And the balance sought – one that Americans have frequently asked since – was between bestowing sufficient power, while at the same time ensuring that those with power seek and secure sufficient consent from the various corners of interests regarding proposed policies.  To get something big done, one needs significant consensus among the various factions that make up the American political scene. 

Currently, that is being judged as a challenge in that various problems – e.g., environmental problems – go untreated.  Unfortunately, one can at least suspect that various politicians today do not fully appreciate what is at stake, but perhaps a sufficient number of voters might resolve this inaction.  And again, the prevalence of the natural rights view seems to be an obstacle of no small consequence.

While it often, as the current headlines of today demonstrate, draws criticisms for inaction, it, the federalist arrangement, has protected the American public from a government running roughshod over the nation.  If anything, it is not majorities that seem to have undermined this federalism, but the power of a minority with excessive moneyed assets that seem to have provided a despotic character – not just today but since the development of first a national economy and now a global one.

The model that was devised, though, took significant strides toward ascribing respectful and meaningful allocation of power to the individual factions that existed at the time and since there have been meaningful accommodations to meet the growth of the economy – for example, instituting national programs that attempt to retain more local elements such as Social Security. 

This blogger sees the main threat comes more from cultural elements.  The nation no longer looks to federalist thought in its political calculations, it now looks to the transactional based view of natural rights instead.  Hence, one has the indecisive reaction one sees in how Americans react to the various political challenges of the day.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30.

[2] Ibid., 21.

[3] This blogger has been instructed that the term “balance” did not refer to a weighing scale, but to the mechanism of clocks of those times that slowed down the operations within those clocks to allow for accurate measures of time.  The analogy was just that, to slow down governmental reactions to increase the probabilities of devising prudent policies.

A POLITICAL ARCHITECH’S CHALLENGE

As this blog proceeds and tracks the development of political thought among Americans in the colonial years – especially with the years leading up to the formation of the nation’s governmental framework – it would be wise to review the governing challenges that the founding fathers faced in the late 1700s.  To remind the reader what is motivating this review, is the challenge to demonstrate the dominance of the federalist view as the founders proceeded in their labors. 

To point out a further qualifier, this review in this posting already assumes that those early Americans, some begrudgingly, were convinced that their future demanded the colonies and then states had to join in some form of unity.  How this became accepted will be outlined in future postings.  It is not a small part of the story, but the goal here is to give the reader an end vision of what the founders were seeking to accomplish.

In this overview, the insights of Daniel Elazar will be utilized.[1]  And he begins by addressing the notion that somehow what eventually happened was, given the conditions before the founders, preordained – it was simply the inevitable solution to what the founders faced and what they knew as being possible.  Elazar rejects that notion and credits the founders with an original idea not at all obvious to them or to the people they represented.  Yes, one can argue it was logical, given the role federalism played in the development of the individual colonies, but not obvious.

That is, they entered the challenge with a bias toward federalism.  They, through the colonial experience, were already disposed to believe that a system needed to sustain, so as to be viable, popular governance and a system that would reflect civil justice and morality.  In that, they sought a good commonwealth which in turn demanded a balance among various sought-after attributes. 

This reflected their short history in organizing their colonies when they needed to find the right mix of human liberty, functional authority, and sufficient governmental vibrancy.  If hit upon, the result, it was believed, would be strong, sustainable, democratic, and just.  And this not only needed to work in terms of the relationships among the colonies/states, but also among the various interests (factions) that made up a national polity.

So, what stood in the way?  According to Elazar, three main obstacles confronted these political architects:  a vast expanse of territory or land even in 1787, a vibrant array of peoples or what current language calls diversity, and the already well-established political norms and biases existing within thirteen different polities that had developed since the early years of the seventeenth century.

To these conditions, Elazar directly criticizes competing views as to what was accomplished.  One is that the founders, who were in their hearts antidemocratic, wanted to dilute the popular will by dividing it in a federalist arrangement.  And further, that a good deal of American history – in antebellum years – was about the people pushing against what the founders established in expanding the democratic character of the American political scene.

The second view Elazar defuncts is that even though the founders might have been democrats (small “d”), they had the practical problem of the lack of communication facility over the vast land mass the states encompassed.  Of course, as technology advanced and communication facility became more sophisticated this became less of an issue.

Therefore, the need to be a federal system became less needed and that, in turn, goes a long way in explaining how American politics had become more centralized especially through such programs as the New Deal and over such concerns as civil rights.  In short, a distribution of power, as provided for under a federalist system, becomes “obsolete.”

