Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume III

Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime

Paul A. Rahe

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469617428
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Democrazia

First published in 1992 and now available in paperback in three volumes, Paul Rahe's ambitious and provocative book bridges the gap between political theory, comparative history and government, and constitutional prudence. Rahe challenges prevailing interpretations of ancient Greek republicanism, early modern political thought, and the founding of the American republic. '[An] extraordinary book.... It is a great achievement and will stay as a landmark.'-- The Spectator (London) 'This is the first, comprehensive study of republicanism, ancient and modern, written for our time.'--Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University 'A stunning feat of scholarship, presented with uncommon grace and ease--the sort of big, important book that comes along a few times in a generation. In an age of narrow specialists, it ranges through the centuries from classical Greece to the new American Republic, unfolding a coherent new interpretation of the rise of modern republicanism.... World-class, and sure to have a quite extraordinary impact.'--Lance Banning, University of Kentucky Volume I: The Ancien Regime in Classical Greece Where social scientists and many ancient historians tend to follow Max Weber or Karl Marx in asserting the centrality of status or class, Rahe's depiction of the illiberal, martial republics of classical Hellas vindicates Aristotle's insistence on the determinative influence of the political regime and brings back to life a world in which virtue is pursued as an end, politics is given primacy, and socioeconomic concerns are subordinated to grand political ambition. Volume II: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought Where many intellectual historians discern a revival of the classical spirit in the political speculation of the age stretching from Machiavelli to Adam Smith, Rahe brings to light a self-conscious repudiation of the theory and practice of ancient self-government and an inclination to restrict the scope of politics, to place greater reliance on institutions than on virtuous restraint, and to give free rein to the human's capacities as a tool-making animal. Volume III: Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime Where students of the American founding are inclined to dispute whether the Revolution was liberal, republican, or merely confused, Rahe demonstrates that the American regime embodies an uneasy, fragile, and carefully worked-out compromise between the enlightened despotism espoused by Thomas Hobbes and the classical republicanism defended by Pericles and Demosthenes.

CHAPTER 1. James Madison and the New Science of Politics

We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally, and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority.—John Adams

III. i.1

Despite its lasting fame, The Federalist is less a treatise in political philosophy composed for the ages than a work of political rhetoric aimed at a particular audience.¹ All but the last eight numbers were written in extreme haste and first appeared in the popular press of New York City as a series of brief articles designed to explain and defend the new constitution devised for the United States of America at the federal convention held in Philadelphia from May to September 1787. The various numbers were then collected, corrected, and republished in two volumes in time for the New York Ratifying Convention.²

Precisely two decades before the delegates from Britain’s former colonies gathered for the federal convention, Adam Ferguson had published in Edinburgh An Essay on the History of Civil Society. The twenty years separating the publication of Ferguson’s book and the framing of the American Constitution mark a watershed in human history. Before we can begin to understand what Hamilton, Madison, and Jay have to say, we must ponder the events of those two decades. We must consider their import as understood by the men of that age, and we must pause to reflect on the character of the audience which the authors of The Federalist addressed.

Though virtually forgotten today, Ferguson was much esteemed at the time. A Gaelic-speaking Highlander, educated in the Lowlands and closely associated with David Hume and Adam Smith, he held in succession the chairs in natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mathematics at Edinburgh in a period in which that university was generally regarded as the greatest in all of Europe. In the decades after its publication, his essay was to exercise a profound influence on economists and political theorists alike. Ferguson was no less aware of the unprecedented nature of the emerging new order than his two better-known friends. But unlike them, as we have already remarked, he had grave reservations concerning the consequences, for the experience of living in the Highlands and his years as chaplain to the Black Watch had left him with a deep and abiding appreciation for the virtues of the world soon to be lost.³ The sharpness of his moral sense and the breadth of experience that he brought to bear on the issues which he confronted in his book make it a work of seminal importance for understanding the differences which separate modern from ancient times.

And yet, for all his perspicacity, not even Adam Ferguson fully grasped the radical character of the change that was to come. He had occasion to weigh the claims made on behalf of the great legislators of antiquity—Lycurgus and Solon, Romulus, Numa, and Moses—and like those among his fellow Scots who had followed Samuel Pufendorf and Bernard Mandeville in transforming Hobbes’s notion of man’s asocial sociability into an elaborate theory of the gradual and spontaneous evolution of economy, society, and polity, he found the evidence for ancient statesmanship sadly wanting. “Nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design,” he argued. “No constitution is formed by concern, no government copied from a plan.”⁴ So it must have seemed to many, if not to most, of his contemporaries.

