Ralph Lerner’s life work is, on its face, preoccupied with the past. Quite apart from his numerous studies of the political thought of the founding period in America, he has also studied, written, and taught extensively about medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers.1 Yet anything more than a casual reading of his writings reveals that Lerner does not worship the past for its own sake, just as any amount of time in his company reveals a modern man—practical, sensible, humorous, energetic, curious about the details of the here and now, and relentlessly forward looking. This essay focuses on the ways in which Lerner’s exploration of the founding period has relevance for today’s problems and tomorrow’s solutions.
One of the most intensely discussed themes among contemporary moral, political, and legal thinkers is the possibility of and the conditions for self-governance and autonomy.2 Although the thought of many eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American political thinkers is often associated with elitism on the part of the ruling classes and indifference, if not disdain, for the independence of ordinary citizens,3 Lerner’s investigation of revolutionary America reveals that the Founders were preoccupied with our modern concerns with self-governance and autonomy in a variety of important ways.
First and foremost, one of the centerpieces of Lerner’s critique of much current historical scholarship is that it presumes that ideology, rather than ideas, motivated the major players during the revolutionary period.4 The “new historians,” as Lerner calls them, do not take the Founders’ statements, ideas, and arguments at face value—that is, as products of their considered and analytical reflection on their times, practices, and culture. Rather, they see them as the psychologically or sociologically inevitable manifestations of their times, practices, and culture. The new historians concede that the Founders’ ideas were part of their attempts to make sense of the world in which they lived, a world of upheavals and lacking adequate customs or precedents to deal with the issues of the day. For the new historians, however, this effort was ideologically constrained: the reasoning of the revolutionaries, like that of people in general, could not distance itself sufficiently from the contemporary situation to achieve independence of mind and thoughtful deliberation.5
In contrast, a theme of all of Lerner’s works, and the explicit theme of The Thinking Revolutionary and Revolutions Revisited, is the ability of some people, some of the time, to attain just such independence. He defends this position, first, by producing evidence, concrete cases, of the writings of individual Founders that exhibit a concern with the integrity of ideas as well as with their utility. His examples are drawn largely from the thought and actions of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and John Quincy Adams. The new historians have, of course, focused much attention on these individuals, among others, and have found in them support for their ideological assessment of the Founders’ limitations. Lerner’s innovation is to recognize that the past, precisely because of its distance from our time and modes of thinking, may represent a distinctive, even foreign, way of looking at the world. In assuming a fundamental kinship between their way of thinking and ours, we run the risk of injecting into the past the brand of ideological determinism that is prevalent in our times but may have been foreign to theirs.6 As a result, because of our contemporary doubts about people’s ability to transcend their cultural horizons, we tend to understate the level of the Founders’ deliberateness and their expectations for the practical effects of their ideas. In short, for Lerner, the Founders’ intellectual limitations should be one of the objects of a proper historical inquiry rather than its operational premise.7
One of Lerner’s conclusions is that the Founders were in fact deeply respectful of tradition. At the same time, they recognized the uniqueness of their situation and saw themselves as overthrowing much of the old regime and contributing to an experiment in enlightened self-governance.8 Ultimately it was this conviction that motivated their reflection on the status quo and their deliberateness in selective borrowing from the past and innovating with an eye toward the future.9 “Among the most thoughtful in each generation one finds a measured regard for their respective past along with a professed commitment to surpass it.”10 This commitment often expressed itself in the hope that future generations would be able to enjoy the fruits of the revolution and its liberating innovations to a greater degree than could their predecessors.11 Like succeeding generations, but for different reasons, the Founders recognized the past as both admirable and limiting.12