One can cite the facts supporting some this, for example, there were thirteen states and as previous postings try to argue, they did generate a federalism within their politics – mostly based on Puritanical beliefs and Enlightenment thinking.  Elazar even points out that there is research that in certain areas of policy, the colonists had de facto federal relationships with the Crown and Parliament. 

But a priori there was no guarantee that the states, after independence, would unite into a single governmental arrangement.  And even if they could or would, that effort could very well be limited to some loose league or confederacy for the sake of foreign affairs issues.  The fact that the colonies united for the sake of addressing their mutual interests vis-à-vis the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War), relations with indigenous tribes, or in fighting the War of Independence proved that the colonies, then the states could unite despite a vast land territory or a diverse population.

And, of course, if one dismisses concerns for democracy, republicanism, liberty, history is full of examples of vast empires – Persian, Roman, Ottoman, Russian[2] – that were able over the centuries to maintain fairly successful political control over vast areas and diverse populations.  Yes, they were, to various degrees autocratic, but most allowed degrees of local autonomy over various governing concerns.  At the time of the founders, the French and the English were establishing world empires.  The French were particularly partial to central control.

Yes, vast land masses could come under a single arrangement, the question was could it do so without counting on some despotic rule.  And as is often the case, an experiment was first tried.  History remembers it as the Articles of Confederation and not only did it not work, but it also gave the founders useful information of what exactly prevented it from working.  The common notion is that the Articles were totally dismissed.  Donald Lutz, this blogger heard him say, points out that much of the Articles survived in the US Constitution.  But the point is, a federal arrangement survived with a more powerful central government.

With the opportunity to abandon a popular government model – George Washington was being advised by his former military subordinates to push for a centralized model – the founders stuck to a federal solution.  This despite the fact that that history provided no example that accomplished what they were trying to initiate – or better stated, preserve.  Elazar points out,

Not only were there no extant examples of the successful government of a large territory except through a strong central government, but there were few small territories governed in a “republican” manner and none offered the example of federalism as Americans later came to know it.  The two nations then existing that had come closest to resolving the problems of national unity without governmental centralization were the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Swiss Confederation.  Not only were both very small republics indeed … but the failure of the former to solve its constitutional problems and its consequent lapse into government by an incompetent executive and an anti-republican oligarchy was well-known while the latter was hardly more than a protective association of independent states with little national consciousness.  Neither could be an attractive example … [of] republicanism …[3]

But as is known today, this did not deter the founders.  The next posting will continue with this contextual information, i.e., the challenges that founders faced in devising the constitutional model they devised.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30.

[2] The Russian empire was larger than the original land mass of America.  According to Elazar, it totaled 888,811 square miles in 1789.

[3] Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” 19.

UNLOCKING LOCKE’S VIEW

 

This blog has often described the national disagreement between those who lean toward republican values and those who lean toward liberalist values.  And here begins a problem with language.  One might think, from these “titles” that republicanism refers to the beliefs of the Republican Party, and liberalism favors the Democratic Party. 

But as the terms are being used in this posting, and in the related literature, the opposite is true.  Here, liberalism does not refer to left-of-center political thought, but actually reflects the natural rights view.  And republicanism, of which federalism is one form, refers to communal biases as expressed by a representative governmental arrangement.  With that, this posting can report on a debate among scholars who study the history of American political thought.

And this debate centers on how at the time of the colonial years and through the beginning of the nation the Enlightenment affected American leaders and the constitutional model they hit upon to establish the nation’s governance.  Those who favor liberalism argue that the Enlightenment led the founders toward a polity that put in place the arguments of John Locke. 

Often cited is Thomas Jefferson’s phraseology of the rights of the individual:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

This mirrored, so the claim states, Locke’s natural rights of life, liberty, and property.  And for the bulk of the years this debate has been carried forth, those who favor liberalism cite this bias,[1] but roughly since 1960s, led by such historians as J. G. A. Pocock, that republican ideas were at least just as important as liberal ideas.[2] 

There are other scholars who support the republican bias, and this blogger leans toward the political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar, who this blog often cites for his contributions to explaining this history.[3]  Another historian this blog has cited is Gordon Wood along with his work on the founding generation.[4] 

This is how this blog described Wood’s account of the founders,

Gordon Wood argues that in the years surrounding the writing of the Declaration of Independence there was an especially strong popular commitment to federalist ideals.  Particularly, the political group of that time, known as the Commonwealthmen or Whigs (not to be confused with the nineteenth century Whig Party), demonstrated an inordinate level of support for republicanism which can be described as a type of political beliefs that include federalist thought. 

