Thomas G. West's "The Political Theory of the American Founding"

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 3, 2017). 428 pp.

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders' political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders' political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. West argues that, on the contrary, the foundational documents overwhelmingly point to natural rights as the lens through which all politics is understood. The book explores in depth how the Founders' supposedly republican policies on citizen character formation do not contradict but instead complement their liberal policies on property and economics. Additionally, the book shows how the Founders' embraced other traditions in their politics, such as common law and Protestantism.

I found this to be a very rewarding and informative read as well as a welcome rebuttal to the critics (among the right and the left) who have taken to faulting the American founding for the present ills of our nation, revealing that the founders were actually far more coherent and unified in their theoretical understanding of the basis of the nation's founding in natural rights, and their application of such in fashioning our government, then is generally alleged in our times. Honestly, after reading Patrick J. Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, West's scholarship and defense of the founding comes across like a refreshing breath of fresh spring air.

Particularly surprising to me was the extent to which his critique extends not only to the usual suspects (Michael Zuckert, Patrick Deneen) but various scholars and historians I had otherwise held in high regard (Mary Ann Glendon, Gordon S. Wood). There's a good, if critical, discussion here regarding some deficiencies with West's approach, but on the whole I found West to be careful in his treatment of the sources. He's fair in the sense that neither the progressive left nor the right (libertarian and/or 'paleo-conservative') will come away pleased with this work, though I would much enjoy seeing some engagement with it.

West makes the salient point that in the study of political thought the tendency is to confine one's perspective to the 'founding documents' on a federal level, which is detrimental insofar as the founders left domestic policy to the states -- consequently, and it is only by a review of the wealth of largely-ignored documentation from the latter, that we can acquire a true understanding and appreciation of their thought.

What I especially appreciated then was the sheer depth and scope of West's survey, encompassing not only the individual writings of Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, et al.; the Federalist papers and the original founding documents as such -- but his most rewarding investigation of the founding documents, bills of rights, laws and ordinances of all thirteen colonies, by which the reader can gain a sense of their consistent and theoretically-rooted understanding on a vast array of issues and questions, including: the position of church and state; government support for education and the cultivation of morality; the promotion of virtue and the founder's understanding of such; the proper definition of "freedom" and the pursuit of happiness; the defense of property, free markets and 'sound money'.

Related Reviews and Discussion

• Founding philosophy, by Michael Anton. [Review]. The New Criterion June 2018:

  West sets for himself the seemingly modest task of “explaining” the American founders’ political views—first, their political theory per se, and second, how they applied that theory to the practical task of building a new government. The qualifier is necessary because while we think we understand the founding, West shows that we—especially, all too often, those who’ve been specifically trained to explain it to others—do not.

  We misunderstand the founding, first, because of the dismal state of modern education, and second, owing to deliberate efforts to libel the founders and their works. The founders’ political theory has been, by turns, denounced, misrepresented, mocked, dismissed, and forgotten. The culprits have been and are of the Left, Right, and Center. The founders’ detractors include fascists and communists, despots and anarchists, Yankees and Southerners, ardent abolitionists and slaveholding oligarchs, eastern elites and western individualists, foreign enemies and domestic terrorists, anti-American leftists and patriotic conservatives, smug atheists and the deeply religious.

• A Partial Vindication of Thomas West, by James Stoner. Law and Liberty 12/11/17.
• The Founders in Full, by Vincent Phillip Munoz. Claremont Review of Books 10/19/17:

  By reintroducing the moral underpinnings of the founders’ natural rights republic, Thomas West has made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of American political thought. He shows that the founders’ republicanism is a part of their liberalism; that duties and rights, properly understood, are not at odds. In doing so, The Political Theory of the American Founding not only helps us better understand America’s principles, it explains why we ought to cherish them and fight to restore them to their rightful place in our political life.

• Roundtable on The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. Hillsdale College. 09/19/17. [Video]
• Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature by Justin Dyer. Public Discourse> 06/09/17.

  [West argues] that the founders did in fact share a “theoretically coherent understanding” of politics rooted in natural rights philosophy. Other traditions were of course present, but the founders, West insists, embraced these other traditions in their official public documents and pronouncements only to the extent that those traditions could be enlisted as allies of the natural rights philosophy. When natural rights conflicted with elements of the common law, customary practices, or religious tradition, it was the natural rights tradition that won the day. Public documents and the affairs of state—rather than sermons, commentaries, private letters, or other musings—“point to natural rights and the laws of nature as the lens through which politics is understood.”[...]

  The Political Theory of the American Founding does a wonderful job of correcting some of the caricatures of the political thought of eighteenth-century Americans as amoral, areligious, individualistic, or otherwise hostile to public virtue and the moral conditions of freedom. The key, for West, is recognizing that the founders distinguished the purpose of politics (securing rights) from the purpose of life (happiness), and the founders created a society that remained open to the private pursuit of nobility, wisdom, piety, and the higher goods that were supposedly sublimated by the founders into the base pursuit of material gain.

