Will Morrisey Reviews

Ralph Lerner: The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 10, 1988.

Among the dozens of books timed for release during the Constitutional bicentennial, surely there must be a few really good ones? As last year wound down, this polite hope had begun to dim, as your reviewer scanned a landscape dotted with ideological sinks, hacked shrubbery, and little mounds of pedantry. But here at last stands an impressive, steep hill, the view it affords worth the climb.

Professor Lerner notes that contemporary scholars leave the American Founders “strangely bereft of revolutionary intent, or conviction, or clarity, or significance.” Reducing these statesmen to creatures of their ‘time’—of economic, social, and/or ‘cultural’ forces—”recent students of the American past still have not faced up to what, from our present-day point of view, is perhaps the most incredible assumption of the Revolutionary generation: that their highest and deepest motives derived from their reasoned understanding.”

Lerner’s task is scholarly, and more than scholarly: If human beings cannot really think beyond their contemporary circumstances, what good is having a republic, or keeping it? Our very ideas of the good itself will shift meaninglessly with the breezes of fashion. We will have not a public philosophy but a string of ideologies, one as empty as the next. What serious man or woman would fight for a myth known to be a myth? Lerner undertakes to “recover the Revolution” both for scholars and for citizens.

Beginning with John Adams, “the very model of a thinking revolutionary,” Lerner proves that the Founders balanced their revolutionary fervor—unmitigated, it would have led to the utopian terror of 1790s France—with a prudence made of equal parts moderation, intelligence, and experience. The Founders saw greater possibilities in human nature than had most previous statesmen, but unlike so many of their successors in this country and others, they also saw “the mixed motives of man.” They devised institutions to mitigate the worst effects of those motives and to encourage the best.

Even the most ‘optimistic’ of the Founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, never quite lost sight of these realities. Franklin “wishes to be a great mover of men, but all things considered, he would prefer they did not know it at the time.” His powerful curiosity limited his utilitarianism, and vice-versa. Jefferson’s revolutionary recasting of Virginia’s legal system “was to take place within certain legal constraints”—existing English and colonial legislation—combining “a sense of open possibilities and cherished constraints.” The “politics of reason” turns out to have been, of all things, reasonable.

Even the early Supreme Court justices sought to educate citizens in republicanism, doing so with a “mixed spirit of high hope and sober sense, equally removed from the doctrinaire and from cold legalism.” They insisted upon “the close connection between self-restraint and true liberty,” carefully “appealing to fairly narrow calculations of self-interest” at first, then “broadening the range of considerations as the argument moved from self to nation to type of regime.” Their arguments consistently aimed at “making the republicans safe for the republic.”

A republic of reasonable citizens faces many problems, given the human propensity for lapses into unreason. In America the presence of three races tested the Founders’ claim to secure natural rights, rights belonging to man as man. Visible differences of skin color betokened even more serious differences of custom. Lerner devotes a fascinating chapter to the Founders’ policy with respect to American Indians. Such men as Jefferson, Washington, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall believed none of the convenient fictions about the white man’s providential obligation to conquer the red man. But they saw that “Indians had for the most part little or no use for the Europeans’ economics, politics, or god,” and for their part most whites felt much the same way about the Indians’ customs. The federal government had insufficient power to halt the white settlers’ predation against the Indians, but attempts were made to convert these societies of hunters and gatherers to agriculture. Usefully enough, this policy would have required them to use much less land.

As Tocqueville writes, and as Lerner observes, the American Indians’ habits recalled nothing so much as the medieval aristocracy, with its warrior spirit, its pride, and its contempt for physical labor. The custom of chattel slavery brought out the same traits in white Southerners. Tocqueville also saw that aristocracy was giving way to democratic man—in North America, the practical if unimaginative Yankee. Red men and Southern gentry were “hopeless anachronisms in an age on the make.” Tocqueville hoped that a few remaining aristocratic virtues might at least temper democrats, as they exerted heroic efforts for “unheroic objectives.”

Lerner agrees with Tocqueville, who teaches that the modern alternative to ‘America’—that is, to commercial republicanism—is not aristocracy but ‘Russia’—a despotism based upon a sort of egalitarianism, the Hobbesian equality of shared oppression. Had Tocqueville lived to see Marxism-Leninism, he might have rewarded himself with a grim smile or (more likely) the sterner pleasure of indignation. He did indeed see both Hegelianism and socialism, detesting both.

Only the spirit of liberty counteracts egalitarianism, Tocqueville argues. And liberty requires certain virtues in order to defend itself. Lerner’s book shows how the American Founders understood the relationship of equality and liberty, governed by balance institutions and civic virtues. Their work remains timely, here and throughout the world, because these revolutionaries thought as well as they acted.

Albert Furtwangler: American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 17, 1988.

Silhouettes appealed to the rational individualism fashionable in eighteenth-century Europe and America. These black-and-white profiles depicted enough particular features to make the subject recognizable, but not more than that. They make an individual as close to an idea as an individual can get—an outline, a form, a profile.

Political rhetoric also presents a selection of features. To this day, politicians concern themselves with their ‘image,’ a thing specific enough for ‘name recognition’ but general enough to leave the blemishes out.