But they were wrong. Ferguson had blundered—and badly. Within his lifetime, the men who made the American Revolution were to demonstrate that he and his fellow Scots had underestimated the dignity and scope of statesmanship; and as a consequence of their action, the world has never since been the same. Consciously and deliberately, after a period of sustained experimentation in the states and after a time of intensive preparation and learned discussion, the framers of the American Constitution set out to institute a government and to shape a people as well.⁵ The radically novel character and the epoch-making importance of the experiment they brought to completion was perfectly evident to many at the time.

In the initial chapter of his Second Treatise, John Locke had denied the generally held supposition that “all Government in the World is the product only of Force and Violence, and that Men live together by no other Rules but that of Beasts, where the strongest carries it.” Instead, he had sought to demonstrate the truth of the novel proposition that there was “another rise of Government, another Original of Political Power, and another way of designing and knowing the Persons that have it.” In his view, all legitimate government actually rested on the consent of the governed.⁶ David Hume was skeptical: he was perfectly prepared to acknowledge “that government in its earliest infancy arose from consent or rather the voluntary acquiescence of the people.” But he deemed absurd Locke’s contention that “at present, when it has attained its full maturity, it rests on no other foundation.” To make his case against these “philosophical notions,” Hume simply appeals to “fact and reality.” Almost without exception, “usurpation or conquest” has been the origin of dominion; “force and violence” are, therefore, the true foundations of government. Even “where consent may seem to have taken place, it was commonly so irregular, so confined, or so much intermixed either with fraud or violence, that it cannot have any great authority.” Locke’s doctrine is attractive for the reason that it is dangerous—because it flatters human pretension: “When we assert, that all lawful government arises from the consent of the people, we certainly do them a great deal more honour than they deserve, or even expect and desire from us.” In truth, there is “not a more terrible event, than a total dissolution of government.” In such a situation, “every wise man” looks for solace not to the wisdom and good sense of the people, but to the power and discipline of an obedient army headed by a general “who may seize the prize, and give to the people a master, which they are so unfit to chuse for themselves.” Some years after the publication of Hume’s critique of Locke, when the American framers set out to fashion a government for themselves that would both rest on and operate through consent, they arguably had “reason, history, and experience” against them.⁷

This they fully recognized. The unprecedented character of their endeavor both buoyed them up and weighed upon them. Prior to January 1776, when Thomas Paine launched a furious assault on monarchy in Common Sense,⁸ neither republicanism nor democracy had been in good odor.⁹ Of this fact the Framers were all too painfully aware. And yet they could not deny what James Madison openly proclaimed: that “no other form would be recon-cileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”¹⁰ Nor could they ignore the fact that the science of government was then “almost in its state of infancy.” As James Wilson reminded the delegates to the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, “governments, in general, have been the result of force, of fraud, and of accident.” That simple fact set America apart. “A period of six thousand years has elapsed since the Creation,” he observed, and now “the United States exhibit to the world, the first instance, as far as we can learn, of a nation, unattacked by external force, unconvulsed by domestic insurrections, assembling voluntarily, deliberating fully, and deciding calmly, concerning that system of government, under which they would wish that they and their posterity should live.” The scene which America exhibited to the world was “hitherto unparalleled.” ¹¹

James Wilson was by no means alone in his conviction. Even before the federal convention met, John Adams openly celebrated the fact that the individual American states had “exhibited, perhaps, the first examples of governments erected on the simple principles of nature.” He even contended that, “if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history,” for it “will never be pretended that any persons employed” in establishing the American governments “had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture.” Instead, he added, “it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” In Adams’s estimation, “Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and… destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”¹²

In New York, by the time that James Wilson rose to address the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, his colleague and collaborator Alexander Hamilton had already introduced the first number of The Federalist with a similar assessment of the importance of the American experiment. “It has been frequently remarked,” he argued,

that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis, at which we are arrived, may with propriety be regarded as the cera in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.¹³

Hamilton’s reading of the situation differs in but one respect from that to which James Wilson would soon after give voice. When the New Yorker spoke of a crisis, he had in mind the prospect of domestic insurrection—and eventualities even more dire. The delegates to the federal convention had met in the shadow of Shays’s Rebellion.¹⁴ In 1787, despite John Adams’s sanguine observations, success was by no means a foregone conclusion.

