An American Founding? Part I
[Editor’s Note: With this week’s essay on The Federalist I begin examining three of the most important essays in the whole collection: numbers 37-39. The reader will be aided by some context for Madison’s nuanced arguments in those papers. Six years ago I wrote an essay for the journal Modern Age that asked a simple question: did America have a “founding?” The question occurred to me while my wife was studying for her citizenship exam and one of the questions on the practice test was “When was America founded?” She asked me this and I was buffaloed by the question. Sure, as a political theorist I had used the language of the American founding all the time, but not until that moment had I thought about it as a specific date. In my usage it referred to an era. If I was going to attach a date to it, what would that be? 1776? That was Lincoln’s choice (“fourscore and seven years ago…”) but I didn’t like the idea that “America” was “founded” with the Declaration. 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention? 1788, the year of its ratification? 1791, the Bill of Rights? 1865, the end of the Civil War? 1620, the date the first Puritan set foot on these shores (which was Tocqueville’s view)? For that matter, did any American thinker or actor understand himself as engaging in a “founding,” which is, after all, a technical term in political science? I went down the rabbit hole. A thorough investigation of documents from that era indicated very little awareness on anyone’s part that he was involved in a “founding” in any historical sense, and to the degree anyone thought of “America” as having been “founded” the likely date that person would have chosen would have been 1688, the date of the Glorious Revolution in England. To the degree there was an American imagination on this matter, The Glorious Revolution was a line that divided history into a “before” and an “after” and whatever America was, it was after. Aside from the historical question, there was the more important existential one: what difference does it make? Those were the questions I asked in the Modern Age essay, half of which I’ll reprint this week and half next. I’ve made a few edits for context and grammatical precision.]
The New York Times’s “1619 Project” renewed debates over the nature of America’s “founding.” Arguing that our whole constitutional system was cast using slavery as its main, if not sole, material, the project’s authors concluded that our polity must be taken apart and remade, or at least set on a new foundation. This kind of argument is not unprecedented: analyses of American origins have almost always served the needs of the present. References to “the Founders” have long been used by those on the left and the right alike to defend their positions in contemporary political and cultural battles. Whoever describes the past shapes the present, and if America was badly or unjustly founded, then exposing those flaws allowed a reshaping of today in accordance with a new vision.
But what if America was never founded?
Russell Kirk’s 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 America’s order did not arise de novo but emerged from a patrimony of thought and the lessons of experience. Political ideas, he argued, are carriers of historical experience and judgments, the residue of hard-won truths gained in the crucible of trial and error. Kirk believed that the unique historical experiences of these four cities created paradigmatic understandings of order that Americans wove together into their constitutional fabric.
His book was written in 1974 in anticipation of the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence and amid serious political scandal. 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—that is, its systemic decay. How America could avoid the fate of the republics of the past was the central question to which thinkers put their minds during the framing of the Constitution, and Kirk raised that question anew in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam.
Note the title: The Roots of American Order. Kirk does not evoke some variation of “the American founding,” which, in contrast to the organic metaphor implied in the word roots, would make America seem more an artifice than a historical development. Kirk wanted to emphasize continuity rather than discontinuity in American history.
His book included as an appendix a chronology that began in 2850 BC and ended in 1866 with the publication of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson. One is tempted to see the twelve-page chronology as idiosyncratic—and it is—but its unifying theme is that history is full of contingencies that require sensitive thinkers and “great men” somehow to turn the apparent randomness of circumstance into meaningful action. Kirk draws attention to efforts to snatch back immortality from time’s all-thieving hands. Overseeing all such human efforts, driven as they are by pride and marked by tragedy and irony, stands the watchful eye of Providence, a God who “intervenes” in human affairs and who in the process generates both resentment at his interference with our freedom and rage at not having such interferences result in perfection.
Kirk’s chronology is not intended to be Whiggish, a simple timeline of progress that somehow culminates in American greatness. It is fitful and haphazard, telling a story of achievement and failure, of greatness and meanness, of rise and fall, of things divine tasted partial and things Satanic swallowed wholly, of a Providence whose mysterious workings the finite human mind can grasp only by faith. As Kirk liked to say, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot: there are no lost causes because there are no gained ones.
And that is why 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. Every living nation, Brownson argued, “has an idea given it by Providence to realize” which is that nation’s “special work, mission, or destiny.” “The American republic,” he observed, “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” imitates divine Providence, a continuing act of creation by which all that is human returns to its origin and end.
In this sense, America’s roots grew not into a founding but into a constituting. The term founding carries within it not only the idea of establishing but of manufacturing something, in the sense of casting metal: that is, something bound to endure, a metal that doesn’t rust (corrode). 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. It was Machiavelli who saw the Prince as operating on the raw materials of political life and forming them, through an act of creative will, into something new.
A political “founding” is artisanship, and the artists are typically tyrants, for violence is the means of such fashioning. Many of history’s great “founders” have the reputation of being tyrants. One of the central problems for political thinking, therefore, is whether a just regime can ever result from unjust origins—namely, the application of violence in accordance with the vision of one person. This problem forms a central concern of Cicero, who postulated the idea of a Golden Age as its solution. We see it as well in Augustine’s City of God, where he resolves 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 from a founding. Brownson refers to the former’s “twofold” nature: as a nation or a people and as a government. The formation of a nation is providential, and the government emanates from the nation. Constitutions are developments, not creations; they are generated, not made. They reflect the inner dynamism of a nation’s purpose. The experience of Israel revealed the ethical meaning 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 covenantal obligations under the law. Because these obligations carry with them blessings and curses, a people so constituted can be either healthy or unhealthy. (There is an analogy to saying “that person has a strong constitution.”)
Brownson contrasts this view to the thought of 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 generative experiences, Rousseau argues that order always results from some sort of founding activity, an authoritative fashioning that determines the subsequent enterprise.
The idea of a “founding” wasn’t itself founded by Rousseau, of course. 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 re-forms 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 flaw in every prior regime. This is why, according to Rousseau, “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.”
Is there an American founding in this sense? Some would have us believe so. America, the thinking goes, is a propositional nation, based on universal and ahistorical principles that are instances of divine command and favor. The Founders were men wise and just, who somehow transcended the petty interests of the day. One might even think of them as demigods. But this is not how Russell Kirk saw it. Regimes, he argued, are not created out of “abstract principles” but develop “out of the circumstances of the times of trouble” within which a people find themselves. Under the most fractious circumstances, leaders will articulate a vision of common life and the common good without which a people will perish. The leader’s charisma makes order possible, and his sin makes constitutional limits necessary.
This helps us to understand better Kirk’s chronology, which reveals the back and forth movements of such articulations. Tellingly, Kirk reflects Brownson’s belief that the vision could not receive greater articulation and clarification than in the American republic. Impressed in America’s DNA is the ancient wisdom of a covenantal people gathered under God to model to the world God’s providential care.
Kirk encourages skepticism that the persons engaged in forming our constitutional system or participating in our war of independence ever thought of themselves as engaged in a founding. Granted, there are counterindications here and there: in some of the letters and speeches of George Washington, for example, arguably in the adoption of the Great Seal in 1782, and in a couple of instances in The Federalist Papers.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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