Lerner also concludes that the Founders were keenly aware of the need to temper the dictates of theory with the exigencies of political reality.13 He emphasizes that the American Enlightenment, in contrast to the French Enlightenment, had different objectives and different approaches to realizing them. The American Enlightenment was a product of practical experience and observation, not just “pure theorizing.” The difference, in a word, was between Voltaire and Jefferson, or between political philosophy and political science.14 As a consequence, Lerner notes wryly, the American approach may have at times displayed “an appalling lack of theoretical clarity and coherence.” Yet, by the same token, it avoided some of the European Enlightenment’s “delusions.”15
Perhaps it was the Americans’ practical orientation that led them, as believers in the long-term integrity of the political process, to accept practices, including the treatment of persons of color, that they found morally objectionable. Lerner is no apologist when he recounts the details: not only does he acknowledge that Jefferson’s modest proposal to free slaves in Virginia would have taken an interminably long time to achieve its goal,16 but he narrates with meticulous detail the mistreatment of persons of color by thoughtful revolutionaries and others. 17 Lerner contrasts the slavery of the classical world, which “was limited to the body,” with Tocqueville’s damning characterization of American slavery as “altogether singular and singularly cruel” because it enslaved both the body and the soul.18 And he notes candidly the final irony, that the whites’ treatment of the blacks increased the servile nature of the whites themselves and made them less, not more, fit for self-governance.19
In short, Lerner does not exaggerate the revolutionaries’ talents or achievements. Although his defense of their thoughtfulness and their belief in the importance of ideas may be dismissed by some as romanticizing the Founders’ vision, in fact his conclusions are balanced, even understated. Some of the revolutionaries were deliberate and thoughtful, others were not.20 Those who were, combined the insights of political philosophy with the wisdom of practical experience. They were hopeful and sober both.21 They were reasonable in the deep sense of being committed to the power of ideas, aware of the importance of grounding the new in the old, and cognizant of the power of political pressures.
For Lerner, not only were the Founders capable of overcoming the ideological determinism posited by the new historians in that they reached a certain critical distance from the assumptions and opinions of their times. Lerner’s Founders believed in the ability of citizens to live reasoned lives and thus to attain a significant measure of autonomy and self-improvement. Moreover, they considered it “axiomatic” that educating citizens to live such a life was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of establishing and maintaining a republican form of government.22
Detailing the Founders’ differing approaches to educating the citizenry is one of Lerner’s central purposes. In this regard, Lerner elaborates Benjamin Franklin’s hope to inspire the public to master its passions, especially its passion for material acquisitions, and to instil greater self-reliance in ordinary citizens by encouraging them to be less slavish to authorities.23 Implicit in Franklin’s approach is the conviction that lasting self-government cannot be achieved unless individuals internalize certain beliefs and related behaviors through habituation and the resulting transformation of their character. Jefferson’s belief in the capacity of individuals for self-governance expressed itself in such things as his efforts to revise and improve the laws ofVirginia, to establish a genuine university there centering on a secular rather than a divine curriculum, and to construct a library of national stature.24 For Lerner, all of Jefferson’s proposals reveal his deep belief in the possibility of freeing human minds from antiquated strictures and his judgment that legislation can play an important role in creating the conditions of liberation.25 Further, according to Lerner, the practice of the United States Supreme Court Justices, while riding circuit, to exhort juries through political charges should itself be seen as an illustration of the Justices’ belief in the educability of those who heard their sermons and the significance of taking part in their education.26 Ultimately the justices’ efforts to teach “people how to be good republicans” reflected their conviction that free government depends upon more than the wisdom and protection of constitutional rights characteristic of the judiciary’s institutional role. Rather, Lerner’s thesis is that for the members of the judiciary themselves, as for Abraham Lincoln decades later, “in this and like communities, public sentiment is everything.”27
Contrary to the conventional understanding, Lerner observes that the Founders’ approach to the protection of private property was part of their rejection of the “hierachical world” of “settled privilege” favored in Europe. They linked property rights to human rights as well as to economic growth; economic inequality to equality of opportunity; and the emphatic guaranty of inalienable rights to “an active, querulous citizenry, quick to be jealous [of established power], mistrustful of officialdom, and quick to act on their misgivings.”28 Thus, in Lerner’s view the protection of these rights was the soil that would nourish citizens’ capacity for self-governance and freedom.
