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.
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