How Democratic Is the Constitution? Edited by Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1980.
How Capitalistic Is the Constitution? Edited by Robert A. Goldwin and William a Schambra. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982.
Classifying the American Constitution as democratic provokes as much debate among scholars and polemicists today as it did among polemicists and ordinary citizens at the time of its ratification. Classifying it as capitalistic provokes little debate. Accordingly, Goldwin and Schambra’s first volume debates primarily the nature of the Constitution and secondarily the virtues and defects of democracy, whereas their second volume debates primarily the virtues and defects of capitalism and secondarily the nature of the Constitution. Each volume contains seven essays. As Professor Bernard Lewis has noted, anthologists usually “violate the humane Pentateuchal ban on yoking animals of unequal strength.” But although a philosopher may call scholars oxen, many of us are well instructed by contrasts wrought by editorial inhumanity.
Historian Gordon S. Wood and political scientists Ann Stuart Diamond and Michael Parenti advance arguments for the Constitution’s aristocracy, democracy, and oligarchy, in that order. Wood begins badly, writing that “there was and is no ‘real’ Constitution against which we can measure the conflicting statement of the Federalist and Antifederalists”; a constitution exists only in the minds of its beholders. Wood nonetheless assumes that the contents of those minds can be discerned, thus conveniently rejecting solipsism in historiography even as he asserts it in textual interpretation. Even if one describes the Constitution, in a famous phrase, as a bundle of compromises, this does not suffice to prove the bundle incoherent.
Wood presents a thoughtful account of the Founders’ attempt to give the regime both popular support and what he calls aristocratic rule, by which he means government by capable, virtuous men of some social standing. He suggests that the framers used rhetoric equating democracy with republicanism, in the face of the well-known argument of the tenth Federalist, which he must take as atypical. He claims, over-piously, that they did not do this in such a calculating way “as here implied”: “Ideas and words are not manipulated or transformed that crudely.” Why “crudely”? The framers’ statesmanship was evidently no less subtle than it needed to be. Indeed, Wood ends by criticizing the Founders for being too thorough, for “further[ing] the American disavowal of any sort of aristocratic conception of politics and encourag[ing] the American belief that the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.” He suggests no alternative rhetoric—admittedly a historian’s prerogative. At any rate, the line from even so democratic a republican as Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey and his famous slogan is a bit jagged, inasmuch as Jefferson wanted an agrarian-commercial republic founded upon natural rights and Dewey wanted a socialist society founded upon the supposed laws of historical progress.
Diamond remarks that land is aristocracy’s basis, whereas the Constitution encourages commerce. Therefore, the American regime could not have been intended as an instrument of aristocracy. This ignores both Jefferson’s definition of the natural aristocracy—those of “virtue and talent,” not necessarily landed—and the social positions of the Founders themselves—businessmen and attorneys along with the planters and farmers. She also denies that the claim made by Paul Eidelberg, among others, that this was a mixed regime in the Aristotelian sense, arguing that there were no fixed classes to mix, as rich and poor tended toward the middle. She does not mention that Aristotle would have statesmen encourage a large middle class, although not of course by the ‘modern’ means of commercial acquisition.
Diamond aims her best observation not at Wood’s aristocratic interpretation but at the oligarchic interpretation of Charles Beard and his epigone. The latter characteristically damn the body of the document and worship its appendage, the Bill of Rights. Diamond asserts that “the primary protection for liberty, in all its aspects, lies in [economic activity ‘generated by self-interest’] and in the constitutional institutions themselves, not in the first ten amendments.” She argues less convincingly in claiming that democracy elevates men of “natural merit” to high office, and then observes that such philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Smith believed “natural merit” a dubious notion in any case. this merely shows that one does not necessarily exhaust the Founders’ practical wisdom by reference to Hobbes, Locke, and Smith.
Parenti attacks the Constitution from the ‘Left,’ calling it “a legitimating cloak and workable system for the propertied interests at the expense of the ordinary populace.” One is tempted to say that never have so many ordinary people profited so much at their on expense, but Parenti’s essay does serve as a useful qualification of any too-noble sketch of the Founders. Tendentiousness mars his arguments (“the property interests of the slave owners were looked after,” he sneers in passing) but, taken as one voice among seven, he adds a Beardian (Marxist economic-determinist) note that otherwise would be missed.
In the volume’s central essay, Walter Berns refuses to accept the terms of the debate, “The Antifederalists were no more simple majoritarian democrats than the Federalists were aristocrats in any traditional sense.” Modern republicans base their regimes on the liberty justified by natural rights and by which liberty those rights are defended. This liberty is saved from what might call mere idealism by the economic liberty or freedom of commerce which complements political liberty under the Founders’ regime. Economic liberty affords citizens a degree of independence that fortifies citizenship insofar as it sunders the dependence upon aristocrats and oligarchs seen in the ‘Old World.’ One might wonder if the materialism seen in many of the modern political philosophers studied by the Founders might undermine the sense of liberty as easily as it can reinforce it. Can the Founders be said to have had theoretical wisdom in addition to their much-remarked prudence?
Wilson Carey McWilliams concerns himself with a related problem of modern political philosophy. Although Berns contends that the regime has become more democratic since its founding, McWilliams argues that there is less citizen participation today than hitherto. He does not substantiate this claim, using it instead to arrive at the more fundamental point that individualism, particularly self-preservation, cannot comport with genuine political life and that the American regime therefore injures its citizens and undermines itself. He does not say how the small, democratic, communal polities he favors could survive.
