Classical Republican-ism v. Liberal-ism: Not The Ratification Debates

August 4th 2009 in American Founding

Continuing on the same themes that came across in a previous post and its quotations from Colleen Sheehan on the issue…

As Bernard Bailyn argued in a postscript (“Fulfillment: A Commentary On The Constitution”) written a quarter century after he published the very book which provided much of the matter for the rise of the classical republican thesis in the  1970s, the debate over the constitution cannot be described as a rejection on the part of the Federalists of the principles of the Revolution.  He says of the Federalists in the ratification debates:

They had to reach back into the sources of the received tradition, confront the ancient, traditional fears that had lain at heart of the ideological origins of the revolution, and identify and reexamine the ancient formulations that stood in the way of the present necessities: take these ideas and apprehensions apart and where necessary rephrase them, reinterpret them—not reject them in favor of a new paradigm, a new structure of thought, but reapply them and bring them up to date…They would have been astonished to hear that they were initiating a change from something scholars would later call “civic humanism” or “classical republicanism” to another, something that would be called “liberalism,” or that they were chiefly interested in preserving patrician rule derived from the older tradition.  They were neither more nor less determined to protect private property as a foundation of personal freedom and to advance economic enterprise than their predecessors and opponents, and they were no less committed to the need for disinterested “virtue” in government.

—Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition(Cambridge and Harvard, 1992) pages 351-352.

While Paul Rahe may not conceive of the ratification debates in the same way Bailyn does, he puts it succinctly when he says “If the Anti-Federalists eventually found it possible to live in peace with their onetime opponents under a constitution they had once vigorously rejected, it was because their dispute with the Federalists concerned means, not ends.”[1]

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[1] Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (North Carolina, 1994), pages 121-122.