Philosophic Roots of the American Nation

Liberalism and Natural Rights Republicanism 

Central Scholars and Key Works

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought (1955)

Martin Diamond, As Far As Republican Principles Will Admit: Essays by Martin Diamond (1992). Diamond’s essays published in this volume were originally published in from 1959 to 1970.

Paul Rahe, Republics: Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992) 

Micheal Zuckert. The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (1996). 

Substantive Teachings

Proponents of the liberal interpretation believe that the American political system and American political culture are best understood as the realization of the ideas of the John Locke, especially as these ideas were embedded in the Declaration of Independence. These ideas, according to those who hold the Lockean or liberal interpretation, express the deepest commitments, the most firmly held convictions, of Americans.

* These ideas include the belief that all men are created equal. Equality, according to the proponents of this interpretation, meant political equality – the idea that everyone is equal in the state of nature. No one has dominion over another.

Thus,

* Legitimate governments are based upon the consent of the governed. Consent establishes a legitimate form of government. Conversely, neither force, nor reason, nor virtue, nor Divine ordination (“Divine Right of Kings”) is a source of legitimate rule.

* The protection of inalienable rights is the principle goal of government. The Framers established a “natural rights republic.” The American political system was not established to try to improve the souls of the people, to promote homogeneity of opinions, passions, and interests among the people, or to improve the excellences of the few.

* The Framers were “commercial republics” who praised commerce and the market model because they believed that, although men could not be expected to exercise virtue consistently or to faithfully pursue salvation, they could be expected to pursue systematically their physical and material desires. At a broader level, this was said to introduce constancy and predictability into society, to encourage an interdependent and peaceful world, and to provide a humane, prosperous, and stable polity.

* American commitments to the principles of the Declaration and to commercial republicanism have translated into the hegemony of liberal values such as the sanctity of private property, economic individualism, and democracy.

Political Implications

Many proponents of the Lockean or liberal interpretation of the American Founding hold to the idea of “American Exceptionalism” – the belief that the natural abundance and unique settlement of the United States has led to the ubiquity of liberalism and rendered Americans deaf to socialism and inoculated against totalitarianism.

The liberal interpretation has provided a powerful explanation for the non-revolutionary character of the American Revolution, for the United States’ early and lasting embrace of capitalism, for the absence of both socialist and Burkean traditions of political thought in the United States, and for the remarkable stability (with the exception of the Civil War) of American politics and society.

The liberal interpretation explains the distinctiveness of American public policies, especially the absence of a large social welfare net and the opposition of Americans to taxes. Empirical distinctiveness of American policies.

Republicanism

Central Scholars and Key Works

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967, 1992 Enlarged Edition)

Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969, 1998)

J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment—Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republic Tradition (1975)

Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978)

Substantive Teachings

Proponents of the Republican interpretation began by arguing that the liberal interpretation was elitist, anachronistic, and ahistorical. The liberal interpretation was elitist, proponents of the republican interpretation argued, because it examined only a few documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. Other documents are equally good, if not better, expressions of the American mind. If these documents are examined, a different understanding of the American Founding emerges.

Furthermore, the liberal interpretation of the American Founding, according to proponents of the republican interpretation, described what America had become, not how it was founded. America was founded, J.G.A. Pocock wrote, in “dread of modernity.” America was founded on principles that drew back to the ancient republics of Greece, reemerged in English political thought in the 17th and 18th centuries, and then again reappeared in the American Revolution. This set of ideas – the republican ideology – included the following ideas.

* The Importance of Virtue and the Fear of Corruption – The American Revolutionaries, according to this account, believed that republics were fragile and required the constant exercise of virtue by the citizenry lest the republic perish. The American Revolution was born of a fear of corruption in the British ministry, not so much a concern with violations of the inalienable rights of the people.

* Positive Liberty through Participation in the Public Realm – The American Revolutionaries, according to the republican interpretation, were also concerned with promoting and protecting “liberty.” But they understood liberty not simply as the protection of rights. They also believed that liberty involved political participation which men required to become fully human.

