Tonsor: Intellectual History: Equality

I.

After we began the walk back to campus, the mood settled and Tonsor broached a topic related to the one we had probed over lunch. "You'd be interested in a book I'm working on, Mr. Whitney. It's about equality. Remarkably, there has been no systematic historical exploration of the idea of equality in recent times. This, despite the ridiculous overproduction of monographs! Yet historians have failed to provide an account of the development of the idea of equality. I argue that this notion -- equality -- has provided the key signature of the modern world. No idea has played a larger role in the history of the past two or three centuries than that of equality."[1]

"When it comes to equality," I said, "it seems everyone nowadays embraces some form of trickle-down Marx." 

"Very true," Tonsor said with a gust of laughter. 

"Now," he said, "insofar as the historian can discern, inequality characterized all civilizations in the past. In fact, if one were to argue that the experience of history constitutes a prescriptive norm, then one must confront the fact that the great bulk of human experience constitutes an argument against equality. Until the eighteenth century nearly all men regarded inequalities of wealth, status, and power as in the nature of things, an unalterable given. That changed sometime in the eighteenth century. Witnessing the American and French revolutions, men in substantial numbers questioned inequality from the standpoint of political and social justice.[2]

"Roughly speaking, equality is to the modern age what freedom was to the early modern age. As you know, freedom -- freedom of thought, speech, religion, politics, economics, national independence -- stamped nearly all important historical struggles from the Reformation to the French Revolution and beyond. We are still under freedom's spell. But at some point after the French Revolution, equality eclipsed even freedom as a value and now plays a larger role than ever in our debates, polities, and aspirations."[3]

"Your subject reminds me of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Black Cottage.' There the poet ponders Jefferson's famous lines in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal. It is 'a hard mystery,' Frost says. The idea is so radical that people don't know what to do with it:

But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.[4]

"Yes," my professor said. "It is a hard mystery."

We waited at Hill Street to let the traffic near the campus clear.

"As you know," Tonsor resumed, as soon as we could walk again, "I advise my students to be alert to historical development. By historical development I mean neither the ideological distortions that you see in the Hegelian dialectic, nor the Whig notion that the 'past is prologue,' nor the nationalists' Darwinistic chest-thumping, nor the Marxian scheme that imposes a theory of scientific inevitability on the historical record. None of that is history. That is ideology -- a one-size-fits-all ideology. History is an empirical discipline. I want students to explore historical development empirically. I want them to order their thinking in a disciplined manner, which means, first, examining the symbolic record men have left behind and, second, basing their interpretation on the canons of reason, logic, and evidence. 

"History is also a humanistic inquiry. So it is important that students understand the meaning of any given development to the human person in community. What are the implications -- morally, spiritually, politically, socially, culturally -- for the human beings experiencing that development?"

I thought: Tonsor's advice to students was about as succinct a statement as I'd heard of the normative method that had been developed by historians over the last two centuries. It was the method championed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. But nothing stays the same in the modern age. The Rankean method had come under withering fire by the time I was in graduate school. In fact, the Rankean ideal was the subject of a book I had been encouraged to read, That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. The University of Chicago historian was wholly skeptical of the quest for historical objectivity -- it was a myth.[5] Not that anyone was arguing that history was a nomothetic science; it was as far away from Platonic absolutes as a field could be. But historians influenced by postmodern theory were drawn to the other extreme, that history was just another literary genre; as such, it was nothing more than subjective, relativistic "narratives" filled with tentative truth-claims. Tonsor in his Aristotelian way rejected both extremes -- rejected the view of history as a rigorous nomothetic science and rejected the view of history as a mere literary genre. History for him was the sweet spot in between. It was an empirical discipline that valued evidence, facts, reasoning, and veracity; it was also a humanistic inquiry that plumbed how man's interior struggles and external confrontations and accommodations with reality left a record that subsequent generations could examine. This record helps us understand what human beings believed and valued. 

I further appreciated that Tonsor did not confine exploration of the past to "the written record" as so many historians taught, but to the larger "the symbolic record" since he himself liberally used art, iconography, music, and architecture in his intellectual history and cultural criticism. His return to the topic at hand pulled me out of my meditations on the complex nature of historical inquiry.

"In the case of equality," Tonsor said, "the development has been exceedingly complex. The idea is more convoluted, has meant more different things, has undergone more transformations, than just about any other idea in the modern age.[6] Would you agree?"

"I would!" I said, excited that Tonsor was sharing his book proposal with me. "Recently at Mass the reading was from Matthew,[7] the parable about all the laborers getting the same wage, even the ones who show up near the end of the day. It caused quite a ruckus. People didn't get it then, and we don't get it now." 

