Michael D. Chan: Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2008.

Republished with permission.

 

Michael Chan would bring Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton closer together than most previous scholars have done. Without “claiming that Hamilton was an Aristotelian,” he wants to show that Aristotle esteems commerce more than many Aristotelians say, and that Hamilton “endeavored to harness commerce not only for the narrower ends of prosperity and national defense, but also for the wider—indeed classical—ends of forming the character of citizens, especially harmony and justice, and [pursuing national greatness” (8). Both find in prudence the essence of statesmanship.

Chan devotes the first quarter of his argument to Aristotle’s treatment of economy and of what later writers would call ‘political economy.’ “The practice of virtue requires equipment,” and “furnishing the equipment of virtue constitutes one of the most necessary and difficult tasks of statesmanship” (13). Whereas the first two chapters of the Politics seem rather sternly to subordinate acquisition to economy proper—that is, the right use of the things acquired—chapters four, five, and six unbend a bit, “giv[ing] commerce ‘two cheers’ of praise” (13).

Chan distinguishes Aristotle from Francis Bacon; “Aristotle does not pursue the possibility of improving the arts and sciences for the sake of the relief of man’s estate” (15). Human life by nature aims at action more than production; “man is better understood as a political animal than a tool-making animal” (15). Production is always instrumental, aiming at an end beyond itself, whereas the distinctly human virtues manifest themselves in activity. Mere production of possessions might succeed too well, clogging our lives with too many things, the sheer amount of which “becomes a hindrance than a help to the practice of virtue” (16). More, the spirit of production is a spirit of innovation, potentially injurious to the steady rule of law, which requires habituation and reverence; steadiness of soul in turns inclines one toward prudence, the virtue that “concerns itself with the whole rather than the partial human good”—unlike any production can do (17).

This notwithstanding, Chan observes, Aristotle stands closer to Bacon than he does to Rousseau, who attacks the cultivation of the arts tout court. In Politics VII.11 Aristotle “relaxes some of his strictures against technological innovation because of certain economic, political, and moral considerations which no actual (and even the best) regime can ignore,” such as “military necessity” (20). A statesman who ignored the need for fortifications in the face of such current innovations as missiles and siege machines fails in prudence, fails to adapt to new circumstances, clings to old-fashioned ways of life at the expense of the well-being of his polis. “[T]echnology can and does affect the conditions for the practice of virtue, which is among the reasons why all natural right is changeable” (20). It is to be noted, however, that this example commends only a prudential response to innovation, not a spirit of technological innovation itself, a stance not necessarily so Hamiltonian.

Chan argues that Aristotle questions “nature’s beneficence” (25). If piracy—that is, theft—is among the natural forms of acquisition, how beneficent can nature really be? And he praises Carthage more than Sparta—that is, the regime of commerce more than the regime of war. He therefore claims that the argument in Books I and II of the Politics for the natural limits of acquisition amounts to edifying rhetoric. In so arguing, he does not consider that if war is a form of acquisition, then Sparta is more, not less violently acquisitive than Carthage.

Chan devotes the beginning of his second and final chapter on Aristotle to Book II’s discussion of the ‘best regime’ as envisioned by philosophers and political reformers. Chan cites Aristotle’s commendation of private property as the indispensable precondition for liberality. He rightly notices Aristotle’s criticisms of Phaleas of Chalcedon, that resolute egalitarian who ignores the honor-loving dimension of the human soul and can therefore imagine a faction-less polis of merely economic equality. A regime animated by liberal property-holders will more likely cohere than a regime of economic equals set free to quarrel over a straw when honor’s at the stake.

On precisely this issue of faction, and returning to the real regimes of Sparta and Carthage, Chan refers to Aristotle’s account of Carthage as a regime with neither serious factionalism nor tyranny, in contrast to the Spartan regime, wracked by periodic slave revolts. Carthage “provide[s] for its people while maintaining harmony by sending out a part of them to subject cities where they are able to become wealthy” (49), unlike democratic but non-commercial Athens, threatened by poverty-stricken urban mobs. An economy of commerce, of deal-making give-and-take, lends itself better to politics—the activity of ruling and being ruled, reciprocally. Carthage is commercial but it is no oligarchy, the regime animated by “the political opinion that wealth ought to be the title to rule” (51). In fact, Carthaginians love honor; Aristotle classifies Carthage as a timocracy. “Sparta and Carthage are similar in the most important way: both are aristocratic polities. Yet for the most part, they represent polar opposites, which can be attributed to their different modes of acquisition. At one extreme is Sparta: agrarian, rooted, homogeneous, prone to slave revolts, and warlike. At the other extreme is Carthage: commercial, seafaring, heterogeneous, harmonious, and less warlike. In creating a kind of continuum of modes of acquisition for cities, Aristotle seems to be expanding the options of statesmen so that they may choose the mode(s) of acquisition that best fits their particular circumstances…though he warns them that their regime’s mode of acquisition will be prone to characteristic excesses. In this way, the best regime need not hinder statesmen from establishing good regimes.” (52-53) Aristotle’s “ultimate aim” is “to deflect narrow economic ends toward the more comprehensive and higher ends of harmony, justice, moral virtue, and cultivated leisure” 953). Thus in the end Chan does preserve the distinction Aristotle insists upon in Books I and II of the Politics, namely, the superiority of use over acquisition. Chan’s Aristotle is less a modern liberal than Montesquieu, more a modern liberal than Rousseau.

So is his Hamilton. While not claiming that “Aristotle influenced Hamilton directly,” Chan rather “mean[s] to show that Hamilton recognized a need for ancient as well as modern prudence in the practice of politics” (55). By “modern” prudence he means a practical wisdom that does not seek so much to improve men intrinsically but to channel “their opinions, passions, and interests through institutions so as to make them serve the common good” (55). “Ancient” prudence “seeks to make men as they ought to be by directly educating and forming their opinions, passions, and interests” so as to enhance their ability to “deliberat[e] well about the best thing to be done under the circumstances in light of what is good and just for man” (55-56). Hamilton learned examples of such prudential statesmanship from Plutarch. The “three major components” of such ancient prudence are close attention to particulars, the direct formation of public opinion, and guidance by “considerations of morality and virtue” (57). “Hamilton chose not to follow the path of Machiavelli” but justified his economic policies in accordance with a hierarchy of five goods, ranging from “the lower to the higher: prosperity, national defense, the national union, cementing Union, commercial virtue, and national greatness” (63). Chan devotes a chapter to each of these.

Chan understands that Machiavelli propounded a politics of acquisition, which the ‘liberal’ wing of the Machiavellian movement—its most extreme representative being Bernard Mandeville—transformed into “economism” (66). Under contemporary conditions, the middle-class regimes Aristotle favored could no longer adhere to the stern frugality commended by many of Hamilton’s contemporaries who advocated regimes of liberty animated by an austere refusal of commerce and luxury and by suspicion of any but the most local government. The prudential statesman in modernity must recognize that such virtuous poverty and political modesty will fall to the opulent, militarily powerful statist monarchies. Within this constricted circumstance, however, Hamilton continues to insist that virtue, not Machiavellian virtù, remains “the only unmixed good which is permitted to [man’s] temporal condition” (Hamilton, quoted p. 79).

With respect to the second good, national defense, Hamilton similarly conceded that “America would have to emulate much of British military and industrial policy if it was to remain free and secure” (80). Standing, professional armies and navies are indispensable to survival in the modern world; ‘ancient’ citizen militias simply will not do. Indeed, the ancient militias rested on the social foundation of slavery, which alone allowed the citizens of the polis the leisure to engage in serious military training. Without slavery, sunshine soldiers and summer patriots will be all too common. In this, Chan observes, Hamilton concurred with the judgment of no less a critic of modern statism than Adam Smith (87). Only a country with such modern systems of finance and manufacturing could fund modern militaries, and in this he departed from the Scottish philosopher, who, with Hamilton’s bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, advocated the rapid retirement of modest war debts. To such thinkers Hamilton replied that not modern economics but “man’s domineering passions” were the true “cause of wars” (97). Chan rightly remarks that Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures urges its well-known policies not primarily for political-economic purposes but in order to strengthen American military (and therefore political) independence from foreign suppliers. For this purpose, mere commercial agrarianism would fail, first of all on economic terms, as the vagaries of crop yields and European policy would incur poverty and debt in a predominantly agricultural New World. Contra Jefferson and Smith, manufacturing—really the economic locus of the technological inventiveness of the human mind and the industriousness of the human spirit—would generate the true wealth of nations.

Strengthening the American constitutional union, Hamilton’s third good, required a commercial economy in which citizens saw that agricultural and commercial interests formed “part of a whole with a common aim” or aims, namely, civil-social peace and justice. Strong nationwide commerce would not only incline the American states less to war with one another; manufacturing and urbanization would reduce the number of poor citizens, another source of faction. Hamilton’s program for the assumption of the states’ war debts by the national government aimed at satisfying both the citizens of the most heavily indebted states and their creditors. He saw that the threat to American republicanism arose not only from ‘democracy,’ the many who were poor whom Daniel Shays exemplified, but also from the few who were rich, from creditor-oligarchs, who might enjoy “greater success” than poor Shays, “since public creditors tended to be men of superior talent and ability” (132). Against both of these revolutionary prospects, federal debt assumption “would unite the interest of public creditors and tie them to the federal government” while relieving the states and the many poor citizens now bearing the financial brunt of the Revolutionary War (137).