The preceding aspects of Lerner’s political analysis29 thus contrast sharply with the familiar story that the Founders hoped to inject stability in the embryonic union exclusively by harnessing and building upon individuals’ self-interest coupled with the enlarged sphere of the emerging commercial republic, presumably because they were pessimistic about the degree to which the population at large was fit to govern itself. The narrative that emerges from Lerner’s historical research challenges this understanding as unidimensional and substitutes for it one that emphasizes both the aspirations as well as the fears of the Founders. They were realists who understood well the baser instincts of the populace. In this regard they attempted to erect a series of institutional structures that would curb the body politic’s worst excesses. The Founders were far from being cynics, however. A democratic republic could not long survive shored up by external checks and external circumstances alone.30 Moreover, they believed in the possibility as well as the desirability of citizen virtue, and spent no small part of their energies on cultivating the conditions most conducive to its emergence and maintenance.31
In the process, the Founders believed that they were breaking with the rigid elitism and encrusted hierarchichal structures of the past.32 Benjamin Franklin, for example, saw the threat to politics from vanity, which led him to attack “pretension in high places and low, [and] aristocratic or pseudoaristocratic presumptuousness.”33 Thomas Jefferson identified as one of his three most significant legacies his proposal for ensuring religious liberty in opinions and practices so that people would be free to follow “the evidence proposed to their minds.”34 The spirit of republican egalitarianism can also be seen in Jefferson’s proposals relating to inheritance laws, such as his proposal to eliminate decedents’ abilities to restrict the alienation of their property so as to perpetuate “patrician dynasties” and the bill he introduced to end the discrimination in favor of male heirs.35
Lerner is the first to admit the ambiguity of the evidence and, thus, presumably, the tentativeness of his conclusions. He notes that at times the Founders stressed the importance of statesmenship and civic minded leaders leading the nation; at times the importance of maximizing citizen virtue and adopting educational measures designed to tap into the potential for such virtue wherever it may exist; and at times the importance of institutional structures, both because of their role in educating citizens and leaders alike to the opportunities for public spirited service and as an insurance policy against the predictable departures from the idealized roles just sketched. For Lerner, taken together, these differences of emphasis thus represent the deliberate, thoughtful insights of a group of exceptional leaders aware of the liberating possibilities for self-government present in the newly emergent republican form of government as well as the variety of destructive excesses to which such freedom was prone.36 In other words, the differences in emphasis on the part of individual revolutionary leaders, as well as the variations within the thought of individual Founders at different times,37 may reflect their insights into the psychological, social, and political complexities of the new nation rather than a lack of deliberateness or decisiveness about the most effective direction for realizing its republican potential.
It is thus not surprising that Lerner elaborates in many places the Founders’ misgivings about the role of virtue as the cement holding the republican building blocks together. Publius, Lerner notes, “knew that while ’the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD,’ they do not always ’reason right about the means of promoting it.’”38 The first Justices similarly assumed that the state of mind prevalent among citizens was the principle of self-interest, and that it was this inclination that they aimed to counteract in their efforts to educate citizens to civic virtue.39 Lerner gives a thoughtful and disturbing account of the commercial republicans, namely, those Founders who hoped that the moderate passions of citizens of a commercial republic would serve as a safeguard against the ambitions of budding despots, aristocrats, and clerical enthusiasts alike.40
And yet, as the American revolution became increasingly distant, the revolution itself became a quasi-mythical moment in Americans’ common past to be reckoned with. The Founders were able to defend their departures from the past relatively openly because of the revolutionary atmosphere at the end of the eighteenth century, even as their innovations were constrained by the pull of tradition in the form of people’s existing habits and practices. The Founders’ successors, in contrast, were faced with a more complex challenge. As the republic developed and the population and its circumstances changed, there was a need for the laws and practices of the country to evolve accordingly.