I continued: "There are so many different ways to look at the idea of equality because there are so many different arenas in which the struggle for equality has taken place. It's been humankind's running struggle, I suppose, since Hammurabi and Moses. The priests -- they have to define what religious equality looks like. Are all human persons equal by virtue of having souls and being created in the image and likeness of God? The judges -- they have to work out what the equality of all persons under the law looks like. The politicians -- they have to determine political equality through norms like one man one vote. The entrepreneurs -- they must seek economic equality by eliminating barriers to entering the marketplace and obstacles to growing their businesses. The social theorists -- they come up with redistributive policies like guaranteed income and school vouchers to give every disadvantaged family a ladder up." 

"You are referring to Milton Friedman," observed Tonsor. "One of our most creative thinkers on the right when it comes to the problem of equality and the related idea of equity. And then there are the abstract philosophers who continue to spin out their ethereal theories. They can be interesting and not altogether unproductive. But it's important to note that when a philosopher like John Rawls writes about equality, he is only ratifying changes that have already occurred in a Sitz im Leben, in a real historical and cultural context."[8]  

II.

I hardly heard what Tonsor last said because a policy idea suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue: "What if we provided a national income for every American adult below a certain line of adjusted gross income, and tied that income to the nation's economic performance. In any given year, if the economy did well, and more revenues came in to the Treasury, then the income floor would be higher. Giving everyone the dignity of a minimum income would satisfy the left. And giving everyone a stake in robust economic growth would satisfy the right. Maybe such a vision of the common good could unite left and right," I offered, steeling myself against his usual charge, that I was being Pollyannaish. 

"It will never happen," he said grumpily. "Still, you should write your idea up for National Review. They might publish it."

III.

After a few moments my professor continued: "What I find especially fascinating is the distance between all the paeans to equality -- by the political scientists, philosophers, Marxist theorists, and historians -- and the absence of equality in the world as we find it. As you know, works dealing with the organization of human society tend to divide into how society is, or how it ought to be: into descriptive or prescriptive treatments. So: Machiavelli in The Prince wrote descriptively; Plato in the Republic wrote prescriptively. Christopher Jencks in Inequality wrote descriptively; Huxley in Island wrote prescriptively. But no author can claim to have found true equality in our civilization. Is this not strange? In a day when demands for equality are at an all-time high, when the rhetoric of equality is at a fever pitch, when the promise of equality is a staple of political life, the fact is that while certain kinds of equality have increased over the past two centuries, there is, overall, little enough by way of genuine equality.[9] 

"Muhammad Ali seeks more political and economic equality. But he is who he is and earns what he earns because of a peculiar combination of genetics, metabolism, training, and opportunity that can only be described as extraordinary. No amount of political or economic equality can suppress that fact.[10]

"And so it is that our experience of individuals and of society is not the experience of equality but rather the experience of the most intense and pervasive inequality. And yet the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence asserted that 'all men are created equal.' Surely there is a contradiction in American political theory in particular and in Western political theory as a whole between prescriptive and descriptive social and political analysis. So we must ask, what exactly does the clause mean? Did it mean the same thing to Thomas Jefferson as it did to the son of a hardscrabble farmer in south-central Illinois named Abraham Lincoln?[11]

"The idea of equality is central to understanding the American experience. It is the fundamental idea that lies behind the American Revolution and the extraordinary society we in America have created. More important still, the idea of equality has transformed not only the political life and society of the United States but also the life and society of the world.[12] 

"Yes, the notion of equality has been the single most potent revolutionary force the world has ever seen. Over and over again in the course of the past 200 years, mankind has defied tradition and status, blood and accumulated usage, in the hope of regenerating and recreating society. More often than not these revolutions have ended in failure and even a diminution rather than an increase in equality."

"Thus confirming Orwell's quip," I said, "that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?"

"Yes," Tonsor chuckled. "Orwell's mordant wit gets straight to the heart of the matter: Ideologues have been manipulating the idea of equality for two centuries now. Still, it is equality that has provided the dynamism, the moving force that has energized modern history. The great liberal and leftist revolutions of the past two centuries have all been made in the name of equality."[13] 

____________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "A Few Unequal and Preliminary Thoughts," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 63-65.

[2] This statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (Kindle ed.), p. 8; Bury's book is favorably cited by Tonsor and informed some of his thinking on the subject. See Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 65.

[3] Again, this statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 8. See Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 65.

[4] Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," lines 64, 68-70, in North of Boston (1915). Many thanks to W. Winston Elliott III for reminding me of the origin of those lines.

[5] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[6] Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 63.

[7] Matthew 20: 1-16.

[8] Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 63. 

[9] Ibid., p. 64.

[10] Ibid., p. 65.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 68.

[13] Ibid.

Tonsor #10 -- Enlightenment and Liberalism

"Modernity is the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is modernity," Tonsor proclaimed in his Shermanesque cadence from the lectern later that morning. "I exaggerate only slightly. In the second half of the seventeenth century and certainly by the first half of the eighteenth, Europe was seeing powerful new forces overtake the traditional thought and culture of Christendom. One of these forces, liberalism, was instantiated in the salons, writings, and reforms of the Enlightenment.