By commercial virtue, his fourth good, Hamilton referred to a character and way of life animated by constant and regular work, self-help, and opportunities for diverse talents and inclinations to make their way; a commercial manufacturing political economy will “call into activity the whole vigor” of each citizen’s “nature” (152). It will also call into activity each part of the individual soul—most obviously the appetitive part, but also the spirited, enterprising part and the reasoning, inventive part. The “true politician,” Hamilton wrote, will “favor all those institutions and plans which tend to make men happy according to their natural bent, which multiply the sources of individual enjoyment and increase those of national resource and strength” (154). A political economy that did not deploy government support to spur manufacturing in an agrarian society such as America would fail to take account of the decidedly unfree markets in all other countries. Its statesmen would depend too much upon what’s now called ‘rational choice theory,’ which at least in its more ‘economistic’ manifestations assumes that human beings will nicely calculate actions for material advantage in abstraction from timidity and ingrained habits. Not only rational calculation to satisfy appetites but spirited ambition to dare to invest and innovate must begin to overcome agrarian ‘rootedness.’ Even a seemingly trivial thing like the introduction of circulation coin would “accustom the poor and middling elements to handling [money], inducing them to become ever-more industrious and sagacious” (159). A large-scale commercial society requires more laws, too, and at least gives statesmen the opportunity to inculcate a greater respect for law, and therefore greater reasonableness among citizens (182).

Chan associates Hamilton’s final good, national greatness, with the Aristotelian virtues of liberality and magnanimity. Chan argues that Hamilton eschews Machiavelli’s (as it were) mean-spirited liberality, the Florentine’s advice to be liberal with other people’s money. The “liberal or enlarged plans of public good” envisaged by Hamilton (189) included federal assumption of state war debts, compensated emancipation of slaves, and endowments for a military academy and a national university. Such uses of taxpayer-derived revenues avoid Machiavelli’s illiberal liberality because they depend upon a principle of republicanism, namely, the consent of the governed. Further, in an important sense such liberality excels the liberality of the ancients, grounded as it is on free commerce and industry rather than on slavery and plunder.

Beyond liberality, Hamilton approaches magnanimity or greatness of soul. Although he does not seem to know Paul Eidelberg’s similar argument in his 1974 study A Discourse on Statesmanship, Chan offers much the same assessment: “Hamilton, by way of Hume, seems to have synthesized the active political virtue of the moderns and the magnanimous virtue of the ancients in his concept of ‘the love of fame,’ which is the ‘ruling passion of the noblest minds,’ and which prompts statesmen ‘to undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit'” (191). Politically, Hamilton needed to find ways to reconcile magnanimity with republican consent. For this effort the project of emancipating slaves with compensation to their owners afforded a wide field for the exhibition of political courage and the other soul-strengthening and soul-enlarging activities conducive to a genuinely magnanimous statecraft. One might add that Hamilton had before him the example of Washington, a great-souled man if every there was one, and a man who did in fact emancipate his slaves—with compensation to them—in his Last Will and Testament.

If, as Aristotle contends, all natural right is changeable—a matter of prudent and morally sound adjustment to circumstances—and not a set of permanent laws, that is commands, then Hamilton might be thought of as a kind of Aristotelian statesman acting in a Machiavellian world of commerce and statism. Chan concludes his study by observing that the owners of American slave plantations, by arguing for the positive good of slavery, depart from Aristotle quite sharply; Hamilton, that proponent of commerce and industry in part as counters to the slave economy, comes closer to the Aristotelian standard of justice. This is particularly true in light of the character seen in prominent members of the mercantile class in Hamilton’s day; Robert Morris was no Philadelphia equivalent of a fig peddler in ancient Athens. The great financial and commercial men of America were statesmen in their own right, and often (as in Morris’s case) statesmen simply. This is not to claim that the commercial way of life seen in America and supported by Hamilton would produce a way of life conducive to liberality and magnanimity in the Aristotelian sense. “Hamilton wished to carve out a sphere in which a few choice spirits like himself could take full advantage of virtue’s equipment to pursue magnanimous enterprises for the public good, but America’s devotion to equality guarantees that such choice spirits have to swim against the tide of American politics” (216). Then again, as a later statesman of republicanism observed, character is “the virtue of difficult times.”

Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”
Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 4, 2004

 

To understand the presidency as the American Progressives reconceived it, we need to track two themes: first, the ideational underpinnings, the moral foundations, of the American regime and their radical revision by the Progressives; second, the institutional structure of the modern state, carefully delineated and constrained by the Founders but substantially elaborated and expanded by the Progressives.

I can illustrate the first theme by reminding you of the first phrase of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events….” I ask my students, ‘Why don’t they say, “When in history…”? Wouldn’t that be simpler, less wordy? It would, but that’s not the way the Founders thought of ‘history.’ To them, ‘history’ meant a literary genre, namely, a factual narrative. Thucydides’ “History” of the Peloponnesian War means Thucydides’ narration of the course of events during that war. One writes a history in order to understand the course of events. The course of events never stands still; the course of events is ‘one damn thing after another.’ Because the human mind cannot understand something that changes constantly, because the human mind needs fixed points of reference, the historian, in attempting to understand a course of events, and in order to commend his understanding to others, must set down the course of events in a story or history. Then, at least the words on the page will go nowhere, and our minds can begin to see the order of the events, understand the course as a course, as a stream that goes somewhere, adhering to a knowable pattern. This pattern might not be rational; the course of events might proceed in largely unpredictable ways. Yet, once fixed on the pages of a history, it could be understood precisely as an illustration of the interaction between human reasoning and human unreason, with no little spice of randomness thrown into the resulting stew.

Not long after the Declaration, philosophers and lesser writers began to use the term ‘history’ to refer to the course of events themselves. Such writers—call them ‘historicists’—claimed to have discerned laws that govern the course of events. Although the persons making ‘history’ might act with no knowledge of those laws, no ability to predict the future on the basis of historical laws, the laws govern in spite of the irrationality of the actors. Moreover, just as the Founders derived natural right from the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the historicists derived their moral and political principles from the ‘laws of history.’ Why this shift in the source of morality?

If one rejects, as the European Enlightenment did, moral and political authority founded upon God’s revelation; if one further rejects nature as the foundation of right (a rejection founded upon the claim of many Enlightenment materialists that nature, including human nature, consists of nothing more than matter in motion, with no purpose beyond itself), then the discovery of laws of history might become the sole source of authority. Without God, a sort of providence remains, now reduced however to the human quest for freedom. By ‘freedom’ historicists mean the liberation from the restraints imposed by God or natural right. Freedom then means the progressive conquest of nature for whatever purposes human beings set down—typically, comfortable self-preservation and a favorable reputation. The domination of nature by human effort comports with science, especially a secularized con-science (inner knowledge), now called consciousness. The fully free human being, a fully free nation, and finally a fully free humanity, will enjoy ‘consciousness’—entirely transparent knowledge of the terms and conditions of its own domination of nature, including its own nature.

Thus man will be a creation not of God, or a product of nature, but finally a creation of himself. In the terminology of G. W. F. Hegel, the first and in many respects the greatest of the historicists, the Geist or Absolute Spirit that is full, rational consciousness, replaces the Holy Spirit. One understands, achieves consciousness, of history (redefined as the course of events) by looking back over that course from its end, the ‘end of History’ first achieved in the mind of Hegel himself. From that authoritative vantage point of full consciousness, one sees that all previous historical epochs were relative to the end of History, the full development of Geist. Each epoch thus can be seen to have had a Zeitgeist, a ‘spirit of the time’—partial and blinkered in comparison to the end of History, but each an advance toward that end, each a stage of progress toward the end or purpose of the course of events. In addition, each nation has its own geist, its own ‘spirit,’ and the Absolute Spirit brings one nation forward to dominate a given age: the Hebrews in one epoch, the Greeks in another, the Romans next, until finally the German usher in the end of History.

Historicist philosophy therefore breaks sharply with natural rights philosophy. To historicist eyes, the American Constitution’s merit rests in its advancement of human freedom, conceived as the mastery of nature, from the English Constitution of the day. The American Founders would have said, on the contrary, that their constitution’s merits lay precisely in its adherence to nature, specifically, the principles of natural right—the laws of nature and of nature’s God. They would not claim that the American people or nation embodied the spirit of the age, much less the end of history, only that the representatives of the American people had invented a set of ruling institutions as part of a new kind of regime which more closely approximates the universal and permanent principles of natural right than existing regimes had done. Political science or knowledge of nature had advanced, but this had nothing to do with some metaphysical principle playing itself out in the minds of the Founders. At most, they would express gratitude to God’s providence for leading them to these discoveries.

Why does this change matter in practice as well as theory? This question leads to the second theme to consider, the character of the modern state. The modern state, invented by Machiavelli, consists of the centralization of all political authority in the hands of one prince or of ‘the many,’ i.e., a republic. Gone will be the sort of political bodies seen, for example, in England prior to Henry VIII: political communities with a variety of authorities in a sort of colloidal suspension—the arrangement of ‘feudal’ societies. Sixteenth-century England, like almost all large political communities hitherto, featured a king, a good selection of aristocrats, common-law judges, clergymen, city magistrates, all in (sometimes tense) relations with one another, but none deriving his authority from the others. The statist project, founded by Machiavelli and elaborated by Hobbes, makes all authority derive from one central source: either monarch or parliament/national assembly. The government is said to be ‘sovereign,’ and all lesser forms of government derive their powers from it. Thus Henry VIII rids himself of the Roman Catholic Church, enriches himself with its properties, and establishes the Anglican Church as the state church of the English. Thus too could Henry’s philosophic contemporary, Francis Bacon, conceive the modern scientific project of the conquest of nature (the logical corollary of Machiavelli’s project, the conquest of chance or fortune) as both guide and purpose of the modern state, which controls that part of nature called the territory of England along with that part of humanity called the English.

