Classical Republican-ism v. Liberal-ism: The Founders Knew Them Not

The problem with scholarship on the founding is that it is often explicitly based upon interpretations of political philosophy generally, and these interpretations are neatly packaged into -isms and then argued to be the cause of the creation of the United States of America. The approach relies on creating certain philosophic parameters, or assuming a certain philosophic shape, and then taking words and events from the founding and arguing they fit into this framework. Said framework is usually suspiciously related to prominent political views of the time period in which the scholar commenting lives, or the philosophic views voiced throughout history that he favors. Thus, the problems of modern scholarship on the founding are, on their face, a matter of method.

This problem of method is a normal temptation of the human mind when engaged with such tasks, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone. In the world of political science, it doesn’t. Political scientists routinely tell the story of their century (plus a few decades) of history as a modern discipline in America using whatever was happening at the time as a guide for how political science saw the founding and most everything else right up till the present. Besides, we’ve all succumbed to the temptation as individuals at one time or another. We are all tempted to lay out the causes of things before the effects, which is how one would ideally explain things if one knew the truth, even as we are supposedly still seeking the causes through the effects. Assuming what we are trying to prove allows us to lay things out rather neatly. The political philosopher in all of us has some understanding of principles we see as true, and we want to read that truth into the past and explain the past in virtue of what we already know, or think we know. Further, there is much at stake when it comes to describing the underlying political philosophy of the founding generation. It is only natural to want to jump to arguing about how what they thought fits within the philosophic universe more generally before one has really marinated in what they thought. This is all well and good, but the task at hand is to reveal what the founding generation thought about government. This requires historical digging skills to get at the evidence and its context, and it requires paying extremely close attention to the evidence itself.

The solution to the problem is relatively simple, but difficult to implement successfully. One ought to first uncover what the founders actually thought, and then argue over what sort of political philosophy this way of thinking about government represents. Given the almost incomprehensible amount of recorded events and relevant writings that we have from their generation, and the generations before and after, surely this is not an impossible task. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these writings are often left unread and unknown by many of the scholars of the last century, whose own numerous books on the topic nevertheless flood the literature reviews of young graduate students today. Even so, the best attempts to get at the founders thought are recognized on all sides as the product of a close reading by a particular professor of some particular portion of the documents the founding generation bequeathed to us.

Colleen Sheehan gives an excellent critique of this situation in her book, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government:

Were they classical republicans or modern liberals? Were they allied more with the ancients or moderns in the battle of ideas between the two conflicting philosophies? Or did they achieve a synthesis of both, however witting or unwitting, however coherent or contradictory such an amalgamation of ideas might be?

Realms of paper have been devoted to this debate by numerous scholars. Many have concluded that synthesis theory must prevail, and some have determined that the debate has been exhausted. But, as Alan Gibson has shown in his fine study and exposition of this contemporary debate, “even if this [amalgam theory] approach is superior to an either/or formulation, it raises as many questions as it dissolves.” Among the issues that remain are whether the contemporary categories of analysis have clarified and improved our understanding of the Founding…

In one sense, the shifting and broadening positions of scholars on this issue have added a much-needed recognition of the complexity and nuance that characterize the thought of the Founders. In another sense, however, the “neither/both” synthesis obscures critical distinctions in the history of political ideas. The difficulty stems in part from a definition of liberalism that is exclusively the product of modern philosophy. If we are willing to shed our contemporary parochialism and to think beyond the definitions that are prevalent today, we may be able to gain a perspective on the matter that is perhaps more consonant with Madison’s. . .For example, if we insist on direct participation in the polis and sumptuary laws as necessary conditions for determining Madison’s seriousness about participatory republicanism and the formation of civic character, then, of course, we must conclude that his brand of republicanism does not reflect the classical spirit. I would add that such insistence is also a rejection of the approach of classical political philosophy in favor of modern abstract political theory; the former begins with the actual conditions of political life, with which the latter is unconcerned…

In addition to avoiding the temptation to conceptualize liberalism in exclusively modern terms, we should avoid adopting a definition of republicanism that is trapped in history. Republicanism and liberalism were not always thought of as mutually exclusive categories…

Madison and the other Founders did not make a distinction between republicanism and liberalism.

–Colleen Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government, pages 170-173.

Amen, amen, I say to you: unless you drop the artificially created modern categories of liberalism and classical republicanism, you cannot understand the founding. An increasing number of those who study such things have been saying something similar, as Sheehan also notes above. To describe the founders in terms of classical republican-ism and/or liberal-ism assumes that our understanding of these terms correctly describe reality.