The Whigs are credited with leading popular support for independence from Britain.  They emphasized citizen participation, – especially at the local level – representative government, liberty, equality, and public virtue.  In other words, citizens bound to this cultural view lived their social lives [in the 1830s] as Tocqueville described them [in an earlier posting].[5] 

 

So disposed, a lot of the colonists’ thought took on a reactive mode to changes in British rule as the 1700s progressed.  That is, they began to see the British as corrupt since they were instituting policies that flew in the face of colonials’ biases.  That particularly targeted British taxing policies, their interference with American politics, and their on again-off again promotion of Anglican religion seemed contrary to what Americans were judging to be good governance. 

What the colonists began to emphasize – both as result of the Enlightenment but also due to their Puritanical background – was that a person’s value, in intrinsic terms as well as in his/her financial standing, was based on property[6] (and its entailed rights), but that value also included his/her communal sense of citizenship. 

Beyond these sensitivities, they saw governmental corruption by means of faction, patronage, standing armies, an established church, and excessive support of monied interests as growing under their colonial existence and attributed to British influence or policies.  Summarily, one can classify these growing concerns as those of republicanism. 

These feelings were not limited to the elites but made their way across the American colonial population.  And this grew as Britain attempted to exert its presence within the colonies and as the 1700s wore on.  Most Americans can readily remember their school lessons of British taxation and Americans’ call for “no taxation without representation.”

As for Jefferson’s phrase, such writers as Gary Will credits not John Locke (Will argues that Jefferson did not even own Locke’s work from which the famous phrase was credited), but was much more influenced by common sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid.  Others attribute the actual Declaration quote to William Wollaston. 

In Wollaston’s 1722 book, The Religion of Nature Delineated, he provides “the pursuit of happiness” phrase and attributes its prudence to reason and truth.[7]  Yet others look to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.[8]  So the Locke source – which in his Two Treatises of Government is “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” – does not turn out to be a “slam dunk” source of Jefferson’s phrase. 

As a matter of fact, when one reviews Locke’s position on natural rights, he is reigned in by something called natural law.  Steven Forde makes an important related distinction between Locke and Thomas Hobbes – who should be the philosopher cited by natural rights advocates.  Forde writes,

Locke’s claim is that individual have a duty to respect the rights of others, even in the state of nature [that state that exists before a people organize a polity].  The source of this duty, he says, is natural law.

          The difference with Hobbes is clearest in Locke’s argument about property.  Hobbes and Locke agree that individuals have a right to property in the state of nature, but Hobbes denies that individuals have any duty to respect the property of others.  This makes property more or less useless in Hobbes’s state of nature.  Locke says individuals have a duty to respect the property (and lives and liberties) of others even in the state of nature, a duty he traces to natural law.  Natural law and natural rights coexist, but natural law is primary, commanding respect for the rights of others.[9]

Forde goes on to clarify this a bit further.  He claims that an individual’s rights are in the context of this duty, in that that duty is always present with the exception when one’s life is in jeopardy.

          This posting will, of course, not end this debate, but this blogger wishes to take this opportunity to explicitly state an underlying message this blog has tried to communicate.  Most of American history, not only the years surrounding the birth the nation, was guided more so by the republican train of thought.  More specifically, that being the form of republicanism Americans followed, federalism.

Everyone knows that that bias determined the structural makeup of the national and state governments.  But beyond that, Americans had held as almost sacred to federalism’s processes.  That included a reliance that the nation saw, at least as a basic espoused value, the worth of its population being federated within themselves.  At least to the degree that a sense of communality, collaboration, and cooperation by those who were accepted as part of the national partnership served to establish what was right in terms of governance and politics. 

Its only shortcoming – and it was and has been an immoral and unjust shortcoming – was the exclusion of nonwhites.  That is why federation theory, what this blogger promotes, is not this earlier version, parochial/traditional federalism, but a newer version.  That is liberated federalism, which is inclusive of all Americans. 

As for what today holds in regard to the allegiance of most Americans, that would be the natural rights view.  Some hold onto the ideals of Locke, but too many are holding onto Hobbes’s dystopian vision – a social existence without any sense of duty or obligation.  With that insight, one can begin to understand the sorry state of the polity today.