At the same time, the Founders’ successors, faced with these changes and the developments culminating in the Civil War, recognized two general truths. First, it was critical for the republic to remain true to the “principles of the regime,” which encompassed a love of reason as well as a love of liberty.41 As Lerner puts it, figures such as Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams were committed to “binding a diverse public in a diverse land to a singular and ennobling ideal,” so that the “principles of American revolutionary constitutionalism” would continue to influence the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind.42
Second, it was critical for the leaders to make clear and for the population at large to understand that the political changes occurring were merely a reworking of features of the original revolutionary design.Thus, to some extent, the Founders’ successors were forced to disguise their creative responses to changed circumstances by casting them as continuations of the original founding event and its canonical, hence relatively uncontroversial, interpretations.43 Their need to conceal the degree to which nineteenth century practices had to diverge from their eighteenth century counterparts was not inconsistent with their belief in certain permanent principles inherent in a democratic republic since unchanging principles may generate radically different applications depending upon the circumstances surrounding the application. In short, the crises of the nineteenth century tested the ability of the body politic to absorb new truths without losing faith in the integrity of many old truths or of truth as such.44
Lerner’s political thought thus can be divided into two types of reflections. On the one hand there are his reflections on foundings, especially revolutionary foundings, and in particular, the American revolutionary founding. These involve how to uproot a large part of people’s habits, feelings, and ways of thinking, while at the same time retaining enough continuity with the past to make use of its accumulated wisdom and to inject familiarity into what is fundamentally a new endeavor. On the other, there are Lerner’s reflections on what he calls “kalam,” the explanation and defense, not only of the regime thus instituted, but of its successive incarnations that are threatened, among other reasons, by people’s instinctive hostility to innovation.45
Lerner appears to distinguish the kalam of the revolutionary Founders from that of their successors. Both involve a certain amount of rhetoric, understood loosely as the art of making arguments that appeal to an audience’s experiences, beliefs, interests, and ideals. In other words, both involve an appeal to the past as part and parcel of setting a new course for the future.Yet the reader gets the impression that the challenge of the Founders’ successors may well have been more complex than that of the Founders because of the greater complexity of social and economic conditions that they faced coupled with the need to keep the faith with the Founders’ legacy
This leads, willy nilly, to the question of Lerner’s own kalam. In one place he notes the importance of watching the “feet as well as the mouth of a politician, a political thinker, and an interpreter of a political thinker.”46 Surely Lerner is both a political thinker and the interpretor of political thinkers. This forces us to wonder how he expects his interpretation of the American founding to influence our understanding of the legitimacy of the present regime and the prospects for this nation as we move into the next century; for, one suspects that Lerner’s writings, like those of Tocqueville, belong “not only to that large class of histories that have something to tell but also to that smaller class of works that have something to teach.”47 It also forces the reader to ask whether, or to what extent, he has emulated the Founders’ successors by emphasizing the restorative aspect of his historical researches and understated their reconstructive aspect.
It is beyond the scope of the present analysis to resolve these issues. As a prelude to an inquiry into Lerner’s kalam, however, certain observations seem appropriate. Many of Lerner’s writings take the form of history laced with political theory. In his capacity as a historian, therefore, he must balance historical criteria with the practical and political concerns uppermost in the mind of a political theorist. For example, Lerner’s agenda likely includes the goal of explaining and defending the Founders’ wisdom, motives, prescriptions, and actions in terms intelligible to and persuasive for contemporary audiences. As a student of the past with an eye on the future, he is preoccupied with the prospects in America for self-governance-rational freedom, and not just autonomy or license—against the backdrop of contemporary suspicions of the rule of law and distrust of authority. These attitudes are arguably the long-term consequences of the Founders’ own efforts to reeducate their contemporaries. In any event, Lerner’s essays seem animated by the twin desires to sharpen readers’ appreciation of the function of reason in political life and to sensitize them to the perils of an excessive love of freedom for its own sake. These are truths that the Founders’ and their successors sought, in their various ways, to communicate. The task of their successors in our times is to convey these truths in a fashion that will help bridge the gap between the strengths of our unique past and our prospects for an enlightened future.