With the help of modern science, the discipline of cartography could produce precise maps, delineating clearly the borders separating one state, one territory ruled by prince or parliament, from another. Eventually, the sovereign state would develop a new kind of governmental organization, to reinforce its centralism: modern bureaucracy, wherein rulers deriving their authority from their participation in the modern state itself owe their loyalty not to the persons of God, monarch, or lord (as had the bureaucrats of ancient China, and those of the Catholic Church) but to their functions within the rationally-ordered system that is the state itself. Eventually, the State would take over the Church’s function of charitable ‘good works.,’ putting these on an ostensibly scientific basis.

As mentioned in a previous lecture, the American Founders sought the advantages of the “new science of politics” while also seeking to avoid the snares of Machiavellian statism, as shown in George III’s actions in attempting to extend and tighten the rule of the English state to the American colonies. By making the people, not the government, sovereign they avoided the tyranny of the Machiavellian prince; by dividing governmental powers, and by separating the sovereign people from the direct exercise of power by the institutions of representative government, they equally avoided the tyranny of ‘the many,’ or democracy. Insofar as the Founders instituted modern bureaucracy, they kept it primarily on the level of the local governments, the townships or municipalities; the national government employed a very small number of bureaucrats. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, the Americans had instituted political centralization—lawmakers, executives, and judges in a capital city—but no substantial administrative or bureaucratic centralization.

The office of the presidency, in particular, needed institutional safeguards to make it both effective and safe for republicanism. Tocqueville considered the seeming weakness of the American president, in contrast to the power of the French monarch, that exemplar of statism. After remarking the constitutional differences between the two offices, he shifted his attention from structures to circumstances:

“If the executive power is less strong in America than in France, one must attribute the cause of it perhaps more to circumstances than to laws.

“It is principally in relations with foreigners that the executive power of an nation finds occasion to deploy its skill and force.

“If the life of the Union were constantly threatened, if its great interests were mixed every day with those of other powerful peoples, one would see the executive power grown larger in opinion, through what one would expect from it and what it would execute.

“The president of the United States is, it is true, the chief of the army, but that army is composed of six thousand soldiers; he commands the fleet, but the fleet counts only a few warships; he directs the affairs of the Union towards foreign peoples, but the United States has no neighbors. Separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, still too weak to wish to dominate the sea, it has no enemies, and its interests are only rarely in contact with those of other nations of the globe.

“The president of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives, which he has no occasion to make use of, and the rights which, up to now, he can use are very circumscribed; the laws permit him to be strong, circumstances keep him weak.”

It follows that the president’s role would change, ‘in degree if not in kind,’ if circumstances changed so as to require a more forceful and regular exercise of executive authority. The president would still be no sovereign, but his exercise of power in behalf of the sovereign people would become more vigorous and extensive.

Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1890s, Theodore Roosevelt and others saw that American circumstances had changed, that industrial capitalism, technology (especially military and communications/transportation technology), and bureaucracy had combined to enable modern states to project economic, military, and political power throughout the world. Thinking in terms of geopolitics—literally, world politics—now made sense. As assistant secretary of the Navy, vice president, president, and finally as an ex-president who never lost his ambition to regain the presidency, Roosevelt did not only ‘think globally’ but also insisted that Americans accustomed themselves to presidents who would act globally, exercise executive power in a world inhabited by rival empires, rival efforts at geopolitical preeminence.

In domestic politics Roosevelt saw similarly large forces, particularly the rival, national and international forces of industrial capitalism and urban, factory labor, contending with one another for control of local, state, and national governments. Roosevelt warned Americans of “the Scylla of mob rule” and “the Charbydis of subject to plutocracy.” Both factions threatened self-government.

Roosevelt also saw the technological conquest of nature for the first time threatening the integrity of nature itself, and accordingly pressed for the conservation of wilderness lands. this was more than a concern for the survival of what we now call ‘ecosystems.’ Roosevelt feared that an entirely artificial, urbanized environment would cut off Americans from nature, weakening them physically and morally.

In Roosevelt’s opinion, this coalescence of forces justified his well-known “stewardship” theory of the American presidency.

Politically as well as individually, he wrote, self-government “is in its essence the substitution of self-restraint for external restraint.” As Lincoln saw, “in a self-governing democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy liberty must show that they know how to use it with moderation and justice in peace.” Citizens must display “self-control”; they must “learn from their mistakes.” They must also know how to fight for their liberties when foreign or domestic “malice” puts those liberties in jeopardy. Mutuality of service and mutuality of respect for service rendered, both founded upon “equality of opportunity as far as it is humanly possible to secure it,” are not only rights but duties, representing “the triumph of orderly liberty.”

Roosevelt sought to extend the power of the American national state. But he did not want to be understood as a statist. Not only are “vigorous forms of self-government in state and city” desirable, but the federal government itself must be democratized. “What is meant by the nationalization of the democratic method is the giving to the whole people themselves the power to do those things that are essential in the interest of the whole people.” Roosevelt, not Herbert Croly, originated the notion of using Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. In 1906, three years before Croly published The Promise of American Life, Roosevelt said, “While I am a Jeffersonian in my genuine faith in democracy and popular government, I am a Hamiltonian in my government views, especially with reference to the need of the exercise of broad powers by the National Government.” Separation of powers, between states and the national government and among the branches of the national government itself, is less important than responsibility of governmental officials to the people. “What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man, or of a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do the work that is necessary; and then the devising of means to hold these men fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people.” That is true “self-government” and “good government.” “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use.” Concentrated power that is “palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account” will not compromise democracy but save it.

The empowered and responsible executive officer of the national government should be “the steward of the public welfare” and, in “great national crises,” “the steward of the people.” The steward of the people “is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.” This, Roosevelt claimed, is the model of the presidency followed by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, and it contrasts with the example of James Buchanan, who claimed that he could do none but those actions explicitly permitted him under the Constitution. Because the president “is or ought to be peculiarly representative of the people as a whole,” he should “take a very active interest in getting the right kind of legislation” in addition to performing his strictly executive work. He can do this “only by arousing the people, and riveting their attention” on what must be done—using the executive office as a “bully pulpit,” in Roosevelt’s signature phrase.

This conception of the executive presents a danger: It lends itself to a ‘routinization’ of emergency or, to put it more sharply, the fomenting and/or proclaiming of alleged national crises that cry out for bold management. A steward-president might engage in altogether too much crying out. Given Roosevelt’s own forcefully-stated reservations about popular sovereignty—specifically, the danger of majority tyranny, particularly as the result of demagoguery—what would prevent the self-proclaimed steward from playing the demagogue, riveting popular attention on himself? Given Roosevelt’s impatience with separation of powers, what institutional safeguards will impede such a president?

Understandably, then, Roosevelt’s theory of the presidency worried some contemporaries. Among the most prominent of these, his sometime friend and ally William Howard Taft, wrote: “The wide field of action that this would give to the Executive one can hardly admit.” By contrast, Lincoln, acting under “the stress of the greatest civil war in modern times,” “always pointed out the source of the authority which in his opinion justified his acts”—for example, the constitutional warrant for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which was in the even confirmed by Congress, albeit after the fact. Although “there is little danger to the public weal from the tyranny or reckless character of a President who is not sustained by the people,” there is some danger from one who is. Fortunately, “this condition cannot probably be long continued,” as the people themselves will desert the would-be tyrant or overreaching democrat. The most that can be said in Roosevelt’s defense is that his conception of the executive cannot be separated from his conception of the right kind of political man who be the executive, nor from the right kind of private man and woman whom the executive will serve. A self-governing president in alliance with a self-governing people—in the full Rooseveltian sense of the term—will scarcely present a danger to minorities. But this drifts far from the Madisonian sense of the frailties of even the best public men, and the best peoples, the problem seen clearly both by Aristotle and by Christians, as well as the Founders.

This also drifts far from a clear appreciation of the problem posed by the modern state mentioned above: Already politically centralized, the state that centralizes administration as well could turn into a tyranny, ‘hard’ or ‘soft,’ as Tocqueville warns. Roosevelt’s attempt to avoid this result by sheer publicity—arousing the people, riveting their attention—fails to work out the relationship between the expanded administrative capacities of the executive branch and the public opinion he hopes will both energize those capacities and limit their abuse.

In Roosevelt’s hands, it might be added, this is nothing much more than drifting. The vessel of Roosevelt’s though drifts from its moorings in natural right and American constitutionalism, but he never decisively cuts the rope. Roosevelt remains the most important link between the post-Civil War civil service reformers or “mugwumps,” who held to the principles of the Founders, and the Progressives, who advanced altogether new principles. For the full Progressivist understanding of the presidency, we must turn to Roosevelt’s rival, Woodrow Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt understood self-government primarily in terms of human virtues, only secondarily in terms of institutions, Woodrow Wilson came to sight first as an ‘institutionalist.’ The young political scientist made his mark as a specialist in constitutional and administrative practice. But Wilson’s thought also has a strong spiritual side. Whereas Roosevelt concerned himself with Christianity mostly insofar as he judged Christians to be in need of toughening, Wilson throughout his life founded his conduct on Christian principles. One of the few major American presidents who was unambiguously Christian, he sought not only to rule himself but to be ruled by Jesus of Nazareth, and to extend the rule of Christ to others.

Knowing that the letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life, Wilson nonetheless insisted on the consonance of some political institutions and Christianity. His father had preached as a minister in the southern Presbyterian Church, teaching his son the ‘covenant’ or ‘federal’ theology of that denomination. Covenant theology emphasized the Pauline doctrine that acknowledge the world as a place lovingly ordered by a God Who carefully demarcates social and political boundaries, consent to which bespeaks a well-governed Christian soul. In the hands of his father’s generation, this authorized strict but kindly subordination of women, children, and slaves. Wilson’s own beliefs bore strong traces of this doctrine, but in tension with the notions of legitimate change that any ‘progressivism’ must entail. His transformed Presbyterian Christianity led him to venture a profoundly non-‘conservative’ challenge to American constitutionalism and to the established international order.