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[1] See Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, edited by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.  Ironically, a value this blogger cites making up what one can call republicanism – or more specifically federalism – is civic humanism.  In making his argument, Kramnick admits that up until the development of the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – American elites tended to rely on republican values such as civic humanism.  Civic humanism, as Kramnick describes it, is a political being realizing his/her fulfilment through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.  This is a republican value. 

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966) AND Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

[4] Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968).

[5] Robert Gutierrez, “What Was the Original Intent?”, Gravitas:  A Voice for Social Studies – a blog (May 30, 2017).

[6] Life was considered an element of one’s property.

[7] James W. Ely, Main Themes in the Debate over Property Rights (Milton Park, England:  Routledge, 1997).

[8] Paul Sayre (ed.), Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies:  Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pond (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1947).

[9] Steven Forde, “John Locke and the Natural Law and Natural Rights Tradition,” Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (n.d.), accessed June 3, 2021, http://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/locke .

FROM INTOLERANCE TO INSTITUTIONAL ACCEPTANCE

 

Overall, one can judge that religion was fairly diverse in the American colonies.  Actually, the main motivation that spurred initial colonization was to seek religious freedom especially in the case of Puritans in what would become the New England Colonies and the Quakers, an off shoot Puritanical denomination, in the settlement of Pennsylvania.  And given the hazards one encountered in making the trip to the North American shores, that motivation must have been quite strong.

          Now, whether these early settlers, usually victims of intolerance in England, were in turn tolerant of other religions, is a bit complicated.  There were the famous cases of intolerance in the Puritan settlement led by John Winthrop.  In their perceived aims, these Puritans sought to establish their ideal religious arrangement; that being the Congregational Church to establish that “city upon the hill.”  And such an image did not tolerate wayward religious views.  The exception was in Rhode Island that led the way to more accommodating policy.

          In Massachusetts, there were famous cases of intolerance such as the case of Roger Williams who was banished from the colony and fled to the area he established as Rhode Island in 1636.  Anne Hutchinson was banished two years later and also made her way to Rhode Island.  Along with banishment, there were other punishments such as jailing, flogging, and other harsh punishments meted out to those who were found guilty of not conducting themselves in acceptable religious ways.  The famous case of the Salem Witchcraft trials, in which over a hundred arrests were made, resulted in the hanging of 19 colonists and the stoning of a couple of men.  But this harshness had a limited history as its impracticality became apparent as new settlers with other beliefs started to arrive.

          In addition, as indicated above, other sects began establishing other colonies and with them other nationalities began showing up.  Among these other settlers were Roman Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Anglicans, Quakers, and Presbyterians.  As the years rolled by, this became a prominent feature of the establishment and settlement of the various colonies.  This blog has already commented on the role the Quakers played in establishing Pennsylvania and how its founder, William Penn, advocated religious tolerance.

          And in this, despite the initial intolerance of Puritans, it turned out that congregational churches began to be more tolerant than hierarchical churches.  That is, churches such as Puritans and Quakers tended to allow for other religions and perhaps it was their more local, communal structures that lent themselves to accepting neighbors of other faiths whereas with religions that place ultimate allegiances to some far-off figure, be it a monarch or a pope, this was not so easily accomplished. 

This was particularly the case under the rule of King James II in England.  His Catholic bent had a double effect when he tried to switch England back to Catholicism.  This did not only sit poorly with the English population, but with colonists as well who were mostly, by a wide margin, Protestant.  Of course, this upheaval ended with the Glorious Revolution that replaced James with King William III and Queen Mary II.  The lasting effect was to undermine the unquestioned authority among the colonists of a king or a queen, but also to establish a more general bias toward tolerance especially in terms of religion.[1]

This is pointed out to make the claim that, first, a basic tenet of federalism – almost definitional – is inclusion.  One cannot speak of being federated with others if others are excluded.  Yet, second, when it came to races and to some degree nationalities and non-Christian religions, early Americans were exclusive and, in terms of race, for too many that is still the case. 

But to the extent they were inclusive, this development should be considered as a version of federalism among Americans.  It is a version this blogger calls parochial/traditional federalism.  And a place to start considering how federalism gained in its ability to influence colonists, one can start with religious tolerance.  Even in this social domain, the path toward acceptance was not always smooth and considered inevitable; it had its “bumps in the road” as the above overview indicates. But the path toward religious tolerance was inevitable.

