THE COVENANTAL PRINCIPLE CHOICE

 

As the last posting establishes, the American constitutional formula was not to take a collectivist turn.  Perhaps, those Americans were already too individualistic for that sort of solution.  Frankly, this blogger believes it was not even considered as attractive or even as an alternative.  Historically, the American experience occurred before the French Revolution erupted and the French collectivist formulation was issued.  Instead, the American formulation, one that was brewing since the early 1600s, took a covenantal option; first as a religious answer, but shortly thereafter as a secular one.

          Here is how Daniel Elazar describes it,

The covenant idea [through history] passed into early Christianity only after losing its political implications.  Its political sense was restored during the Protestant reformation, particularly by the Protestant groups influenced by Calvin and the Hebrew Bible, the same groups that dominated the political revolutionary movements in Britain and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Much of the American reliance upon the covenant principle stems from the attempt of religiously-inspired settlers on these shores to reproduce that kind of covenant in the New World and to build their commonwealths upon it.  The Yankees of New England, the Scots-Irish of the mountains and piedmont from Pennsylvania to Georgia, the Dutch of New York, the Presbyterians, and to a lesser extent, the Quakers and German Sectarians of Pennsylvania and the Middle States were all nurtured in churches constructed on the covenant principle and subscribing to the federal theology as the means for properly delineating the relationship between man and God (and, by extension, between man and man) as revealed by the Bible itself.[1]

But with the influence of the Enlightenment – especially the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau – those ideals were secularized.[2]  Secularization also allowed for covenantal principles to be accepted among other Christian sects – Catholics and Anglicans.  And this Enlightenment effect deserves its own highlighting.

          In this aspect, Elazar betrays his federal roots when he calls the main idea of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau as not a social contract, but as a social compact.  Both ideas are based on the notion that government derives its powers from the will of the people.  That the people went through some process by which that will is expressed, recorded, and agreed upon to establish a resulting polity is included in both concepts. 

But the distinction between the two terms, compact and contract, has more to do with timing.  That is, a compact is in perpetuity or until its purposes are fulfilled.  A contract is time specific and reliant on its signatories fulfilling the agreement and if one or the other does not, that eradicates the agreement, making it null and void. 

A business agreement is best served by a contract; establishing a government for a nation is best served by a compact in which no matter what an individual or group does, the agreement is still in force.[3]  And in John Locke’s version, with its provisions for natural law, it is amenable to establishing a popular government in that it more fully appreciates covenantal values.  It therefore proved applicable among Americans, relative to the other social contract theories.  Why?  Because their take of Locke’s approach, and hence Elazar’s choice of terms, took on a compact-al formulation.

He claims that the evidence is overwhelming, it describes how the American founders translated the covenant principle so as to establish a governing model for a large land mass and a diverse population.  “The word federal is derived from the Latin foedus which means covenant.”[4]  He then proceeds to provide some of that evidence beginning in 1645’s English Civil War, but here in America, the current use of the term federal, begins to be used in 1777 as the colonies were fighting for their independence.  But its ideas can be first noted in the Mayflower Compact, back 1620.

Subsequent to that with sufficient time to develop, one can find those ideas scattered throughout the founding documents of the various states including the Virginia Bill of Rights (1776), the Vermont Declaration of Independence (1777), and the Constitution of Massachusetts from the pen of John Adams (1779).  One can readily assume that all that agreement did not pop up toward the end of the 1770s without a long serious stream of thinking, discussing, debating, and agreeing over the constitutional issues that evolved among those colonies through the 1600s and 1700s.

And in those discussions one can see recurring principles:

·       Polities are developed by freely formed associations of colonists.

·       Those associations are formed by each motivated colonist with all fellow colonists creating whole entities – a colonial polity – while respecting the individual and his/her integrity within a truly vibrant governmental body.

·       In that wholeness, it is governed by self-made laws that strive to attain and maintain the common good – its ultimate value. 

·       And that that arrangement demands a law-making process by which all have equal voice and laws are impartially interpreted and administered.

These principles, it turns out, proved to have staying power as first the colonial polities were formed, then while a national polity was formed, and onward as settlers made their way to the Pacific coast taking these constitutional ideas and ideals with them.

          And in that, the evidence includes that each of the remaining thirty-seven states’ governments was formulated by a “covenant-making” process.  This general process was mirrored in the development of cities and towns.  In the private sector, at least on paper if not genuinely felt, the same basic process was adhered to in the formulation of various organizational structures that followed.

Among those organizations have been corporations, labor unions, professional organizations, scientific and reform societies – they all followed the federal model.  Even hierarchical religions at least gave/give federal organizing attributes supportive rhetoric.  It became part of the American instinct.  That is,

 

… for federalism [it] was extended into most areas of human relationship shaping American notions of individualism, human rights and obligations, Divine expectations, business organization, civic association and church structure as well as their notions of politics … At the same time, [despite some variance on interpretation of federalism] all agreed that the existence of inalienable rights was not an excuse for anarchy just as the existence of ineradicable human passions was not an excuse for tyranny.[5]

 

The next posting will address what the implications were for those who were caught up in the “Age of Revolution” that started with the American experience in seeking their independence from the British.

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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, 23.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Of course, the resulting government can enact laws that punish rule breakers.

[4] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” 24.

[5] Ibid., 26.

ONE VIEW: THE “GENERAL WILL”

This posting continues this blog’s summary of Daniel Elazar’s general description of the influence that federal theory had on the founding fathers, especially as they devised the governing model that addressed the nation’s vast land mass and its diverse population.  The last posting addressed how this model, if implemented, can prove to be a source of indecision.  That is, in trying to secure the input of all, law making can easily get bogged down and result in either ineffective legislation or in no legislation for a demanding problem. 

