Virtue and the American Founding Part 1
The Michigan legislature, in 1994, declared Russell the state’s “greatest man of letters.” Author of numerous books and essays, Kirk helped create American conservatism. Note I do not mean by this much of what goes by the name of conservatism today, but a gentle and humane conservatism that sought to restore order and balance to life where they weren’t and to preserve it where they were. One of his best-known books, The Roots of American Order, traced the influence of four cities - Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London - on the formation of the American Republic. He demonstrated that American order emerged from a long patrimony of political thinking and the hard-won lessons of experience. Political ideas, in his reading, carry historical experience and judgments, the residue of hard-won truths gained in the crucible of trial and error. In his judgment, the unique experiences of the thinkers and peoples of these four cities created paradigmatic understandings of order, which Americans stitched together into their Constitutional fabric.
As we come closer to our semiquincentennial it seems worth reviewing some of the themes of that book. It was written in 1974 in anticipation of the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence and during the height of the American political scandal that ended in the ascendancy of Gerald Ford to the presidency. It’s not a stretch to see the book as motivated by the problem of corruption: not only personal corruption, but the corruption of a regime. How America could avoid the fate of the Republics of the past was the central question thinkers were engaged in during the Constitutional period, and Kirk raised those questions anew, as they must always be, in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam.
Kirk began the book with the interesting title The ROOTS of American Order. Note he does not call it some variation of “The American Founding,” which would, in distinction to the organic metaphor implied in the word “roots,” make America seem more an artifice than a historical development. Kirk wanted to emphasize continuity rather than discontinuity in American history.
There’s also the very curious chronology at the end of the book, which begins in 2850 BC and ends in 1866 with the publication of Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic. The chronology, putatively concerned with American order, is twelve pages long, and is notable both for what it includes and what it excludes. The temptation to see it as idiosyncratic - and it is that - would overlook the unifying theme that history is full of contingencies that require sensitive thinkers, prophets and seers, and those with magnanimous souls to somehow turn the apparent senselessness of circumstance into meaningful action. Kirk highlighted our efforts to snatch back immortality from time’s all-thieving hands. Overseeing all such human efforts, touched as they are by pride and tragedy and irony, stands the watchful eye of Providence, a God who “intervenes” in human affairs and in the process generates both resentment at His interferences with our freedom and rage at not having such interferences result in perfection.
The chronology is not intended to be Whiggish, a simple timeline of progress that somehow culminated in American greatness. It is fitful and haphazard, telling the story of achievement and failure, of greatness and obscurity, of rise and fall, of things divine tasted partially and things Satanic swallowed wholly, of a Providence whose mysterious workings the finite human mind could grasp only by faith. As Kirk liked to paraphrase Eliot: there are no lost causes because there are no gained ones.
Which is why, I suspect, the chronology ends with Brownson, a defender of “the permanent things” who understood that no regime or governing authority can sustain itself without some sort of religious sanction. At the center of all culture stands “cult.” Every living nation, Brownson argued, “has an idea given it by Providence to realize” that is that nation’s “special work, mission, or destiny.” “The American republic,” he continued, “has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other.” Brownson explicitly defended the idea of the nation as “an organism, not a mere organization - to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all - to develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and direct it to the promotion of the common weal.” In doing so, “the social providence” imitated divine providence, itself a continuing act of creation by which all that is human is returned to its origin and end.
In this sense, American roots grew not into a founding but into a Constituting. The term “founding” carries within it not only the idea of establishing something, but of manufacturing something; and not manufacturing in any sense, but in the sense of casting metal: that is, something bound to endure. The great “founders” of political society “founded” in both senses: they laid social life on new and solid foundations, and they also “mixed” the unformed elements available to them to recast political life into something new and enduring.