And here, ironically, it was not religious thought that led the way, but the more secular bent among Enlightened thinkers that pushed Americans to realize that their common welfare hinged on being tolerant, especially in this domain of religion.  One finds a general transition from a fairly intolerant postures among various colonial settlements to functional levels of inclusion especially as the jurisdictions of evolving polities grew in size. 

And it is in this form of development that congregational – the more federalist arrangement – functioned to almost insist that tolerance be part of the necessary foundation of such unification.  Surely, this historical development provided evidence of the functionality religious tolerance could play to those who would become the leaders of the new nation Americans would establish toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Those leaders included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.  Each of these and others actively fought for provisions to be drawn up and enacted into the founding documents of the nation.  Religious freedom for all denominations, majority and minority sects, was seen by these founders as an essential property right.  In addition, this was not only seen as an individual right but a communal element that the past had demonstrated was an essential factor in establishing and maintaining peace and mutual well-being.

And the growing sense of tolerance was eventually legalized by various provisions in law, most notably by the ratification of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but also at the local level as exemplified with the adoption of the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 which finally killed any consideration of having an “established” religion for either a state or the nation.

And this more secular turn reflected Enlightened thinking that objected to any traditions of aristocracy while turning to republicanism as the preferred mode of governance.  This blog has already shared a list of Enlightened writers, both from the colonies, but also from Europe and Britain, that provided the theoretical guidance leading the way to republicanism. 

Those names include John Locke, David Hume, but also should include Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Adding to these names is those of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid.  There are others such as Samuel von Pufendorf, a German thinker who wrote about the ideas of Thomas Hobbes’ dealings with natural law.  But with these works, what became contentious was the conflicting ideas between republicanism and liberalism.

The term republicanism is somewhat new to this blog.  Related terms the blog has utilized are federated polities (a form of republicanism) and democracy (republicanism being a form of democracy).  America’s form of republicanism includes a commitment to a list of governing attributes.  They are the consent of the governed, doing away with any remnants of aristocracy, and a deep-seated antagonism to corruption especially in the public domain. 

Such writers as New Zealand historian, John Greville Agard Pocock, write of the rich political literature upon which American republicanism is based.  Pocock shares the following:

 

[Those political writings] formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar:  a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded on property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the milia); established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion); and the promotion of a monied interest – though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement.[2]

 

And this has led to a current debate between those who see the prominent thinking among the founders as being predominately that of republicanism (of which this blogger can be included) or those who see them being influenced by liberalism (that being a reflection of natural rights’ ideas and ideals).

The next posting will delve into this debate since it has a profound effect on contemporary politics.  That is, liberalism has become the central rationale for many conservative arguments and a foundational cause of what is being called polarization.  Republicanism can be seen as both supporting non-Trumpian conservativism and many left-of-center liberal advocacy of today.  The verbiage can be confusing, but hopefully, the next posting will shed some light on these foundational concerns.

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[1] For a simple overview of this history see “Religion in the Colonies,” (no author or date), https://www.landofthebrave.info/religion-in-the-colonies.htm .

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975), 507, emphasis added.

ARE THERE LYING EYES?

 

As the last posting leaves the reader, it suggests that one can pick up much of the political theorizing among colonial Americans through the tensions between Enlightenment advocates – some being Deists – and religiously influenced colonists.  A lot of that tension will lead to ideas concerning tolerance. 

And further, tensions within the religious faction arose between the New Lights or as known in Europe, Pietists – those affected by the Awakening – and Old Lights who tended to disparage Awakeners.  This last group tended to be supporters of established churches and their ministers.  But to get to tolerance, one needs to take a developmental view of how constitutional ideals got started.

          One finds that such views result from a dialectic struggle.  While this overall contention was being expressed among Americans, several institutional developments occurred.  Probably the most prominent was the upstart of various higher education schools in many of the colonies.  This blog has already reported on the first two of these efforts, those of Harvard and Yale. 

Other colonies followed suit, but what seems a bit ironic, as with Harvard and Yale, religiously motivated people played central roles in getting things started.  For example, Rhode Island College, which became Brown University, Queen’s College in New Jersey, which became Rutgers, Dartmouth in New Hampshire, College of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania, and King’s College, which became Columbia University in New York all were started through the influence of the Awakening. 