          This posting looks at how the constitutional solution the founders devised was both something new and unique, but at the same time extended established norms and modes of governance Americans had grown to accept as preferable.  And in this, one can detect how this nation rejects traditions that were being implemented or promoted by other democratic or semi-democratic arrangements from Europe.  For example, they dismissed notions of a “general will” a la France or an “organic state” a la European monarchies, such as Great Britain.

          This debate as to what America adopted and what it rejected deserves special attention.  The main concern to which this blogger’s attention is drawn has to do with the difference between collective models or principles and federation model or principles.  Early in the history of this blog, in its attempt to describe and explain critical theory, it dedicated a series of postings to the critical theorist, Paulo Freire.  

           One of the end states that theorist aims for, in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a condition he calls “communion” – a sort of union between the oppressed and the oppressor.  The idea is that the oppressor discovers his/her humanity by ceasing to be an oppressor.  But the question this blogger asks:  what exactly does that mean?

          This is how this blog answered that question as it relates to education back then,

 

According to Christopher Ferry, it is described or defined as a state in which teachers trust students, accepts them and their limitations as they are, while at the same time work with them to transform reality. [[1]]  In this definition, one can appreciate an overlap between Freire’s ideas and [those] of federation theory.[2]

 

But this alignment with federation theory is somewhat tentative in that it is ascribing its most communal sense to Freire’s idea.  One can easily give it a collective sense which would further classify it as a critical theory idea – a classification more in line with Freire’s general argument or tradition which his writings are judged to be.

          The importance of all this has to do with the implications of collectivist ideals and ideas.  For example, socialism is generally considered a collectivist construct.  As such it degrades the values associated with individualism.  While the “new left” claims to be more moderate on this point, certain developments among current advocates of the new left give one pause.  And here, language distinctions muddle one’s understanding, but the results demand that one has a clear understanding of this difference.

          Both federal values and critical theory values promote a repudiation of extreme individualism and perhaps the difference comes down to one of degrees, but the consequences of those degrees can be significant.  It turns out that if one ushers in high degrees of merger or union to the point individuals’ integrities are diminished, a form of mob mentality seems to take hold. 

One sees this in socialist countries – especially where democratic traditions are lacking – when their assumptions about peoples’ willingness to abandon individual ambitions and profit do not materialize.  Those efforts have, as a result, been degraded and despotic elements have been utilized to secure what regimes might deem as justice.  A form of this has recently been reported as occurring here in the US.

          Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt report that among new left advocates there has been a proclivity to shut down presentations by right wing speakers on American campuses – even claiming that such speech equates to violence.  Now, speech can lead to violence or danger, as in the famous refrain, one doesn’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, but the cases Lukianoff and Haidt share seem too far from such results. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland is quoted in news reports that in America the Justice Department doesn’t investigate hate speech[3] – the exception is when violence occurs, and motivation is an issue.  This tie in with violence can be complicated and what some of these speakers say reflects policies or practices that should be prohibited.  But the readily chosen reaction of either banning of speakers or disallowing the dissemination of written works seems to reflect a collective mindset reaction that one usually associates with autocratic governments. 

And the history of such efforts goes back to the collectivist practices one associates with the various revolutions in Europe.  One being the French and the other the Russian, both in their ways instituted collectivist solutions to governance.  Here is what Elazar writes concerning the “general will” of the French,

 

Other revolutionaries in the “Age of Revolutions” that has existed since the late eighteenth century – most prominent among them the Jacobins – also sought solutions to some of the same problems of despotism that perturbed the Americans.  But, in their efforts to hurry the achievement of the millennium, they rejected what they believed to be the highly pessimistic assumptions of the American constitution-makers that unlimited political power could even corrupt “the people” and considered only the problem of autocratic despotism.  They looked upon federalism and its principles of checks and balances as subversive of the “general will,” their way of expressing a commitment to the organic unity of society, which, like their pre-modern predecessors, they saw as superior to the mere interests of individuals.  They argued that, since their “new society” was to be based on “the general will” as a more democratic principle, any element subversive of its organic unity would be, ipso facto, anti-democratic.[4]

 

The take-away is that this degree in diminishing the importance of individuals has a strong enough track record to give one concern.

That would be as to its ability to protect the rights – not just natural rights, but federal rights – of individual people.  So, for example, in France, it led to the Reign of Terror – an orgy of guillotine executions of political opponents.  Here in America, especially on college campuses, a slew of “witch hunts” that not only has disregarded the rights of free speech but has led to fear among those who would have come to the defense of targeted speakers and writers. 

That is, collectivism has a track record that frankly gives republican advocates serious concern.  The next posting will look at what federation theory’s response to this traditional “organic” problem has been.  While federation theory challenges extreme individualism, it is strongly committed to upholding and advancing the dignity of individuals. 

Their rights, in the eyes of federalists, are sacrosanct within the parameters of the common good which in turn is defined by a constitutional agreement.  And an important part of that common good is for each to feel and act in ways that reflect his/her own integrity and value as a viable, multidimensional person.  Today, there is a campaign to “police” what is taught in American history classes – an effort geared at “white-washing” the racial history of the country.  Among its offensive character, such policing undermines the socialization of vibrant citizens.

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[1] See Christopher Ferry, “When the Distressed Teach the Oppressed:  Toward an Understanding of Communion and Commitment” (n.d.) accessed June 11, 2021, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268749403.pdf .

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Review of Freire’s Main Ideas,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics Education (June 3, 2011), at present, not available in published form.

[3] For example, Meet the Press, Daily, June 15, 2021 – a news item.

[4] 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, 27.

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 .