  Throughout, West leaves open the question whether the founders’ philosophy is true. I venture a preliminary answer: yes, for the most part, but only because they were buoyed by those other traditions—notably Christianity, the common law, and elements of classical theological natural law—and thereby built better than they knew.

"Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents"

Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents (Dissident American Thought Today)
by Patrick J. Deneen.
St. Augustines Press; 1 edition (November 30, 2016)

"Opinions about America have taken a decisive turn in the early part of the 21st century. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks that its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Evident to all is that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots increases, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular, and deep disagreement persists over America's role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to build gated enclaves in and around select cities where they congregate, while growing numbers of Christians compare our times to those of the late Roman empire, and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. This collection of thematic essays by Notre Dame political theorist and public intellectual Patrick Deneen addresses the questions, is there something worth conserving in America, and if so, is America capable of conservation? Can a nation founded in a revolutionary moment that led to the founding of the first liberal nation be thought capable of sustaining and passing on virtues and practices that ennoble? Or is America inherently a nation that idolizes the new over the old, license over ordered liberty, and hedonism over self-rule? Can America conserve what is worth keeping for it to remain--or even become--a Republic?"

Extended Debate: Robert R. Reilly and Patrick Deneen

• Did the Founders Build Better or Worse Than They Knew?, by Jeffrey S. What's Wrong With The World 10/29/17.
• Fools or Scoundrels? A Response to Patrick Deneen, by Robert R. Reilly. Public Discourse 10/16/17. "To suppose that the Founders set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended requires the belief that they were either stupid (by creating a Hobbesian regime and not noticing) or immoral (by doing it while cleverly lying about what they were doing)." The first in a two-part series.
• Christianity and American Founding Principles: A Response to Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly, by S. Adam Seagrave. Public Discourse 10/3/17. "When it comes to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Founding, Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly are both right."
• Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly, by Patrick J. Deneen. The Public Discourse 09/19/17. "There is no distinctive Catholic political philosophy today, and Robert Reilly’s call to man the battlements of classical liberalism is an attempt to short-circuit the possibility of a real revival of Catholic political thought in America."
• For God and Country by Robert Reilley. Claremont Review of Books 07/31/17.

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Reviews and Related Discussions

• America, What’s Left of It: A Conversation with Patrick Deneen. Patrick Deneen joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents. Law and Liberty February 2015.
• Review: Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, by Lee Trepanier. Voegelin View 08/24/17.
• Conserving America: On the Recovery of Political Theory, by Brian Jones. The Imaginative Conservative 05/23/17.
• Conservatism in America: A long-read Q&A with professor of political thought Patrick Deneen, with James Pethokoukis. American Enterprise Institute. 06/29/17.
• On Not Conserving Liberalism, by Mark Mason The University Bookman Winter 2017.

Gordon S. Wood on "Revolutionary Character" (and the rise of Donald Trump)

I'm reading a book by revolutionary war scholar Gordon S. Wood (Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different). It is a collection of essays (some previously published and expanded upon) on the lives of our founding fathers, and an attempt to explain in part why for all of our celebration of them, we'll likely never see the likes of their calibre again. It also touches, at least in my mind, on the rise of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.

According to Wood, there was a time in American history where qualities of the ideal man were vigorously pursued -- "politeness, taste, sociability, learning, compassion, benevolence" were marks of civilization, just as "virtue, disinterestedness, an aversion to corruption and courtierlike behavior" were marks of good political leadership. The pursuit of being a "gentleman" (displayed by classical conceptions of virtue and self-sacrifice) was given a moral meaning. One's public reputation actually mattered, and they took great lengths to preserve that honor by what they said and did.

"Disinterestednesss" at that time was understood to be "superior to regard of private advantage; not to be interested by private profit", especially in the conduct of public service. (Of course, wealth was a factor in cultivating such in that its advantages diminished the motivation for personal advancement; men of leisure were naturally expected to participate in governance because they could afford to -- public office was considered an obligation). Unfortunately, this meaning of the ancient ideal of "disinterestedness" has changed over millennia and has come to acquire negative connotations, now being characterized as "ambivalence".

However, being a gentlemen was not necessary rooted to bloodline or heredity -- Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Paine -- the first generations were all considered "self-made men". Of those who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, only eight are known to have fathers who attended college. And yet despite being "sons of reputable mechanics or farmers" (Benjamin Rush, 1790), it was thought possible that men of low birth could attend college, acquire a liberal arts education and through self-cultivation could become true gentleman as well.

The aristocracy of virtuous public character, such as it was being pursued by the founding fathers, is what distinguished themselves from later generations -- and as the years progressed, Woods contends that what we now value most in American society, democracy and egalitarianism, has proven to be the recipe for our undoing. "The founding fathers had succeeded only too well in promoting democracy and equality among ordinary people, indeed they succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves." America continues to celebrate the ideal of being a "self-made man" -- but the original understanding of such as the classical cultivation of moral character has faded into obscurity. Now we have Kanye West and the Kardashians.