Wilson rejected the natural-right foundation of American constitutionalism. A young contemporary recalled that “he spoke of the inherent Rights of Man and he indicated his disbelief in such rights, when written in capitals”—that is, when understood as ideas in the Socratic sense. In his dislike of such ‘abstractions’ he could sound very much like Edmund Burke, whom he admired, but in affirming democratization and progress he embraced a historicism of the ‘Left,’ not of the ‘Right.’ Philosophic historicism comports well with covenantal Presbyterianism’s doctrine of election, which calls individuals to imitate Christ in the world, so to speak reincarnating Christ in order to serve and lead others. As a unique event, the incarnation at the center of Christianity resists intellectual-philosophic abstraction, reduction to a principle; as a personal event, however, it can be ‘generalized’ as imitation rather than as idea. The centrality of incarnation allows Wilson to write that “self-government [is] a very coarse, homely thing when alive” while preparing himself to be America’s most ‘idealizing’ president, to use the language of many scholars. But to speak of Wilson’s ‘idealism’ doesn’t quite give an accurate account of his task. If a Person, and a person reincarnating or imitating that Person, generates every true ‘ideal,’ then intellection and the rule of reason take on secondary importance. Self-government consists, then, of a spiritual re-enactment of the life of Christ, not the rule of natural reason in the human soul. At the same time, the addition of progressivist historicism to that re-enactment suggests that even if human sinfulness remains, an individual, a society, and even the world may overcome its sinfulness and achieve peace. This hope sharply distinguishes Wilson from his Calvinist forebears, and from the American Founders.

Wilson lived from before the Civil War until after the First World War. The immense changes that occurred during those years of course marked his own thought as a political man in academia and in government. His principal biographer, Arthur S. Link, contends that Wilson’s thought changed so much that any attempt to study Wilson’s thought as a whole must be doomed to incoherence. Only a periodicized treatment fits the facts. But Wilson’s covenantal Christianity, with the new, historicized conception of self-government he develops out of it, does give coherence to his enterprise, even as it explains the many apostle-like wanderings of Wilsonian policy. “[S]ince Wilson,” political scientist Robert Eden writes, “we have grown used to willing together,” grown used to speaking less of ‘statesmanship’ than of ‘leadership,’ used to conceiving of ‘liberalism’ as ‘progressivism.’ American Progressivism is liberalism historicized theoretically and institutionalized in practice by the insertion of an administrative state—a new, necessarily oligarchic element in the American regime. The person who connects theory to practice is the opinion leader. The young Wilson told his fiancée, “My heart’s desire [is] that I may become one of the guides of public policy by becoming one of the guides of public thought,” using “political science” “to the end that our forms of government and our means of administration may be perfected.” (This, incidentally, is quite the thing for a man to identify as his heart’s desire in correspondence with his wife-to-be, but let that pass.) Statesmanship as guidance or leadership, leadership as the leading edge of historical process, and historical process as the progressive incarnation of the will of a providential God, Whose operations are not easily distinguished from those of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit: All this revolutionizes the American understanding of what self-government should mean.

Two years before he ran for president, Wilson summarized his political credo. “Politics is the very stuff of life.” “[I]ntensely human, and generally intimately personal,” political relations are not amenable to rational understanding on the basis of “principles that are fancied to be universal.” What gives personal politics its coherence is not a set of universal principles but the “large movement of it all which is independent in some strange way of time and place and accidental elements.” Political ‘science’ therefore misnames political knowledge, which requires “insight and sympathy and spiritual comprehension.” “Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great field upon which men like himself struggle, with unflagging pathetic hope, towards better things. He is a man big enough to think in the terms of what others than himself are striving for and living for and seeking steadfastly to keep in heart till they get. He is a guide, a comrade, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.” Leader and political ‘scientist’ alike should study the people “not as congeries of interests, but as a body of human souls,” attending to facts, to be sure, but to facts “spiritually perceived.”

Talk of ‘natural right’ must go. Even the citizen of the ancient world did not need natural right; he “bounded his politics by common sense, and so dispensed with ‘the rights of man.'” In modernity, in America, “French doctrines of the ‘rights of man’ crept in through the phrases of the Declaration of Independence”; they are the stuff of demagoguery. “[T]he only standards that are universal, the only standards that have borne the test of long experience, the standards that underlie the very processes of civilization and furnish the genius of human liberty” come from Christianity, form its “proposition,” its “discovery,” that “one man’s soul is of equal value with another man’s soul.” The thumotic passions of the political man find their true character in the honor of the Christian leader “willing to offend his fellow men in order to serve something that is greater than he is, and greater than they are, something that they will ultimately honor.”

When modern Zeitgeist meets Christian providence, when the Absolute Spirit meets the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian leader, self-government takes on a metaphysical dimension not contemplated by any previous American president. Church and state move closer than they had been for more than a century, but without reconstituting the politics of ‘throne and altar,’ of Church establishment, rejected by the American Founders. Wilson would save self-government—in the Christian as well as the political sense—inn a historicized world, a world ‘conscious’ of its own historicity, a world moreover buffeted by such seemingly uncontrollable forces as industrialism and geopolitics. Only the power of God can successfully resist such forces. In the iconography of the day, General Washington was Moses, the leader; President Washington was Cincinnatus, the civilian ruler ready return to private life after his public duties were done. Wilson, the Christian spiritual warrior, never stopped being Moses, the leader, the type of Christ. “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion.”

Wilson’s progressivist historicism and his incarnational theology express themselves in organic metaphors, images of growth, rather than in images of balanced mechanism. His organicism makes it more difficult to distinguish ‘levels’ or ‘concentric circles’ of his political thought, as one can do so readily in Washington’s thought. If Wilsonian thought suggests concentric circles of self-government, they resemble rather the growth rings of a tree, marks off individual and national self-development. ‘Self’ blends into ‘state,’ ‘political economy’ into ‘foreign policy,’ and so on—all growing together as elements of a self-developing world guided by divine providence and immanent laws of historical unfolding.

How does this work in practice? To lead, a leader needs a political party. Politics conceived as providential historical progress centers Wilson’s attention on the president as party leader. A vigorously-led political party embodies the vital, growing tissue of the national organism.

National, democratic self-government becomes party government. “I am interested in any one individual in politics only in proportion as I can see in him the candidate serving more other individuals, only in proportion as I consider him the representative, the great representative, of a great body of my fellow citizens who have a cause at their hearts.” For American progressives, ‘ideals’ are indeed causes both in the sense that they are creeds by which men and women act and in that they make things happen. As it had existed in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, party government had been run by bosses for their own self-interest. Such parties are “savory with decay and rank with rottenness,” “ready for no service but to be served” and “to debauch public morals, to corrupt and use the people.” It is time for public opinion to become the political boss of America. The mild reformism of post-Reconstruction America, reform as advanced by the mugwumps, will not suffice. “[M]ugwumps look for a man, not for a party. Would it not be better if, in finding a man they become a party—by winning, not a representative merely, but a leader as well?”

Parties directed by bosses are irresponsible, impediments to popular self-government. For decades, their deal-doing helped to hold together a governmental system that had no real nation behind it. But their time is long over, now that the North has won the Civil War and forcibly unified America. Partyless mugwumps cannot replace the bosses because the people do not back the mugwumps. “A living people needs not a master but a leader.” A master is a sovereign, and “there was never any sovereign in the United States,” whose citizens are their own guardians, not the wards of the government. But “great passions” “when they run through a whole population, inevitably find a great spokesman.” Leaders are the spokesmen of “constructive and handsome” popular passions. Thus the Christian Wilson concurs with the decidedly un-Christian historicist, G. W. F. Hegel, who writes, “Nothing great can be done without passion.” Paul Eidelberg charges that “Wilson’s project to unify political power so as to render it responsive to popular majorities is precisely what Madison feared most,” namely, “ideologically disciplined political parties acting under presidential leadership”—”the most efficient means of facilitating what Madison defined as majority faction.” This is a sober, well-taken warning, provided that it is understood that Wilson defines ‘passion’ differently than Madison does, and does so on the basis of a Christianity that Madison does not view with much confidence as a partisan political force. Party politics for Wilson parallels the principled sectarianism of Christianity, which broke from institutionalized Judaism and conquered the Western world.

Leadership is necessary because “what we really mean when we say that the people govern is that they freely consent to be governed, on condition that a certain part of them do the governing.” The people govern “in proportion as they produce the stuff out of which governors and kings are made.” This means that the regime question takes on less urgency for Wilson than it did for the Founders: A self-governing people might be ruled by a monarch, so long as he has been drawn from the people he rules.

Also in keeping with his organicist anti-structuralism, Wilson claims that the advantage of democracy over monarchy and aristocracy has nothing to do with the Madisonian-Montesquieuian separation and balance of powers on the governmental level; “in these points aristocracies and monarchies have often proven superior to democracy.” Rather, democracy’s advantage over other regimes consists in its superior “variety and symmetry of development,” its capacity for organic growth. “A people, not self-directed, but directed by its boldest, most prevalent minds”—so long as those minds are representative, expressive of the best popular passions—will grow with the most vigor. Progress in civilization consists of a material element, “assured mastery over nature,” and an immaterial element, “an assured and equitable order” brought about by the discipline born of struggle, the “ideals of duty” born of religion, and the enlightenment born of education. In this process the people are “passive.” “Progress works upon them, rather than by means of them.” Thus what at first sight appears to be a ‘from-below’ conception of self-government, an expression of the people’s will, turns out to be leader-driven. This suggests that Wilson’s thought on self-government must center on the national state, the prize of great parties and their leaders.

