…several of the states wrote into their Revolutionary constitutions declarations, like that of New Hampshire, that “government is instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any man, family, or class of men.”

How many state constitutions before and after the adoption of the federal Constitution in 1789 asserted something similar?  What did they mean by such words?  Why did they feel the need to make such declarations?  How many state constitutions mention the common good or something similar before and after the federal Constitution was adopted?  What did they mean by this?  What was the relation between this assertion and the bills of rights also present in such documents?

If one accepts the context of the modern scholarship described in the previous post one would think that references to the “common good” would have classical republican connotations and link back to pre-modern political philosophy; “Publick good” perhaps contains elements of both republicanism and liberalism; and “common,” “general” or “publick” interest would seem to possess a definite liberal connotation and bear some relation to early modern political philosophy.

On the face of it, obviously, if one speaks of a common interest instead of a common good, one might very well be replacing a concern for what is good and evil with a concern for unifying self-interests.  Instead of speaking about what is truly good in common, one might be speaking about a collection of selfish desires that are in truth only accidentally considered common in that they do not have the same object.  On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that one could understand common interest as referring to the common good itself if one thought that interests rightly understood are satisfied by the common good.

There is less of a potential difference between a public and a common good, although “public” is more limiting than “common.” Things that are public are, by definition, common in a specific manner, whereas not all things that are common are necessarily considered or said to be public. More specifically, by labeling a good public one is implicitly calling attention to the fact that the good you refer to isn’t a private good.  “Public” generally indicates a relation to society, the citizenry, or government and our actions in light of them that “common” does not necessarily imply.

The distinction between public and private in the context of the end of government is not mere semantics.  For instance, one might conceivably hold that we all have a common human nature and thus we have a common purpose or end in life, but neither our nature nor our purpose should be properly called public.  Modern scholarship maintains that one of the tenets of “classical republicanism” is that human fulfillment is found ultimately in public action, or as part of the polis.  This is but one example of the fundamental difference to one’s understanding of government and its purpose the private vs. public distinction might make.

Based on my experience with the ratification debates, I would bet that “public good,” carrying the private vs. public distinction within it, is the phrase most frequently employed by the many participants in the ratification debates.  Yet “common” and “public” good are much more closely related to each other than they are to “common” or “public” interest.” One of the meanings of “Publick” in Samuel Johnson’s 18th century dictionary was “Regarding not private interest, but the good of the community.” Thus there is also a clear overlap between all three phrases.

Two other frequently used, relevant words in relation to the end of government are “welfare” (sometimes “common” or “public,” etc.) and happiness (sometime “public,” “national,” or “of the people,” etc.). Generally, the meaning of welfare is interchangeable with happiness—Samuel Johnson’s dictionary lists “Happiness” as the first meaning of the word. Yet the second and third meanings of “welfare” are “success” and “prosperity,” so one might take “welfare” to mean happiness with a slight emphasis on material well being. Still, happiness and its promotion among the people or public of the individual states, all the states together, or just in general is to my mind connected with the older, classical notion of the common good, in which happiness is understood to be achieved by becoming good or attaining what is good in common.  Although welfare and happiness are referred to as the end of government frequently, it is rare to find a participant in the ratification debates talking about individual happiness or anything of the sort.  Quite the contrary: happiness and welfare are almost always discussed insofar as they are “general” or shared. In order to be happy one must desire and obtain what is truly good, or at least that was the understanding still attached to the word at the time of the ratification debates.  Further, even upon a superficial glance at the texts happiness seems to signify something more than material well being.  Happiness or its variants are usually spoken of in the same breath as “safety” or something similar as an end of government in such a way as to make clear that happiness or welfare refers to something more than, or higher than, safety or material well being.