Because of the strict page limits imposed upon the contributors to this volume, this essay focuses on Lerner’s The Thinking Revolutionary, Revolutions Revisited and “Facing Up to the Founding.” See the select bibliography at the end of this essay.
See the writings of Amy Gutman, a political theorist, and Frank Michelman, a legal theorist.
These attitudes are sometimes inferred from the Founders’ efforts to protect private property. For Lerner’s discussion and criticism of this inference, see “Facing Up to the Founding,” pp. 251-53.
In The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 4-6, Lerner analyzes the “ideological” historical approach of Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, J.G.A. Pocock and others. See also his discussion in “The Constitution of the Thinking Revolutionary.”
These issues are discussed in the Prologue to The Thinking Revolutionary, “The Constitution of the Thinking Revolutionary,” and Revolutions Revisited, pp. 13-14.
See especially The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 31-32.
See below, p. 285, for an instance in which Lerner identifies the failings of certain Founders, including those he considers thinking revolutionaries.
See especially “Facing Up to the Founding,” pp. 254-55, 258-59, and The Thinking Revolutionary, p. xiv (the Founders combined a “rare blend of boldness and caution”).
See “Facing Up to the Founding,” p. 250 (they didn’t start from scratch, but used what “had proved serviceable”).
Revolutions Revisited, p. xiii, see id., pp. 37, 40, 41, 54.
Revolutions Revisited, pp. 46-47 (in the words of John Adams, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Matematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary Tapestry and Porcelaine.” 3 Adams Family Correspondence 342 (1963-73).
Revolutions Revisited, pp. 49-51.
See The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 12, 63. See also id., p. 61 (Jefferson recognized the gap between “grand-sounding principles” and their implementation in practice; and he was aware that “confusing right and capacity might be fatal.”).
Revolutions Revisited, pp. 36-37.
Revolutions Revisited, pp. 37-38.
The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 66-69.
The Thinking Revolutionary, Chapters 4-5. Lerner notes that the moral sentiments and ideas of some of the Founders—such as Jefferson, Knox, and George Washington—were different from those who simply thought the Indians were lazy or inferior to whites.Yet he also recognizes that the policies of the former were as doomed to failure as those of the latter because they presupposed “the remolding of Indian character after a white image.” Id., pp. 164-171.
The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 188-89.
See The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 191.
The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 30-31. See also Lerner’s comparison of the manner in which Chief Justice John Jay attempted to influence and educate people in their jury charges while riding circuit and that of Justice Samuel Chase. Id., pp. 98-114. In particular, Lerner notes that Chase’s impatience and immoderation led him to exhort his audiences “[s]tarting not from where his audience was, but from where (in his judgment) they ought to be,” as a result of which he missed the opportunity to be an effective educator.
Revolutions Revisited, p. 54. See, for example, The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 63 (describing the legislative project of Jefferson and his fellow revisors as “[w]ishing to soar, but obliged as sober legislators always to touch Virginia soil”).
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 91, and the citations in the paragraphs that follow.
This is detailed in Chapter 1 of The Thinking Revolutionary and Chapter 1 of Part I of Revolutions Revisited. Lerner notes his own doubts about the long-term viability of Franklin’s approach, especially his hope of assuring individuals’ self-control by linking it to their desire for respectability. Revolutions Revisited, pp. 16-18. Lerner also observes that Franklin’s approach to educating the citizenry, if successful, would trade the stability of a decent society for the grander opportunities possible in a society motivated by higher aspirations. Id., p. 34, see also p. 12.
This is described in Chapter 2 of The Thinking Revolutionary, which outlines Jefferson’s attempt to induce the Virginia Assembly to review and revise “the entire legacy that had up to then shaped life and institutions in the colony and the commonwealth”.
Although Jefferson believed that laws could establish institutions (such as a secular or humanistic-oriented university) and practices (freedom of religion) to liberate the human mind, he also believed that it was not the province of the civil government to shape the opinions of its citizens. Rather, he had faith that the free flow of opinion and argument would ultimately lead to the triumph of the truth. See id., p. 87. See also Revolutions Revisited, pp. 43-44.