Wilson defines a state as a people organized by law within a definite territory; the state’s object is to rank and harness individuals and social groups to accomplish a common object. The state is necessary but dangerous; if too powerful, it will “dominate the variety and crush the spontaneity of the individual,” the center of the vitality of the state; this retention of ‘individualism’ separates American Progressivism from such collectivist historicisms as Marxism and its derivatives. Limited or constitutional government “can exist only where there is actual community of interest and of purpose, and cannot, if it be also self-government, express the life of any body of people that does not constitute a veritable community,” that is, a nation. “Self-government is the last, the consummate stage of constitutional development.” Self-government in America results from a long historical process, originating in medieval England. Self-government in England for most of the time was not democratic. Self-government with respect to the state does not mean democracy or republicanism but the “participation by non-official persons in the conduct of affairs.” Under feudalism, this meant men appointed “because of their importance in the locality, and not because of their connection with the national government,” men “who were not officers of the central government in the sense that modern administrative officials are.” This “imperative lay voice in affairs” required publicity of government action, freedom of opinion, and freedom of “concerted public agitation.” To work well, self-government requires “a clear experimental understanding of Rights,” social and economic conditions sufficiently equal to foster “community of feeling,” education and experience in public affairs, and “a habit and spirit of civic duty.” National self-government means government by representatives; it subordinates local self-government within legal limits. Under national self-government, local self-government becomes “self-direction” within those limits.

The state, then, is as natural as the nation, “the eternal, natural embodiment and expression of a higher form of life than the individual”; here is where Wilson departs from liberal individualism, settling on a democratized version of Hegelianism. “Each nation has its own State, i.e., its own form of organic life…produced by its own development, expressive of its own character.” The state’s purpose should be to “quicken” that development. Government is “the executive organ of  society,” making the will of the society operative. The constitution of the government is “a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age,” the “great world-historical processes of politics” as filtered through national life forms.

Wilson’s historicist vitalism causes him to stress continuity in political development. He makes one exception: the transition from antiquity to feudalism. There is no continuity between paganism and Christianity, and this may be seen in modern politics, where sovereignty—”the will of an organized independent community”—inheres in the power of legislation—extending state power to private as well as public affairs—exercised finally by the people, not an aristocracy. The legalism of the Old Testament and the populism of the New Testament combined with the self-conscious, self-directing rationalism of the Renaissance to produce the modern state. “Peoples [became] old enough to govern themselves.” Although Wilson sometimes asserts that the modern state serves the individual, not the individual the state, and also ranks society over the government that should “serve,” not “rule or dominate it,” finally individual and society both serve as sources of authority. They are not themselves authoritative.

Like all nations, the United States has developed over time. The United States government was founded by men guided by natural-rights social contract theory, and for most of its history “almost all the greatest statesmen of the Union have been constitutional lawyers,” fighting “the great battles of our politics…around the Constitution.” the Civil War ended the central battle, the battle over the constitutional authority of the national government itself. “The questions of the future are to be questions of internal national policy, of federal administration.” The Civil War force all Americans into nationhood, specifically, into a national economic network based on free rather than slave labor. Controversies over legal structure are now subordinate to controversies over national life. The old, contractarian understanding of the American Constitution had been inadequate, anyway. The Founders borrowed from Montesquieu, whose balance-of-power scheme fit the mixed regimes of Europe, not the popularly-based governments of the United States. Wilson eschews the clashing ambitions of officers lodged in separate governmental branches. He prefers coordination and unified control, again on the basis of organicism: “Governments are living things and operate as organic wholes”; “the whole art of statesmanship is the art of bringing the several parts of government into effective cooperation for the accomplishment of particular common objects—and party objects at that.” Wilson would replace what he calls the Newtonian mechanics of the Founders’ regime with evolutionist historicism. Separation of powers, “the central defect of American politics,” weakens the president by cutting him off from the Congress, which exercises the lawmaking power, the key power of modern government. Federalism, the attempted balance of national and states’ governmental powers, failed and eventuated in civil war.

In the years subsequent to the founding “patriotism was state patriotism,” the states being “the heart of self-government,” the “living, organic entities.” The Union was only an “arrangement.” Wilson judges John C. Calhoun and the other states’ rightists to have been correct according to the letter of the Constitution. They were mistaken in supposing that the contract could hold. Beneath the parchment document, a nation was forming, and “national sentiment” overrides contracts. national growth overtook the states’ growth. The Civil War “laid bare” the “ultimate foundation” of the contractarian structure, namely “physical force, sustained by the stern loves and rooted predilections of the masses of men, the strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every system of government”; Wilson here ignores the arguments of Lincoln. Contractarian illusions collapsed and “a citizenship of the United States was created.” The contractarian Constitution is a form of government “rather in name than in reality.” Self-government can only base itself on the reality of power, sentiment, and habit. The Newtonian balancing act of the 1787 Constitution obscures power and therefore obscures responsibility. “The times seem to favor a centralization of governmental functions such as could not have suggested itself as a possibility to the framers of the Constitution.” (In this, Wilson was mistaken: Many Founders worried about what they called ‘consolidation’ of powers, and of course the anti-federalists who rejected the Framers’ work accused them of effecting just such a centralization.)

Wilson would have America ascend from the hypocrisy of force-based contractarianism by reforming the Constitution in the direction of what he calls, following the English political scientist Walter Bagehot, government by discussion. Government by discussion means government by talk that is actually effectual. Effectual talk requires a certain level of civilization in the nation along with structural reforms to make the government more parliamentary—more English. Government by discussion is true self-government; its very verbalness conduces both to reasoning and to evangelizing. Government by discussion conduces also to progress; in Bagehot’s words, it “breaks down the yoke of fixed custom” and substitutes for it an “animated moderation.” In Wilson’s terms, government by discussion allows for the rule of “intelligently directed opinion.” “Common counsel is not aggregate counsel,” a matter of “counting heads,” but “a living thing made out of the vital substance of many minds, many personalities, many experiences”—the equivalent, on the national level, of the neighborhood talk that constitutes local self-government. But for all his verbalism, Wilson remains a ‘realist’: “It is the potential might rather than the wisdom of the majority which gives it its right to rule.” With no conception of natural right, Wilson must fall back on might as the ultimate arbiter, this side of God.

He is nonetheless confident that orator-leaders, in whom “are centered both opinion and party, will “elevate the whole people.” A party leader can also be a national leader if his party embodies the leading edge of historical progress—the way in which the nation will go. Under twentieth-century conditions, the executive and not the legislative branch has “the most direct access to opinion,” and therefore “the best chance of leadership and mastery,” unimpeded by the confusion and contradiction of debate. “[B]ecause he has the ear of the whole nation and is undoubtedly its chosen spokesman and representative, the President may place the House at a great disadvantage if he chooses to appeal to the nation.” As political scientist Jeffrey Tulis has observed, Wilson conceives of presidential authority as deriving not from the Constitution as the product of popular sovereignty but through popular sovereignty expressed as popular mandate—a mandate, moreover, shaped by the president’s own “interpretation” of public opinion. This ‘verbal’ aspect of leadership, so characteristic of Christian thought, does finally rest on force, precisely because and in the sense that public opinion finally rests of the force of ‘History.’ It is unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to say that government by discussion eventuates in government by sermonizing, sermonizing on the president/preacher’s claim to interpret accurately the leading movement of the ‘spirit of the age.’

Government by discussion also eventuates in government by administration. The expansion of executive-branch power includes bureaucratization, the topic of one of Wilson’s earliest and most influential essays, “The Study of Administration.” Wilson intended to go beyond what he dismissed as the mere moralism of civil service reform, popular throughout his lifetime. Given the complexity of modern life, “it is getting harder to run a constitution than it is to frame one.” It is also getting to be impossible for the chief executive, “the most heavily burdened officer in the world,” to administer the nation’s business; men of “ordinary physique and discretion cannot be Presidents and live.” Without substantial administrative support, “we shall be obliged always to be picking our chief magistrates from among wise and prudent athletes—a small class.” Moreover, “there can be no science of choice or wisdom“: Ancient government, which consisted primarily of rule by judging, did not lend itself to a science of administration, which attempts, within the legal framework of modern constitutions, to “effect a systematic balance between private right and public power.” Modern science systematizes and ‘legalizes,’ understanding all phenomena under the governance of natural laws (which turn out to be ‘evolutionary’ or historical laws). Scientific administration accordingly rises more easily in a country like Bismarck’s Prussia, where the often-messy public opinion that rules democracies need not interfere with sovereign systematizers. Countries where public opinion counts politically—England, America—resist bureaucratization.

This fact involves Wilson in what must seem to us today as a somewhat quixotic project to make bureaucracy responsive to every-growing, ever-progressing public opinion as led by political men. Wilson introduces what the notion of the “elastic Constitution” to make that feasible. Far from being a stable law to be changed only by formal amendment, the Constitution must be “stretched” so as “to cover so great a giant as the nation has become.” The government’s “active, planning will” and “prevailing popular thought and need,” both at the service of “symmetrical national development,” do and should override constitutional forms, the letter of constitutional law. Leaders will guide this “statesmanship of adaptation.” Because the Supreme Court of Wilson’s time resisted such adaptations as Wilsonian progressivism commended, he tended to read the Court out of his project, referring constitutional matters to public opinion as interpreted by presidents and administrators. The one thing that might derail this project would be a popular feeling of what might be termed constitutional guilt over such confident stretching, especially if that guilt were coupled with the suspicion that elasticity might redound much more to the benefit of the governors than to the governed. Wilson bolstered popular faith and confidence by pointing to the charms of development, material and spiritual.