Allen Guelzo comments on this irony:

That the Awakeners were interested in founding colleges at all may seem unusual, given the cold shoulder that Harvard and Yale turned to the Great Awakening … [The belief was that] Enlightenment’s glorification of reason and nature was all well and good, argued the Pietists, but only if one did not forget the limits placed upon the operation of the reason by the countervailing power of the other faculties, and especially the will … This was not necessarily an anti-intellectual stance.  It was, in fact, little more than an updating of scholastic-style voluntarism, and it was shared, without any dimming of intellectual energy … by John Wesley, and by Jonathan Edwards.[1]

In that, various personal stories can be discovered.  For example, the story of Thomas Clap illustrates how eventful the twist and turns of these schools were and how they survived low enrollments, rambunctious student bodies, and less then competent administrators.[2]  All of them survived and all would drift toward Enlightened views, especially as science became more prominent.

          As backdrop to these developments on this side of the Atlantic, events in Britain would also have meaningful effects not only on how higher education curriculum would turn, but also on the substantive political ideals the founding generation would generate.  And a lot of this evolving had to do with the politics of religion in Britain. 

The Crown found it beneficial to close campuses of Cambridge and Oxford in England to all except Anglicans.  This proved to be a windfall for Scottish schools.  It was there that the Enlightenment would have its greatest impact that would extend to America with its influence on the founders of the US.

Of specific effect, the work of various Enlightened thinkers tackled the philosophic problems that the Enlightenment bestowed on the intellectual development of Western thought.  And one train of thought worth mentioning here involves John Locke (often referred to in this blog).  Of interest is that philosopher’s thoughts on epistemology or questions regarding how people know what they know.  Specifically, his claim as to the inability of humans to know directly the objects they are aware of; they only know their ideas of those objects, became problematic.

While one persuaded by this view could rely on those perceptions reflecting reality, this disconnect bothered religious thinkers such as Bishop Berkeley who argued that Locke had no evidence for his claim.  But, in addition, a whole school of thought, the school of common sense, led by such thinkers as Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, argued that all that constructed distinction between what is perceived and what is known was essentially nonsense. 

They argued that people know things because they perceive them.  They basically argued that Locke was being unrealistic and that he rendered the mind as being some passive organ (his tabula rasa).  That is, the mind does not only take in ideas over factual perceptions passively, but configures what it perceives conceptually, inductively, and deductively. 

It forms from bare factual explanations, relationships, stories, claims of importance, and other judgmental or semi-judgmental opinions.  One does not see from a scene of New York City a bunch of buildings, but a sense of human progress, ambition, fortitude, challenge, and human folly or degradation.  When one sees a painting, to use a Guelzo’s example, one does not “see” oils and canvass.

And this leads to a sense of morality, what is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly.  And this referred to qualities beyond the individual and his/her perceptions.  Instead, a moral sense was universal among humans.  And this seemed to attack Locke’s claims that one could not have any assurance of what was perceived.  This Lockean claim was further strengthened by the arguments of David Hume.  He reasoned that one could not arrive at any conclusions – such as concluding a billiard ball one saw hit by another ball moved as a consequence of the collision – from perceptions.  To this, Thomas Reid responded.

Reid argued for the strength that common agreement had in formulating one’s views and conclusions.  Basically, he argued that it was the height of idiocy to not accept what one sees as being what is true.  As Guelzo describes Reid’s point,

 

Without trying to explain how it worked or implying that one could know how it worked, the fact that there was “common sense” which attested to the real existence of objects outside the mind was so elemental and reflexive a fact of consciousness that denying it, questioning it or being cleverly philosophical about it, was absurd.[3]

 

In one respect, this “common sense” further strengthened a Locke initiative in that it supported what was evolving from Locke’s thoughts, scientific study – in that one could rely on perceived observations – while at the same time picking up on scholastic bias for reasoned arguments. 

The former aligned with the ideals of natural rights, while the latter could be attached to natural law.  And this combination will be appealing to such politicians and Enlightened thinkers as Thomas Jefferson.[4]  This notion of “common sense” among all led to such conclusions as the “self-evident” quality human rights possessed.  For example, all do not agree to what is beautiful, but all agree that beauty exists.

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – transcript books – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 61-62.  The factual claims of this posting based on Guelzo’s lecture.

[2] Another story of note is what happened to Aaron Burr’s father, Aaron Burr, Sr. and mother, Esther Edwards Burr (daughter of Jonathan Edwards), as their fate intertwined with the early days of Princeton University.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – transcript books – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 68.

[4] Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018).