This aspect of American history is elaborated in Chapter 3 of The Thinking Revolutionary. See also his discussion of John Adams’ views on education. Id., pp. 22-29. Lerner observes that after the practice of political charges while riding circuit had been abandoned, the Justices of the Supreme Court continued the education of citizens through their often unanimous opinions during the tenure of Chief Justice Marshall, and the rationales underlying their decisions can be seen as serving the same function today. Id., pp. 135-36.
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 134. For the approaches of other Founders toward educating the citizenry, see Revolutions Revisited, pp. 44-46.
See “Facing Up to the Founding,” pp. 253-55.
See the preceding three paragraphs.
See Revolutions Revisited, p. 38 (arguing that for the Founders, political institutions and social arrangements would be “an extension of the people’s education” because securing a democratic republic cannot be “produced magically from above”).
See, for example, The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 27 (John Adams); id., p. 117 (quoting James Madison to the effect that institutions alone cannot sustain republican government in the absence of citizen virtue). Lerner notes that all of the Founders believed that the civic virtue required by a commercial republic such as America was easier to attain and likely to be more stable than classical civic virtue. Id., pp. 195-96.
Lerner discusses the Founders’ ideas that aimed at greater egalitarianism or democratization of the American republic, yet he also addresses their continuing elitism in many areas. See, for example, The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 115ff., in which Lerner examines whether the members of the judiciary were seen by the Founders as by and large superior to the citizens in general and, thus, more capable than the latter to serve as custodians of the regime’s values.
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 48; Revolutions Revisited, p. xii-xiii.
The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 86-87. See, however, id., note 46 (suggesting that Jefferson intended to support religious belief as such).
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 72. Jefferson’s proposal to make college available at public expense had greater democratization as its objective as well, although the assistance was available only to those who were deemed qualified rather than being available to the public generally. See id. pp. 79-80. Lerner also notes that Jefferson’s egalitarianism nonetheless contemplated, even “promoted,” natural inequalities as part and parcel of “a regime of republican equals.” Id., p. 63. The natural inequality that Jefferson supported, however, was one of talent and merit, not accidents of birth. Id., p. 81.
See, for example, Lerner’s assessment of Jefferson’s sense of the “legislator’s long view”: “With apparent hopeless circularity, the problem seemed to demand simultaneously that society be made worthy of free men and that individuals be made fit for free society.” The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 88-90. See also id., pp. 121-22, 129 (Publius recognized that both the leaders and the citizens need more than self-interest for the republic to endure, but also worried that the requisite degree of virtue would not be forthcoming).
See, for example, Lerner’s account of Madison’s views on citizen virtue. The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 116-18.
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 129.
The Thinking Revolutionary, p. 135.
The Thinking Revolutionary, Chapter 6.
See Revolutions Revisited, p. 51; see also id., p. 65 (referring to “the founding opinions fundamental to the perpetuation of the regime”).
Revolutions Revisited, pp. 52-53.
See Revolutions Revisited, pp. 62, 64-66.
See Revolutions Revisited, p. 62 (Although “’Necessity’ may dictate change,” “wise legislators” will avoid appearing to overrule the founding fathers.), p. 66 (making the same point whenever a statesman seeks “to settle his public’s mind about some distressing issue of the day”).
This is discussed in Chapter 4 of Revolutions Revisited. Lerner notes in this regard that kalam, or the defense of a regime, may itself be innovative, and not merely protective of the exisiting order. Id., p. 62.
Review of Zuckert’s book, p. 148.
Revolutions Revisited, p. 122.
Lerner, Ralph. Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994.
————.“Facing Up to Founding.” In To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution, eds. Herman Belz, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, 250-71. Charlottesville, Va., 1992. A shortened version of this article appears as chapter 3 of Revolutions Revisited.
————. The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic. Ithaca, N.Y, 1987.