Conclusion. Severed from natural right, what does ‘self-government’ mean?

Through Lincoln, American presidents understood self-government as the rule of reason, a setting of limits on personal and popular passions. The reasonable or prudential government of the non-rational aspects of the soul, contractarian/constitutional government founded by prudent statesmen, the conduct of domestic and foreign policy by prudent statesmen or even, absent these, by statesmen acting within the reasonable limits set by the Constitution: Wilson rejects all of this as illusory. God and history, war and passion, drive the real world. The providential rule of the Creator-God, incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, makes of the world a system of transformative power. The leaders who align themselves with this power are saved from egoism by their conscious subordination to the God Whose power it is, by the selfless service commanded by Jesus, the Captain of our souls. Self-government becomes impassioned, personally and nationally; the national state and its government become more tightly integrated and forceful, les it succumb to other powerful forces in modernity, those of the great business corporations and the great foreign tyrannies. Right willing, agapic love, more than prudential judgment, redeems human power. Wilsonian enlightenment is an act of willing—the “Let there be light” of Genesis—not an act of thinking—the “Dare to know!” of the Enlightenment, much less the “Know thyself” of Socrates. This act of willing nonetheless knows where ‘History’ is going, and so can rightly guide the less knowledgeable souls of the nation at large, who feel what is right without quite being able to articulate it.

Power rules this world in ways great and small. To Wilson, education is a police agency that includes mental discipline, gradually growing into self-government. War is central to American and world history; in America, war brought on the power of the business corporations, unified the country, demonstrated the need for a living or elastic constitution under the might that is also the right of leader-directed public opinion. Out of the Great War, the most extensive display of power men ever engaged in, will come the perpetual peace enforced by the League of Nations—democratic-republican and perhaps even Christian nations.

Wilson’s historicism depends upon the God of the Bible to make it both real and right. But if God chooses to withdraw, Wilsonian self-government has no natural right to fall back on. If America ceases to be “a Christian nation” (as Wilson described it), if the world increasingly refuses to hearken to the Word of the Lord, then a less sublime apocalypse might loom. Severed from Christianity, Wilsonian self-government might collapse into some form of materialism. Wilson was confident that this would not happen, given the benign providentialism and historicism he embraced.

 

Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”

Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 1, 2004

 

As we’ve seen, political regimes consist of four elements: the persons who rule; the institutional structures by which they rule; they way of life, habits of mind and heart of the political community so ruled; the end or purpose of those ruling persons, structures, and way of life.

That regimes matter to us, the Founders saw. Lincoln also saw this, and illustrated it as decisively as could be. Without the institution of the presidency, no Lincoln; without Lincoln, no Union; without Union—what? Continued slavery in the southern states, and the extension of slavery in whatever lands the Confederate States of America would have annexed; a balkanized North America with bigger military establishments, sooner, and the wars that would have come with them, later; more likely victory for one or more of the tyrants of the twentieth century, in the world wars that followed.

If practical politics centers on the question of the regime; if the American Founders intended to replace monarchism with republicanism; if ‘republicanism’ means representative government rather than direct democracy as the means whereby a people can govern themselves; then the executive branch of that representative government deserves considerable suspicion. Executives execute. Will an executive execute us? Even if elected by us, perhaps he might execute, or in some other way punish, those of us who failed to vote for him. Or (given the secrecy of ballots today) he might punish those who publicly oppose his policies—a sobering thought, especially here in Florida, where large numbers of voters are likely to be on the losing side, whoever wins the upcoming presidential election.

In other words, the president fills the office within republican government which looks most suspiciously like that of a monarchy. Might he not turn tyrant? And even if he does not, will not a strong executive compromise our own rights of self-government by hogging public attention, or by doing things for us that we could do for ourselves, or by beating the rest of us to the punch in any number of ways? A decisive executive who commands soldiers and bureaucrats will always worry his fellow citizens. The very existence of an executive raises the regime question, perennially.

In framing the Constitution, the Founders owed us an explanation of how their new executive differed from the old, dubious monarchs of Europe. Delegates at Philadelphia themselves demanded such an explanation. Randolph of Virginia decried the presidency as “the foetus of monarchy,” and Dickinson of Pennsylvania argued that “a vigorous executive…cannot be republican.” At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Patrick Henry declaimed, “Away with your President! We shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?”

Before considering the Founders’ understanding of the presidency, I first want to draw back to the foundation of their thought, and consider what they meant by ‘self-government’ in the first place. The Founders, including George Washington, the first president, frequently recurred to the idea of ‘self-government.’ Subsequent presidents for a century and a half made much of it. What does it mean?

In classical political philosophy, self-government has two dimensions. Autarchia, which means self-sufficiency or literally self-rule, means independence from the rule of others, not needing what others provide, standing by oneself and for oneself. Self-rule characterizes what we would call ‘sovereign’ political societies, as distinguished from colonies, captive nations, dependencies of one sort or another. In individuals, the most self-ruling person of all is the philosopher, the one whose body and soul needs the least—both materially and intellectually—from his or her contemporaries.

Such a community, such a person, will also need enkrateia or self-mastery, the other dimension of self-government. Enkrateia literally means ‘rule over what is within,’ self-control, the ability of the rational part of the soul, or of the rational persons within the political community, to rule the irrational. Socrates tells one of his interlocutors, “every man is his own ruler,” capable of “being moderate and self-mastering,” the “ruler of the pleasures and desires that are in himself.” The self-masterly person or community most fully develops its own distinctively human capacities, namely, those associated with reasonableness rather than passion or appetite—characteristics human beings share with beasts. As the term ‘mastery’ implies, enkrateia is sterner stuff than autarchia. By nature, the passions should be treated as slaves by a being whose distinctive characteristic is reason, and criminals should be deprived of their liberty or ‘enslaved’.

When a person or community fails to govern itself in this double sense, it becomes not autarchic but anarchic not enkratic but akratic or without rule. Lawlessness in the person and civil war in the community then follow, opening opportunities for tyrants. Such persons and communities lose their chance for a fully human life: They compromise their personhood and lose their political independence. Today, we have seen what we call ‘failed states’ where human life is cheap and living nearly intolerable.

The American Founding.  The American Founders sensed that America was moving in the direction of losing its self-government, asserted in 1776. The classical philosophers were not at all sure that ‘the people’ as a whole could adequately exercise self-government. Some of the Americans were by no means sure of this, either. Nonetheless, in the thirty-ninth Federalist, Publius insists that republicanism alone comports with “that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the Founders intended to design a government that would enable reason to rule Americans—an ambitious aspiration.

Government by consent means governed by reasoned assent, but what kinds of governing institutions can strengthen reason sufficiently to enable it to govern our often unreasonable souls? As Publius states it, can “societies of men” establish “good government”—government by “reflection and choice,” not “accident and force”? “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” not angels over men or angels over angels, “the great difficulty lies in this,” Publius writes: “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” For the government to govern itself, “inventions of prudence” are needed, institutions so arranged that “the private interest of every individual” in the government “may be a sentinel over the public rights.” The regime of monarchy could not be arranged in such a way as to ensure that the monarch would be such a sentinel. Could a republic solve this problem, with respect to its executive?

One set of institutions that can filter out would-be tyrants are those that elevate citizens to executive office in the first place. Another set of institutions will determine the powers and the limits to the powers executives exercise, once in office. Publius describes both of these kinds of institutions, taking care to mark the difference between them and the institutions of monarchy.

With respect to electoral institutions, the Founders rejected direct popular elections of presidents for the Electoral College, the institution Florida made famous. As we all re-learned in the presidential election of 2000, the Electoral College requires that a president earn not a popular majority of votes cast nationwide, but a constitutional majority—that is, a majority of the votes cast in the Electoral College, peopled by delegates in each state—each unit in the federal system—delegates equal in number to the United States senators and representatives from that state. The Electoral College thus expresses popular opinion while at the same time constituting a temporary but indispensable institutional layer between popular majorities and electoral victory. The Founders intended thus to avoid the hereditary election—or worse, the violent coup—characteristic of monarchy, while at the same time, forcing electors to think both of the interest of their own states and the interests of the country as a whole. That is, the Electoral College was to inject an element of deliberation into presidential selection.

Publius says that the president’s election will express “the sense of the people” in the initial stage, that of electing the delegates to the College. A republican or representative regime can do no less. At the same time, Publius expects the electors to be deliberate and judicious—persons who understand how their state’s self-interest can only be served b y voting for a candidate who appeals to voters beyond their state, persons who can think about how to put together a winning coalition, persons who know how to rule and be ruled. Publius also sees that although the initial phase of the election may be a rowdy affair, the final phase, the actual selection of the president, will not conduce to such “tumult and disorder.”

Key to these effects will be two features of the College. First, the electors will meet within each state, not as one group in some central location. Second, the delegates will meet briefly, cast ballots, return home. These features of the law, taken together, will minimize the chances of widespread corruption and manipulation because the delegates will not be able to business together long enough to come to know each other, and thereby come to trust each other enough to ‘do deals.’ And any corruption or manipulation that does occur will be localized to the one delegation, and not spread easily to all delegates across the country.

Since the founding, two things happened to alter this system. The first thing happened quickly. National political parties developed, practically ensuring that almost all delegates to the College would not deliberate but simply vote the party line. This effectively pushed deliberation into the party organizations. Parties, and particularly party ‘chieftains,’ became known for their sagacity in selecting ‘electable’ presidential candidates who would also do credit to the party while in office. This produced some mediocre presidents—Buchanan, Pierce—but also some remarkable ones, including the most remarkable of all, Lincoln, a man to whom backroom wheeling and dealing were not unknown.