III.i.2

Eleven years had passed since the united colonies had declared their independence from Britain, and for the makers of the American Revolution, those eleven years had been a sobering experience.¹⁵ Already in 1783, George Washington had expressed grave misgivings. In early June, on the eve of his retirement as general of the armies, he addressed a circular to the governors of the states. It was intended to be his last official communication, his farewell address. In this open letter, Washington congratulated his compatriots on their great victory, but reminded them that there was much left to do. They had won the war, but they could lose the peace. “It is yet to be decided,” he noted, “whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved.” This great question remained to be decided in part because there was a serious danger that the end of the war would bring a relaxation of the Union, “annihilating the cement of the Confederation” and allowing the United States “to become the sport of European politics.”¹⁶

Washington had written because this seemed to be taking place before his very eyes. While coordinating American resistance to the Coercive Acts, the delegates to the Continental Congress had gradually assumed many of the powers traditionally accorded the king;¹⁷ and under the pressures of initiating a difficult and often chaotic struggle for independence, they had stitched together the Articles of Confederation in a haphazard fashion without much discussion. The resulting document was mute testimony to the power of what Hamilton would call “accident and force” and to the debility of human “reflection and choice.” Thus, for example, in response to the need to foster cooperation and achieve unanimity among the states, Congress denied itself the right to impose and collect taxes on its own; accordingly, the finances of the confederation were never placed on a proper foundation.¹⁸ The consequences had nearly crippled the war effort.¹⁹ This Washington knew only too well. “No man in the United States is, or can be more deeply impressed with the necessity of a reform in our present Confederation than myself,” he wrote in a letter to Hamilton. “No man perhaps has felt the bad efects of it more sensibly; for to the defects thereof, & want of Powers in Congress may justly be ascribed the prolongation of the War, & consequently the Expences occasioned by it. More than half the perplexities I have experienced in the course of my command, and almost the whole of the difficulties & distress of the Army, have there origin here.”²⁰

Victory had reduced the urgency but not the need for reform. As the war drew near its end, the public creditors openly wondered whether they would ever receive recompense, and they were not alone. After the victory at Yorktown, Washington’s troops had been left unpaid for months, and the legitimate fear that the confederation would renege on its pledge to provide some sort of pension for the officers of the Continental Line had eventually occasioned worrisome disturbances within the army.²¹ In truth, however, the insolvency of the confederacy and the fact that there were murmurs of mutiny among the soldiers at Newburgh were only symptoms. As Washington recognized, there were other, more serious problems confronting the Union. In matters pertaining to the nation as a whole, Congress lacked the power to force cooperation on the states, and voluntary compliance with its decisions (though required by the Articles of Confederation) was but rarely forthcoming. There was, already in 1783, good reason to fear the dissolution of the Union itself.

There were grounds for hope as well. During the colonial period, Americans had become accustomed to relying on Britain to serve as an impartial umpire in settling the jurisdictional disputes that grew up between the various colonies. When the newly independent states ratified the Articles of Confederation, they quite naturally conferred this power of superintendence on the Continental Congress;²² and though their boundary disputes were many, the states did manage to muddle through the Revolutionary War and its immediate aftermath without ever coming to blows. Moreover, while in the midst of war and revolution, the states that had claims to vast tracts of unsettled land in the West had found it difficult, if not impossible, to police those claims, and they had been so pestered by separatist movements on the frontier that, over time, the leaders of the various states became increasingly eager to negotiate a general settlement to all territorial disputes that would render each state secure in all its remaining possessions. Thus, Pennsylvania found it remarkably easy to settle its quarrels with Virginia and Connecticut; and when the Continental Congress called on the landed states to cede their western territories to the confederation as a prelude to the formation of new states, New York and Virginia quickly displayed a willingness to comply. There was every reason to expect Massachusetts, Connecticut, and North Carolina to follow suit. No one seriously believed that the individual states could go it alone.²³

Thus, when Washington sent out his circular, he had reasons for thinking that it was still possible to set things right by strengthening the confede...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue Novus Ordo Seclorum
• Chapter 1 James Madison and the New Science of Politics
• Chapter 2 Slavery, Section, and Progress in the Arts
• Chapter 3 Alexander Hamilton and the Conduct of Administration
• Chapter 4 Thomas Jefferson and the Spirit of Popular Resistance
• Chapter 5 A Republican Distribution of Citizens
• Chapter 6 Virtue in the Modern Republic
• Epilogue The Present Discontents
• Notes
• Index