A political “founding,” is artisanship, whereby the creative will fashions the raw materials of political life into the image of the artisan’s vision. Politically, tyrants shape in this fashion, for political violence is the means of such fashioning. The great political “founders” all have the distinction and reputation of being tyrants. “The founder” and “the tyrant” have typically been the same person. One of the great problems for political thinking is whether a just regime could ever result from unjust origins; namely, the application of violence in accordance with the vision of one person (or group of people). This problem formed a central concern of Cicero, who postulated the idea of a Golden Age as its solution. Behind the political constitution, he argued, stood a period of piece. In that case, politics could be seen as either a fall from grace, or as redemption from the fall. Saint Augustine, in his City of God, tried to resolve the problem by distinguishing sacred history from secular history, the former linear and the latter a cycle of rises and falls.
But a “Constitution” is a different sort of thing than a founding. Brownson referred to constituting’s “twofold” nature: as a nation, or a people, and as a government. The formation of a nation is providential while the government emanates from the nation. Constitutions are developments, not creations; they are born, not made. They reflect the inner dynamism of a nation’s purpose. Kirk argued that ancient Israel first discovered the ethical meaning attached to the idea of a “people” organized in time under the authority of God and His appointed agents, the prophets, who would constantly call the people back to the covenantal obligations under the law. Because these obligations carry with them blessings and curses, a people so constituted can be either healthy or unhealthy, such as when we say “That person has a strong constitution.”
Brownson contrasted this to the thought of the radical French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his obsession with origins. Whether it is the formation of personality, the rupturing of natural comity into emerging sociality, the development of social order, the inculcation of proper virtue, or the location of the self in its own experiences, Rousseau argued that order always resulted from some sort of founding activity, an authoritative fashioning that determined the entire subsequent enterprise. He furthermore argued that such fashioning usually accompanied nefarious purposes.
The idea of a “founding” wasn’t founded by Rousseau. We see it in the actions of a Solon or a Lycurgus or in Rome’s description of its own origins, and we see it discussed with great clarity in the work of Machiavelli, and taken up subsequently through a series of “Machiavellian Moments” wherein political crises require great actors to try to stabilize a regime’s existence. Time is itself taken as the great solvent of political life, but if the regime is well-founded then the corruptions of time may be - if not avoided altogether - at least put into abeyance. Can it be founded, however, without unjust exercises of power and violence?
Rousseau thought not, and addressed this problem in chapter 7 of the second book of his Social Contract. While man is born free and is everywhere in chains (a form of metal fastening Rousseau offers as his primary description of social life), the “good” society, one that transcends the give-and-take, the agonism, and the friction of “ordinary” politics, is the one brought into being by a “lawgiver.” This act of “lawgiving” not only reconstitutes society, but reconstitutes human nature itself, which is the only way a society can be formed wherein all machineries of division are melted down and recast into harmonious unity. The Lawgiver has the characteristic of “being able to see all men’s passions without having any of them” and is thus able to form a society independent from the interests of any one particular part of it, the want of which has been the bug in every prior regime. This is why “the act that constitutes the republic isn’t part of its constitution.” Indeed, the founding act “has nothing in common with human power,” driven as that is by narrow interest, and is in fact “an enterprise that surpasses human powers,” in that it operates “by divine authority.”
Most Americans of the Constitutional period held Rousseau in low regard. They worried about the revolutionary implications of his thought and also his empowering of majorities. For that reason, it seems reasonable not to think of the writers of our Constitution as “lawgivers” in Rousseau’s sense. They certainly did not think that human nature admitted to reconstitution nor did they think that they could “see all men’s passions without having any of them.” The tension remained: how could they respect the workings of Providence without succumbing to the temptation to see themselves as operating “by divine authority”?
Many read Rousseau (plausibly, I might add) as harkening a return to classical republican theory with its emphasis on the need for virtue. Certainly, Rousseau voiced a concern with virtue, even if he changed its meaning and what might count as virtue. While the rejection of Rousseau did not require our Constitution’s writers to abandon the idea of the importance of virtue, they certainly pondered the problem of how you could make a government good without making men virtuous. We will address their response in next week’s essay.
Discussion Questions:
What difference does it really make whether we see America as having been “founded” or “constituted”?
Why would Rousseau insist that a founding act “has nothing to do with human power”?
What evidence do we have that many of our early leaders operated with a faith in Providence, and what difference did such a faith make?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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