Presidential primary elections, designed to test electability more directly, came more than a century after party-driven nominations arose, and only achieved their current highly populist form in the 1970s. Nominations determined by primaries push deliberation into the camps of the candidates themselves, and their hired consultants. This does make for a more tumultuous and also long-drawn-out electoral process, at which the Founders would have looked askance.

These changes notwithstanding, the original architecture of the Electoral College continues to provide the basic goods the Founders intended. It makes presidential selection, in Publius’ words, “dependent upon the people themselves,” while requiring the president-elect to enjoy prestige in many states, not only a few. To enjoy such prestige, “characters preeminent for ability and virtue” are more likely to find favor. Although we delight in criticizing and ridiculing our presidents, it would be hard to say that they are less preeminent in ability and virtue than, say your average college professor, much less your average college administrator—to take two examples that hit close to home. To put it a different way, how many of us really believes, ‘I could do that job’? How many of us would even want the job in the first place?

Publius calls “the true test of a good government” its “aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” Can the government govern? This brings him to the second set of presidential institutions, namely, the powers of the office and their limits, and how these too differ from monarchic institutions.

Although the republican executive, like the monarchic executive, will also consist of one person, not a committee, unlike a monarch his terms will be limited to four-year increments; he will be impeachable and removable from office; his vetoes can be overridden. Although he will command the military, he cannot declare war or raise troops. He cannot pardon other officials who have been impeached and convicted, and therefore cannot protect those who might conspire against “the public liberty.” The treaties he or his agents negotiate require Senatorial advice and consent, as do his nominees for the Supreme Court and other offices. He can grant no titles of nobility, and so cannot reconstitute the regime of aristocracy in the New World.

Each one of these powers, taken with its limitations, speaks directly to the regime in question, a republic not a monarchy.

For example, the prevention of aristocracy, particularly an aristocracy beholden to the executive, makes republican self-government possible. In one of his last letters, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, not a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Although there is, he wrote (agreeing with John Adams), a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, such genuine aristocrats feature no visible markings by which they can be readily identified and thus as it were made automatically to accede to the command of their inferiors. Denying executives the power to grant titles of nobility eliminates one source of artificial aristocrats, even as the electoral system tests the mettle of the natural ones.

The exercise of limited discretion in judicial and other nominations and also in treaty negotiations also separates the republican executive from the monarch. In a monarchy, where sovereignty inheres in one person alone, a treaty can only be as good as the monarch’s word. And any governmental appointee must derive his authority from that sole source of legitimate power. But in a republic, where the people are sovereign, but their sovereignty flows into separate and equal branches of government, constitutional law must require both legislature and executive to ‘buy into’ treaties and appointments, so that the sovereign people’s word can be its bond. Further, in the United States, the senators represent the states; Senate approval of treaties and presidential nominees involves both levels of the federal system, a constitutional majority similar to that effected by the Electoral College.

To the Americans, the British regime, a constitutional monarchy, seemed to have reached a dead end with George III. Eventually, the British themselves concluded that  the monarchy had played itself out as a real regime, and they too became a commercial republic. But at the time of the founding the Americans were exploring new political territory. As Publius asks, can a strong executive be made “consistent with the genius of republican government”? This question goes right to the heart of the regime issue.

Publius calls energy in the executive “a leading character in the definition of good government, and gives four reasons for thinking so.

First, energy is “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.” A president may not have time to wait for a Congressional declaration of war, and of course the vast majority of American wars have been fought without any such declaration.

Second, executive energy is indispensable to “the steady administration of the laws.” Congress can make as many laws as it likes, but without vigorous enforcement they will effectively lapse.

Third, executive energy will protect property when threatened by civil disturbance. A memorable example: In the 1960s, when the Watts section of Los Angeles went up in flames, President Johnson ordered in the 82nd Airborne Division. End of riot.

Fourth, executive energy can secure liberty against ambition, faction, anarchy. The best-known early example of this was to be President Washington’s firm response to the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.

Part of executive energy comes from the character of the executive in power, a topic to which I shall return. Institutionally, however, executive energy derives from five features of the presidential office, outlined in the Constitution. The first is the unity of the executive: Although he has a Cabinet, the president makes the decision. This is not government by committee. If it were, Publius argues, the plural executive would dither interminably, and, after finally acting (or finally failing to act) would not only embarrass itself by finger-pointing refusals to accept responsibility for failure—that much is inevitable—but confuse the rest of us as to where responsibility for a given decision lies. With a plural executive, Harry Truman’s proverbial “buck” would stop—where?

The second institutional prop for executive energy is duration in office. A presidential term must be sufficiently long to allow the president to undertake serious medium-range actions. Without such duration, no serious person would want to bother with the presidency at all, and, as in the provision of unity, no president could be held responsible for actions taken. A four-year terms gives a president time to formulate and pursue policies, and also gives his fellow citizens time to see the first results of those policies, and so to judge them fairly when re-election nears. For example, neither supporters nor opponents of the Bush Administration’s economic and foreign polices will likely say that they haven’t had enough time to come to some fairly strong preliminary conclusions respecting his ‘job performance’ in time for the November 2004 election. Four years is usually a fair test; when it is not, as perhaps in the case of the Great Depression, that may indicate a problem that the government alone cannot solve.

To give scope to personal firmness in the executive, and to stability of administration, a shorter term will not do. To keep an executive on a short leash will encourage habits of “servile pliancy” to the “prevailing current” of opinion, Publius warns in Federalist 71. “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they trust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” Alluding to what Rousseau calls the “general will,” he continues: “It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it…. When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.”  Notice the language of ethics, here: moderation or resistance to passions; the public good or justice; good sense or prudence; courage; and even magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crown of the classical virtues. These virtues will not always be present in a people or in an executive, even an executive of exceptional abilities and virtues, but without institutional support from duration in office, even a president of the most exemplary character will be helpless to bring these or any other virtues to the service of the country. Without a decent duration in office, the careful separation from legislative power would be overridden, and a president would wield only a sham independence from Congress.

The Founders so esteemed the moral and political effects of duration in office that they made the presidency indefinitely renewable. Publius praises experience, “the parent of wisdom,” and the incentive for good behavior in office that the prospect of re-election brings. With characteristically restrained asperity, he also notes that the practice of long-serving presidents will reduce the number of living ex-presidents at any given time—that is, the number of potential political kibitzers.

Third, in addition to unity and duration in office, an energetic executive must not depend upon another branch of government for his salary. Accordingly, Congress shall not change a president’s salary during his term in office. Excepting persons of remarkable virtue, “a power over a man’s [financial] support is a power over his will.” The Constitution denies this power over the president to the American Congress.

While independent of the other branches of government, presidents are to be dependent upon the will of the people, in the long run. This dependence limits their powers but also forms one foundation of those powers. As the only Constitutional officer elected, if indirectly, by the whole body of voting citizens, the president enjoys considerable authority over any other single officer, if not over any other governmental branch. He can claim to speak for the people in ways that no one senator, representative, or judge can do.

In a monarchy, the monarch is sovereign; in the American republic, a president is not sovereign. Nor is the government as a whole. The people are. Therefore, the presidential veto, exercised by an executive overpowered by a constitutional majority vote, expresses one part of popular sovereignty slowing, but not preventing, another part of popular sovereignty’s expression in law.

These four features of executive energy—unity, duration in office, independence of financial support, and dependence upon the sovereign people, all point to the fifth, most important feature: executive responsibility. The word ‘responsible,’ meaning accountable for one’s actions, dates back to the middle of the seventeenth century, but its first use as the noun, ‘responsibility,’ occurs for the first time in English in the sixty-third Federalist, which concerns the Senate. All good regimes require responsibility; a political community or res publica implies publicity or, as political scientists say nowadays, ‘transparency.’ With respect to the executive, responsibility needs sharply different institutional supports in republics than it does in monarchies. A permanent executive or monarch should have a privy counsel—to some extent a plural executive—which will hold him to some degree of responsibility. An elected executive or president, however, must be enmeshed in institutions that hold him responsible to the rulers of that regime, namely, the people.

All of the main constitutional duties of the president require clear lines of authority or responsibility. Effective military command, for example, means (in Publius’ words) “the direction of the common strength.” Treaty negotiations and judicial appointments also must be made to ‘trace back’ to some person who can be held responsible for them by his fellow citizens. Ultimately, the very character of being an executive involves the establishment of one’s reputation by the performance of one’s duties. Legislators legislate; they “prescribe the rules for the regulation of the society.” Executives execute; they execute the laws by bringing the common strength to bear for the making-real of legislative enactments; they also bring the common strength to bear for the common defense, a task that no set of laws can fully regulate or constrain. This is both the danger and the necessity of executive power.

Publius acknowledges that abuses will occur. But he also insists that “the supposition of a universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning that the supposition of universal rectitude.” Both cynics and idealists are wrong. As framers of institutions, the best the Founders could do was to see that the way the national government was constituted would make rectitude more likely than venality.

The Character of the First President. We have reached the end of what institutional or structural regime-building can accomplish, with respect to self-government and the executive. We turn now to the other dimension of any regime, namely, the kind of person who will rule. The institution of the presidency had an especially fortunate ‘founding example,’ George Washington. Washington quite deliberately conducted himself in such a manner as to set an example for his successors. Not being a fool, neither he nor his contemporaries imagined that subsequent presidents would often equal Washington in character. But they knew that he would remain, as a guide for, or, failing that, as a source of shame to malefactors.