Professor Furtwangler teaches English for a living, and rhetoric interests him. He modestly describes his chapters as silhouettes; they are really succinct commentaries upon the silhouette self-portraits of several principal American Founders: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Marshall. He sees that these men crafted profiles of themselves in words in order to educate American citizens in the principles of republicanism.

The senior statesman of the group, Benjamin Franklin, “is not easy to comprehend.” Modeling his literary style on the plain, smooth prose of Joseph Addison, he carefully opposed the Puritans of Boston (and later the Quakers of Philadelphia) with essays “teasing readers out of thinking too seriously or moralistically,” inclining them toward the practical and good-humored temper of commercial republicanism. “A far cry from pulpit moralism,” Franklin’s silhouette presents a “joco-serious, light-but-penetrating, knowing-but-unknown being” whose “knack of ingratiating himself with a public of common readers” effected a moral and political revolution with shrewd indirection.

John Adams “had little opportunity for popularity,” as Furtwangler courteously phrases it. Adams was a lawyer; though an intellectual, he avoided the ideological compulsions of later revolutionizing literati, having trained his intelligence and moderated his passion by the study of Blackstone and the practice of law courts. Furtwangler discusses Adams’s Novanglus letters, in which he debated a Loyalist fellow-attorney on the topic of the separation and balance of powers. “Both argue like good lawyers, but despair of a legal solution.” This points to the limits of the law, as understood by lawyers themselves. Yet Furtwangler’s concentration on rhetoric prevents him from considering either the philosophic or political proofs framing the legal debate. He calls Adams and Adams’s opponent “Whig and Tory twins”; he does not see that the Revolution itself proved Adams right to hold consent more essential to politics than force, even as the revolutionaries deployed force to defend the principle of consent.

With refreshing unfashionableness, Furtwangler devoted two chapters to George Washington, whose reputation has been in eclipse for a century. At Valley Forge, Washington had Joseph Addison’s Cato performed. This play has none of the urbane modernity Franklin found in Addison’s Essays; it rather “translates” the principles “of republican Rome into the sturdy language of modern Britain.” Here Furtwangler does see the limits of legalism. While British law and custom embodied liberty, many Americans regarded true liberty as “austere personal virtue in [a nation’s] people,” the virtues Cato had and the British rulers lacked. The American revolutionists’ call for liberty had little to do with libertarianism, and not at all with libertinism. Furtwangler does less well when he turns to Washington’s Farewell Address, in which chapter he expends so much space reporting the speech’s origins that he never says much about how the finished product ‘works’ rhetorically.

With Thomas Jefferson, we return to modern political philosophy. Furtwangler writes of “Jefferson’s trinity”—Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the men he believed the greatest who had ever lived, “without exception.” Furtwangler refuses to adulate the Sage of Monticello, whose reputation ascended as Washington’s declined: “on close inspection, Jefferson’s intellect was not that extraordinary.” Unfortunately, Furtwangler tries to catch that unextraordinary mind in a contradiction that isn’t really there. He criticizes Jefferson’s criticisms of Hamilton and Adams, those devotees of the British Constitution, while “proclaim[ing] his own devotion” to three undeniably “British minds.” But it was the British Constitution’s mixture of monarchic, aristocratic, and popular institutions, a mixture found in Aristotelian and Ciceronian political philosophy, which Jefferson objected to. Bacon, Newton, and Locke are ‘moderns,’ critics of Aristotle; moreover, far from being merely British minds, their thought transcends the regime that sheltered them. Jefferson knew exactly what he was rejecting, and what he was promoting: a new understanding of reason, in and out of public life, one capable of putting constitutions on a more ‘popular’ foundation.

Furtwangler begins to acknowledge the place of reason in politics, and particularly in constitutional law, when he turns to Chief Justice John Marshall’s argument for judicial review. But unlike Marshall, Furtwangler cannot conceive of reason as an impartial judge. If, as reasonable tradition has it, a party to a dispute shall not also judge it, “does not the same stricture apply to a judge who claims that his court alone has the power to interpret the fundamental law?” It does, indeed. However, having also prudently rejected Jefferson’s notion of holding a new constitutional convention in each generation (to keep up with what he expected to be new political-scientific advances), Furtwangler can do no more than believe the Constitution “a web of strong and articulate wills,” not a product of reason at all.

This descent into Nietzscheism forces an otherwise unfashionable scholar to invoke the trendiest feature of Constitutional interpretation today: the ‘living Constitution.’  To his credit, even in this he has the good judgment to differ from the Biden and Kennedy tribe, who would have the Supreme Court or (when a suitably ‘progressive’ person occupies the office) the President lead us toward the ever-receding Promised Land of perfect egalitarianism. Furtwangler rather wants every generation to feature a large contingent of ‘founders,’ who will check one another and thereby avoid tyranny. The real American Founders saw this sort of thing to be far-fetched, and so should we. The ‘living Constitution’ remains a vehicle for petty ambitieux who imagine themselves great. The spirit of such persons conflicts sharply with Professor Wurtwangler’s own mind, whose civility and manly refinement Washington would have recognized at once as belonging to a fellow gentleman.