* Advancement of the Public Good was a primary role of government. The public good was not simply the sum of all the particular interests of the people. It refers to the people understood as an organic body of people bound by common interests and a common fate.

* The Founders – especially the Jeffersonians – were opposed to commercial capitalism or at least the excesses of capitalism. Here, proponents of the republican interpretation stress the importance of Jefferson’s idea of the independent yeoman.

Political Implications

Proponents of the republican interpretation were historians who denied any explicit contemporary political motives. Their ideas were however taken up by a number of left wing scholars as a communitarian alternative to socialism that had genuine roots in the American political tradition. 

The Scottish Enlightenment

Central Scholars and Key Works

Adair, Douglass. Fame and the Founding: Essays by Douglass Adair ed. Trevor Colbourn. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974.

Sinopoli, Richard. The Foundations of American Citizenship: Liberalism, the Constitution, and Civic Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1978.
___. Explaining America: The Federalist. Garden City, NY.: Doubleday & Co., 1981.
 
Yarbrough, Jean. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson and the Character of A Free People. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998. 
Substantive Teachings
Proponents of the Scottish Enlightenment have generally divided into two camps: scholars who see the Scottish Enlightenment as a modern communitarian alternative to liberalism and others who see it as “liberalism in a different key.” Garry Wills has been the most forceful advocate of the first position. In Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Explaining America: The Federalist, Wills has argued that the Founders were heavily influenced by moral sense and common sense philosophy which they interpreted and adopted as rejections of Locke’s “selfish system” of ethics and politics. In contrast, a number of scholars – most prominently Richard Sinopoli and Jean Yarbrough – have argued that the Founders were thoroughgoing liberals who saw the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment as a means of addressing questions raised within liberalism, especially questions about how selfish and self-regarding individuals could be motivated to obey the law and to engage in the civic obligations that are necessary to maintain any state.

In particular, scholars who hold the “Scottish Enlightenment” interpretation:

* Explore several signature conceptual innovations of the Scottish Enlightenment, including “the invisible hand,” “the division of labor,” the social scientific approach to the study of man, the “stadial thesis” or four stage theory of social and economic development, and especially moral sense and common -sense philosophy.
 

* Stress the importance of moral sense philosophy as a means of explaining how ordinary people have access to moral truths. For Jefferson, and doubtlessly numerous other Americans, moral sense philosophy provided a foundation for rejecting medieval Christian claims for the authority of the pious and learned over moral questions. Much medieval Christian theology had taught that, since men were fallen, they lacked immediate access to moral knowledge and therefore had to rely on intermediaries, especially the clergy, to discern moral principles. Americans turned to moral sense philosophy because it provided evidence that ordinary men could discern moral principles. The moral sense, Jefferson argued, made moral knowledge equally accessible to the Professor and the ploughman.

* Stress the importance of common – sense philosophy as a means of countering Humean skepticism.
 

* Emphasize the importance of David Hume’s political writings on the Founders’ willingness to create a republic of unprecedented geographic extent.

Political Implications

To some scholars, the Scottish Enlightenment interpretation is another effort to find a communitarian tradition within American political thought.  To others, it provides a means of illustrating the richness and diversity of forms of classical or Lockean liberalism. 

The Common Law 

Central Scholars and Key Works

James Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994).

James Stoner, Common Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

Linda Kerber. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Linda Kerber. No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligation of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

Substantive Teachings
The Common law is judge-made law grounded in precedent and local tradition. Substantial portions of British common law were transferred from the mother country to the United States in the formation of our nation. This included laws such as those punishing governing libel and prior restraint in areas of freedom of speech, those governing divorce and marriage in domestic affairs, and those governing property. 

Protestant Christianity 

Central Scholars and Key Works

Ellis Sandoz, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006).

Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding America (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 

Barry Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1994).

Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert eds., Protestantism and the American Founding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 

Substantive Teachings
* The American Founders secularized the concept of original sin and this governed their understanding institutional design and purpose.

* The United States was first a nation of some local, Protestant communities. Protestant ideas and values were embedded in the laws of local communities.