The volume’s final two essays speak of what we are, not what we might be Joseph M. Bessette replies to Wood and Parenti by writing that the Founders made a “deliberative democracy” that reconciles moderation and majority rule. “If the citizens possessed the same knowledge and experience as their representatives and if they devoted the same amount of time reasoning about the relevant information and arguments presented in the legislative body, would they reach fundamentally similar conclusions on public policy issues as their representatives? If the answer is yes, then we must conclude that the result is basically democratic.” Obviously true as far as it goes, this assessment fails to reflect the need for the capacity to make good use of knowledge, experience, and leisure. The statesmanship of both Jefferson’s natural aristocrats and Hamilton’s man of ambition fades from view.
Statesmanship concerns Alfred F. Young, who presents an informative historical account of how the Federalists “made democratic concessions to achieve conservative ends,” and how some potential antifederalists came to agree that democracy needed restraint. Of the latter faction, Jefferson in particular came to like the Constitution—”testimony to the powerful pull of the democratic features of the document.” One might add that Jefferson’s conduct as president also testified to the scope the document affords statesmanlike action.
How Democratic Is the Constitution? introduces new students to the principal issues of the founding and invites further reflection by older students. It teaches above all that a comprehensive account of the Constitution would take more than one essay or an anthology of essays. Perhaps the only attempt to describe the Constitution using Aristotle’s regime taxonomy can be found in A Discourse on Statesmanship by Paul Eidelberg. Partisans of the aristocratic, democratic, and oligarchic interpretations will have to surpass Eidelberg before they can claim to have said the best, if not the last, words in the debate.
How Capitalistic Is the Constitution? begins with an able presentation of The Federalist‘s arguments on the political benefits of commerce. Marc F. Plattner describes the practical and theoretical bases for this iew, reminding us that even Jefferson regarded economic redistribution as antisocial, a violation of the right freely to exercise one’s own industry and retain its fruits—”the first principle of association.” Plattner observes that those who “seek to impose on the large republic an economic egalitarianism more appropriate to the small republic” indulge in “a utopian combination of contradictory elements.”
Edward S. Greenberg argues for a neo-Marxist view of “the capitalist state.” He minimizes the importance of the Constitution, believing it primarily a reflection of “the prevailing class relations” in America at the time. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the essay comes near its end, when he writes that “We have no way of predicting whether [laissez-faire capitalism or corporate capitalism] is capable of successfully taming the emergent crises of the system.” Marx’s proud claim that he had developed the first scientific socialism evidently has lost its plausibility even to his admirers.
Forrest McDonald argues that the Constitutional guarantee of property rights made capitalism possible but not inevitable. Merely owning property is not enough; a capitalist also uses his property “for the purpose of creating more property.” He shows that few Americans, and few of the Founders, were capitalists. Not class relations but statesmanship brought capitalism to America. McDonald credits Alexander Hamilton with shrewdly—indeed surreptitiously—putting the contract clause into the Constitution, with developing the practice of using public debt as the basis of “an institutionalized system of monetized private credit” and, of course, with the establishment of a national bank. “Although most Americans probably would have chosen otherwise, Congress chose the Hamiltonian way.”
Walter Dean Burnham is the volume’s sole ‘liberal.’ He claims that we now have a “zero-sum society” in which the economic growth described by Locke and Smith has, for the most part, ended. He advocates more government control over society in order to distribute what we still produce more equally. He regrets the “feudal,” decentralized institutions of the framers. Nonetheless, “it seems a bit too late in the day for a simple-minded faith in the state as a savior.” “I have no magic formula….”
Neither is magic possessed by Bernard H. Siegman, a ‘conservative’ law professor, or Robert Lekachman, a socialist-democratic economist. Siegman deplores special-interest legislation; whether or not its sponsors’ intentions are egalitarian, the legislation itself almost always gives inequalities the sanction and rigidity of law. The temporary inequalities of commercial flux are more tolerable than the long-lasting inequities of legal inertia. In the volume’s most elegantly-turned and superficial essay, Lekachman complains that the Supreme Court has failed to make “welfare” payment “a Constitutionally-protected right” and dreams of help, if not salvation, from “our own François Mitterand,” an American equivalent of the socialist president of France, who has yet to brighten our national horizon. He does manage some telling criticisms of the ‘small-is-beautiful’ Left, but gives no sign of knowing Plattner’s argument on the problems of pursuing small-republican economics ends in a large republic.
The editors reserve the most original essay for last. Stephen Miller shows how the Founders’ political economy differed from the laissez-faire capitalism of the late nineteenth century. Economic libertarianism offers no place for the statesmanship that transcends commerce. he also argues, perhaps inconsistently, that capitalism has comported with authoritarian and even tyrannical rule. He rejects economic egalitarianism as well. Its partisans do “not realize that it is precisely because most Americans do not think the present distribution of wealth makes any moral sense that they are inclined to accept it”; their economic inferiority reflects no moral judgment on them, feeds no resentment. Having found space for ‘conservatives,’ socialists, and a ‘liberal,’ the editors give the last word to a moderate. They risk being thought inhumane to ideologues.
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