Linguistic and etymological nuance aside, of course, all of the above terms could be used by an author who adopts either political philosophy. Even assuming all that I have sketched above contains some element of truth, for instance, a writer could easily use any one of the terms used above and actually mean what another of the terms above better signifies. It is conceivable that an Anti-Federalist writer could say that the proposed constitution should promote the common interest in an off-hand, general comment, but in the rest of his essay deny the central tenets of classical liberalism.  One might say, for instance, that it is in our common interest to be virtuous and good. Conversely, another writer could say that the proposed constitution must promote the common good in passing, but in the rest of his essay embrace classical liberalism. One might say, for instance, that our common good is intrinsically related to commerce alone and is achieved strictly through the promotion of material prosperity.  One might say the common good is only common insofar as everyone ought to be allowed to decide what is good for themselves.

We ought to be wary for such loose fitting speech since, after all, the participants of the ratification debates were not writing carefully thought out philosophical treatises, but political rhetoric, often hastily written in the heat of bitter and even personal debates.  In this context, all of these related phrases point in some way, however vague, to a shared reason and purpose for the existence of government.  A purpose which is to be distinguished from the protection of individual rights as an end of government (even if the two goals are related).

Broadly speaking, this interpretation suggests that the core of the Founder’s political thought is encapsulated in the Lockean variation of the principles of classical liberalism.  The Founders, according to proponents of this interpretation, believed men “created equal,” possessed of “natural” rights, and motivated primarily by the pursuit of their passions and interests…

Since men were naturally equal and intractably self-interested, governments should promote stability and personal security, protect individual rights (especially property rights), and promote economic prosperity.

Conversely, government should not try to foster virtue among the citizenry, promote some organic conception of the common good or “good life” . . . governments should divide powers between different branches of the government and use diverse social interests to prevent both governmental tyranny and the tyranny of the majority.

Finally, this interpretation also stresses the acceptance by the Founders of an early form of commercial capitalism.[1]

The tenets of the classical republican view are harder to categorize, but there is common agreement among these scholars that early American political thought did wish to promote an “organic conception of the common good” and sought to “foster virtue among the citizenry.”  Classical republicanism holds civic and moral education to be a vital part of good government and views the “commercial republic” of classical liberalism as corrupting influence.  In this view, liberty is vital not necessarily as an end in itself but for the sake of allowing civic participation.[2]

Ultimately, at the heart of the notion of classical liberalism is a government that aims at securing or protecting individual rights; at the heart of the notion of classical republicanism is a government that aims at promoting the common good.  Republicanism looks at human beings as virtuous or vicious and aims to promote civic virtue through education and/or religion.  Liberalism looks at human beings as self-interested and aims to channel and check those interests, in part by promoting a commercial republic and protecting individual rights.  Republicanism possibly hearkens back to Aristotle and pre-modern thought through either Machievelli or pre-enlightenment English thinkers while liberalism is said to be an early modern idea arriving fully grown with John Locke and the enlightenment period.

Again, these are conceptual categories (admittedly powerful) as elucidated by modern scholars over the last 40 or so years and argued to apply to the founding of the American regime.

[2] For more, see my literature review…

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]

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.

What did the opponents of the constitution think the purpose of American government was or should be, and how did this understanding affect their opposition to the Constitution?  A review of the various ways scholars have answered this question reveals the heart of many of the major debates of contemporary political science.  Although there are a limited number of scholars working directly on Anti-Federalist thought, almost every political scientist writing about American government has expressed an opinion concerning the Anti-Federalists.

Some argue there was an underlying liberal consensus between the two sides of the ratification debate that assumed the end of government is to protect individual rights and property, while others hold that the Anti-Federalists were fundamentally opposed to the kind of government the Federalists sought to establish.  This review focuses on how these two positions have both modified their position in the midst of the rise and fall of the classical republican thesis.  The polar opposition among scholars today on the basic nature of Anti-Federalist thought is striking.  While one argues that the Anti-Federalists were “more, not less” Lockean liberals than the Federalists, another concludes that the Anti-Federalists were classical republicans seeking “…to preserve public happiness.”[1]