(Drawing from Woods' line of thought) Trump, you might say, is the thoroughly contemporary American -- the cultivation of moral virtue, honor and "reputation" in the highest sense of the term, has no concern and seems utterly lost on him. He displays no sense of moral character, exemplified in part by his behavior and conduct towards women and vulgarity of speech. He is of course concerned about his own "reputation" -- but this extends only as far as the material advancement of his ego, especially as it consists in turning himself into a commodity to be foisted on the masses for personal gain. In other words, he is the furthest thing from the 1700's ideal of a "gentleman", but Woods might argue that he is the President we deserve.

Liberty, and the abuse thereof.

There is a liberty of a corrupt nature which is effected both by men and beasts to do what they list, and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty ‘sumus omnes deteriores’: ‘tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good. For this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives and whoever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof.

-- Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (1835). [Via: Michael Novak].

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While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, "To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts". 11 October 1978.

Critical Reviews of Matthew Stewart's "Nature's God"

In America's Founding May Not Have Been Christian, but It Sure Wasn't Anti-Christian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, chair of the Department of History at Wheaton College, reviews Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. (Christianity Today 07/03/14):

... I'll leave it to the philosophers to evaluate whether Stewart has exaggerated the underlying atheism of this cast of characters. (His portrayal of Locke, at least, is sure to arouse controversy.) As a historian, I am more concerned by his utter failure to establish the influence of atheistic belief on America's founding. Historians believe that our most important task is to explain what we see, basing our statements of cause and effect on evidence. Stewart takes a different approach. He concludes that radical philosophy was widespread among common Americans after discovering it in the writings of two individuals, Vermont's backwoods leader Ethan Allen and a Boston physician named Thomas Young. In like manner, he finds that atheistic presuppositions determined the political philosophy of the most prominent Founders by ruthlessly disregarding all competing influences. This is pronouncement, not demonstration.

McKenzie comments further, on his own blog, Faith and American History:

Although Stewart cloaks his argument in a 400-page narrative, the heart of his reasoning boils down to a simple syllogism: The ideas that matter in history are the ones that are true. Religious beliefs are, by definition, false. Ergo (philosophers say ergo a lot), religious beliefs couldn’t have mattered in the American founding. If lots of colonists back in ’76 thought otherwise, that’s because they weren’t as enlightened as the author. Too bad for them.

The thrust of my review was to call attention to Stewart’s a priori assumptions and to remind readers of historians’ quaint belief that historical assertions should be grounded in historical evidence. Stewart is correct to point out that the religious beliefs of many of the leading Founders were unorthodox, David Barton’s wish-dreams to the contrary notwithstanding. But Stewart errs badly in equating the views of the leading Founders with atheism, and he provides almost no evidence at all for his insistence that radical philosophy was widespread among the rank and file of colonial patriots. In short, the emperor has no clothes.

Matthew Stewart, a self-identified atheist, professed in an interview with the Boston Globe that he'd "like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation — more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education", sans traditional orthodox religiosity of any kind. Curiously, notes McKenzie,

for a study that is so determined to discredit orthodox Christianity, the author is curiously averse to engaging Christian scholars, whether historians or theologians. When it comes to the religious beliefs of the revolutionary generation, quite a number of Christian historians have anticipated much of Stewart’s findings, albeit with vastly greater nuance and balance, but you’d never know it from his account.

Elsewhere, Baron Swaim (Wall Street Journal) deems that "Mr. Stewart's learning in philosophical radicalism is impressive; what undermines his work is his contempt for everyone but the few radicals he esteems." And Charles W. Cooke (National Review) corrects Stewart's mistaken charge that "the first Tea-Partier was an atheist."

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Update

Mark David Hall has published a rather devastating review of Nature's God for the Spring 2015 issue (pp. 285-291) Christian Scholars Review entitled "A Failed Attempt at Partisan Scholarship", which is reposted to the blog American Creation. He concludes:

... Stewart regularly makes sweeping statements that leave the impression America’s founders were radical deists who wanted to create a godless republic, but he occasionally offers the qualification that many Americans were traditional Christians and that intellectual traditions not antithetically opposed to Christianity may have had some influence as well (e.g. 32, 352). But these qualifications are too few, faint, and far between. By focusing on a handful of founders with radical religious views, some important—Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine—and others relatively unimportant—Allen and Young—he grossly distorts the founders’ religious views and political commitments. Even brief consideration of a wider range of founders reveals a very different picture._*

[...]

Nature’s God suffers from a number of serious flaws. Stewart virtually ignores the vast literature on the role of religion in the American founding and he utterly fails to engage scholars whose works challenge his thesis. He misuses and misconstrues primary sources and largely ignores founders (key and otherwise) who do not fit his thesis. Alan Ryan, in a friendly blurb, describes the book as “partisan scholarship.” It seems to me that Ryan is half right. Readers interested in a polemical account of religion in the American founding almost completely ungrounded in history may enjoy this book, but anyone interested in a serious treatment of religion in the era should look elsewhere.

See, for instance, the approximately thirty-three founders and traditions profiled in Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, eds., The Founders on God and Government (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, and Dreisbach and Hall, eds, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford, 2014).

(Read the whole thing).