Nonetheless, Washington did not suppose, as Lord Acton later did, that ‘power corrupts.’ On the contrary, under due institutional restraints power strengthens the human soul by involving it in the very public responsibility that Publius highlights. Washington conceived of self-government on several levels, which might be envisioned as concentric circles. First, the government of the ‘self’ or soul requires the rule of reason over the passions. Other levels of self-government include the family, the immediate social milieu—nearby families that comprise one’s local civil society—the local political community, the county, the state, the national union of the states, the world of ‘nation-states’ and empires, nature, and, finally, God. None of these levels or circles of self-government fails to affect the other. The government of the individual soul receives valuable guidance from the other circles of self-government, and to varying degrees they receive guidance or at least petitions from the individual soul. In learning to govern itself, the soul must attend to family, society—all the other circles.

As mentioned, the executive branch poses more acute problems for a self-governing people than does the legislative branch. As Publius repeatedly states, the executive must move with secrecy and dispatch, thereby posing serious questions concerning the requirements for public knowledge and deliberation that the experiment in popular self-government must meet. Further, how shall a man of conspicuous virtue accept the status of an executive—the agent of the will of another, namely, the sovereign people—rather than long for the status of a monarch or an aristocrat? Upon his elevation to the presidency Washington wrote, “Few who are not philosophical spectators can realize the difficult and delicate part which a man in my situation had to act…. In our progress toward political happiness my station is new; and, if I may use the expression we walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” Washington cited prudence, conciliation, and firmness as the foundations of his conduct in this “last great experiment for promoting human happiness by reasonable compact in civil Society.  Both the greatness and the finality of the American experiment in self-government suggests the attraction of this enterprise to a Washington. 

The Whiskey Rebellion called for the exercise of all these virtues. Washington ordered suppression of the rebellion on the grounds of the constitutional duty of the executive to maintain the rule of law. “To withstand by open violence the lawful authority of the Government of the United States, and to compel thereby an alteration in the measures of the Legislature and a repeal of the laws aforesaid” would be to allow a violent faction to abort the process of popular self-government—an argument to which Lincoln would recur some fifty years later. The rebels were animated not by prudence but by “treasonable fury.” “The very existence of the Government, and the fundamental principles of social order, are materially involved in the issue.” “If the Laws are to be so trampled upon, with impunity, and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government; and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter; for some other man, or society, may dislike another law and oppose it with equal propriety until all Laws are prostrate, and every one (the strongest I presume) will carve for himself.” The successful suppression of the rebellion “demonstrated that our prosperity rests on solid foundations; by furnishing an additional proof, that my fellow citizens understand the true principles of government and liberty: that they feel their inseparable union: that notwithstanding all the devices which have been used to sway them form their interest and duty [Washington alludes to the Democratic Clubs, which he was viewing with increased suspicion], they are now as ready to maintain the authority of the laws against licentious invasions, as they were to defend their rights against usurpation” at the time of the Revolutionary War. He exhorted Congress to “verify the anticipations of this government being a safe guard to human rights.” Self-government requires that the constitutional executive appeal not to his own will but to the principle of majority rule linked to the still higher principle of natural right, and to report fully on his actions to the legislative branch, justifying those actions on those very grounds of American self-government.

Respecting Congress, Washington successfully resisted efforts by some senators to make the Senate effectually his executive council; as historian Forrest McDonald has recounted, Washington also opposed the British ministerial model favored by Hamilton. Instead, Washington reviewed candidates for the executive branch of the federal government according to the criterion to which he had long adhered: reputation for good character, discreetly inquired into when the candidate was unknown to Washington himself. “Administration was therefore highly personal,” McDonald writes, “after the fashion of the pre-bureaucratic eighteenth-century world.” And ‘the personal was the political’ in the sense that Washington’s administration mirrored the self-government of Washington’s soul.

As chief executive, commander-in-chief of the military, and former general of the Continental Army, Washington had much to say on the delicate issue of executive involvement in foreign policy, for which he shared constitutional responsibility with Congress. Among the ‘circles’ self-government, American relations with foreign countries would be crucial to the safe establishment of domestic self-government.

Washington had pointed to the link between foreign policy and self-government during the Revolutionary War: “Nothing short of Independence, it appears to me, can possibly do. A Peace, on other terms, would be, if I may be allowed the expression, a Peace of War.” Old animosities would linger, but having failed to secure independence once, there would be no foreign assistance for Americans now refitted with the imperial yoke. The design for tyrannizing the colonists would be completed at leisure—tyranny being, as the Declaration of Independence observes, a form of the state of war. While foreign assistance is desirable, dependence upon foreign military or financial aid is not; that would only risk exchanging one tyrant for another. Specifically, “hatred to England may carry some into an excess of confidence in France”—precisely the mistake of Jefferson, two decades later. “[I]t is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.”

Indeed, for prudential, balance-of-power purposes, many Europeans might not have wanted a devastating English defeat in North America, fearing the ascendancy there of France or Spain. Americans therefore should declare their dependence upon themselves. To the end of his life, Washington advocated a “truly American” policy, neither pro-British nor pro-French. This is the foundation of Washington’s advice “to keep disengaged from the labyrinth of European politics and Wars.” “[T]reaties and compacts formed by the United States with other nations, civilized or not, should be made with caution and executed with fidelity”; engagements should be prudently selected and governed by that combination of natural right and settled conventions that comprises the law of nations. Natural right, like Washington’s foreign policy, does not a priori favor one nation over another. “My politics are plain and simple,” he told Lafayette. “I think every nation has a Right to establish that form of Government under which It conceives It shall live most happily; provided It infracts no Right or is not dangerous to others. And that no Governments ought to interfere with the internal concern of another”—the principle solemnized in the Peace of Westphalia, more than a century and a half earlier—”except for the security of what is due themselves”—that is, securing their own natural rights. Washington likely had in mind the notorious Genêt affair, when the French ambassador engaged in fitting out a warship in Philadelphia and publicly threated the Washington Administration with “an appeal to the people” if it did not acquiesce. As political scientist Patrick Garrity has written, Washington’s “entire political career” was “directed at creating and strengthening an independent political community with a distinctive American, and republican, character.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington magisterially restated these themes of national self-mastery and self-rule. The United States should observe natural right—”good faith and justice”—toward all nations. It should avoid habitual or passionate hatred or fondness for any other nation. A nation that indulges such passions “is in some degree a slave” to its own “animosities and affections.” Foreign influence “is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government,” playing upon its tendency toward faction. Faction, dependency, partiality, hatred: All counteract the rule of prudential reason, “the best calculations of policy,” and therefore contradict self-government. Having severed, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “the political Bands that connect[ed] one nation to another” as colony to metropole, Americans should observe “the Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations,” namely, “in extending our commercial relations and to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Free trade counters the ‘war system’ of mercantilism, that engine of modern, statist empires. The reciprocal and consensual character of commerce presupposes a fundamental equality in international relations, anathema to imperialists. Permanent political alliance could only bring a militarily weak country like America into another country’s orbit, precluding self-rule—especially in a time when there were no powerful commercial republics.

Conclusion. If reason is the distinctively human characteristic, human self-government must be rational government. Prudential reasoning is the leading form of governing reason, particularly for any constructive (as distinct from theoretical, legal-interpretive, or persuasive) purpose. It is prudential reasoning that moderates human passions and appetites, making them governing. Self-government or government by the consent of the governed involves principled and prudent assent.

Each of the ‘concentric circles’ of Washington’s thought and practice exhibits this rule of prudential reason. On the personal level, the individual masters himself by the prudential application of right principles, an application made usual by habituation. Habituation is strongly linked to family, initially, and soon to public opinion; this is a social and republican individuality. Prudential knowledge should govern both friendship and love, both of which have been known to disrupt political regimes. Love leads to the formation of new families and the need for the exercise of prudence in household management and the larger political economy. Families, household, and markets are protected by the military—the first ‘hard case’ for any self-governing people. Here too, Washington had recourse to habituation (in the form of military discipline), good (the appeal to honor), and prudential self-interest—all most readily inculcated in regular troops, not militia. Politically, prudential reason finds expression in constitutional union with no king but a strong executive. To govern themselves, the people must obey the laws they make; such obedience is the republican incentive for establishing and respecting the rule of law. To make good laws, the people’s governors should strengthen religion (in a nonsectarian manner) and education. Washington and the Founders avoided the bitter secularism-versus-religion quarrels seen in France by guaranteeing the free exercise of religion and encouraging widespread education or ‘enlightenment.’ The theoretical foundation of this practical policy may be seen in the Declaration of Independence, with its reference to the laws of nature and of nature’s God—acceptable to secularists and religionists alike, so long as both remain undogmatic.

The office of the executive is the second ‘hard case’ for a self-governing people. The executive’s virtues are conciliation, firmness and, once again, prudence, all of which are exercised in securing American independence from foreign powers. Such virtues, as The Federalist makes plain, need the strong support of well-designed institutions that enable the executive to maintain a sphere of independence of action without enabling him to control the rest of the government.

Within all these ‘circles’ of self-government, individuals, families, social groups, the various levels of government within the country, and the country itself among other countries, look to the most authoritative ‘circles’—those of the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Beyond these laws, God may be conceived variously, inasmuch as the attributes of God beyond those effects knowable to all persons need have no political relevance to the foundation and maintenance of good political communities.

It was by encompassing in his own soul the self-governing efforts of his fellow citizens that Washington could achieve magnanimity or greatness of soul in founding a modern commercial republic, in participating in its governance, and in being governed within it. And it was by governing themselves rationally in their private lives, to the greatest extent possible, that the citizens of that republic could obviate the need to live under the commands of tyrants ruling in the name of virtue. In so doing, Washington made his soul better, and the American people made their souls more like Washington’s. Together, they established the American presidency as the seat of executive action in the national government.