"I would like you to note two things. First, the Enlightenment was revolutionary. It was revolutionary because it would establish a competing source of authority in the European mind and thereby change the fundamental character of our civilization. Henceforward there would be not one source but two sources competing for intellectual and moral authority -- the ancient and medieval source of religious values that developed in Christendom, and the modern source of secular values that developed in the Enlightenment. The former was oriented to the things 'above'; the latter to the things 'below.' The struggle between these two competing sources of intellectual and moral authority would raise the pivotal question in the West's inner history: What should the relation between these two sources of authority be?[1]

"Note, further, that this shift in the fundamental character of our civilization did not follow the French Revolution but preceded it. Indeed, it was the Enlightenment that made the French Revolution and so many subsequent upheavals possible because men had already changed their minds. On our side of the Atlantic, John Adams made a similar point when he said the American Revolution had occurred in the minds of men at least a decade before any shots were fired. This point brings to the fore what I told you in our first class. Ideas have consequences. It is when men change their minds that other changes become possible. Our Marxist friends get it backward."[2]

There I sat in my chair, marveling at what my professor was saying. If we had been at the Met, Tonsor's intellectual dash in the opening minute of class would have been regarded as a bravura performance. The way he laid out "the pivotal question in the West's inner history" gave me the chemical fix I craved, the giddy frisson of discovery.  So, I thought, today's lecture[3] will be the Rosetta Stone, the sacred tablet that encapsulates Tonsor's take on the modern problem. We will see his fierce intellect[4] in all its brilliance reveal his intellectual task to understand modernity and his ethical task to confront modernity. In tandem these tasks comprised the civilizational mission of Stephen J. Tonsor.

Stirred with anticipation, I gripped my pen tightly and pressed down on my looseleaf paper with so much force it became crinkly. It was time to take a deep breath: Reverting to the days when I practiced Transcendental Meditation, I slowly exhaled my mantra to calm myself down.

Suddenly -- an intrusion. As Tonsor was saying, "Our Marxist friends get it backward," a woman with a longish ponytail walked up to the near side of the blackboard and wrote, in large chalk letters, "Learn or die." She coyly smiled at Tonsor, who was staring at her wide-eyed, then slipped out of the classroom. I had never seen anything like this display of audacity, certainly not before an old-school professor. We all wondered what would happen next as Tonsor walked to the end of the blackboard and scowled at her message. His face was red. "Yes," he growled, "learn or die." Just as he was about to rub out her words, he paused, put down the eraser, and said in a brighter register, "A wise one, she!"

We laughed. Her words would survive but she would not. Apparently she was dropping his class because we never saw her again. Tonsor returned to the lectern and resumed as if nothing had happened.

"You may have taken a survey course in Western civilization that has led you into error. If you were taught that the Enlightenment was a unified movement, then you have the wrong idea. Now, it is true: There were certain convictions that were found in virtually all the different manifestations of the Enlightenment -- in France, England, Scotland, Germany. Let us listen to the great intellectual historian and student of the Enlightenment, Sir Isaiah Berlin, tell us what elements the diverse strands had in common:

These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men sought after, namely happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice, and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them -- ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature.

Moreover ... it was by and large believed that human nature was fundamentally the same in all times and places; local and historical variations were unimportant compared with the permanent central core in terms of which human beings could be defined as a single species.... Consequently the discovery of general laws that govern human behavior, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems -- of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and the like [were central to the Enlightenment project].... [A]ll discoverable facts would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and 'interested error' that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the Church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just, and self-perpetuating human society....   

This is the noble, optimistic, and rational doctrine and ideal of the great tradition of the Enlightenment from the Renaissance until the French Revolution, and indeed beyond it, until our own day.

"What interested Berlin even more than the conventional view of the Enlightenment that students get in survey classes were the many important divisions within the movement. I shall give you three. (1) On the question of human nature, not every French Encyclopedist or German rationalist believed that man is by nature good, ruined only by the follies and wickedness of priests and crippling institutions like the Church. Voltaire, for instance, believed that man was quite possibly cruel by nature. (2) When it came to religion, some of the philosophes were devout theists, while others were militant atheists. (3) And when it came to politics, some championed enlightened despotism, others democracy. So the first thing to keep in mind is that the Enlightenment is not one theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic program.

"When I ask you about the Enlightenment on, say, the midterm examination, don't give me the bumper sticker slogans you learned in AP history or college survey. You must specify which Enlightenment, which thinkers, you are referring to."

*     *     *

"Recall how in our first meeting I said that ideas have power; they have consequences when men seize on them and act with the conviction that they are true. If you see how liberalism informed the intellectual and institutional life of the modern West -- if you also see the fierce reaction against liberalism in the modern age -- then you will be well on the way to understanding the last three centuries.

"By liberalism, I do not here mean the politics of Ted Kennedy. I have plenty to say on the politics of Ted Kennedy and his family,[5] but there is not enough time in our class to chase that rabbit down the hole."

Tonsor looked up from his notes: "For you city slickers who do not know, rabbits burrow in holes, and the allusion is to an early scene in Alice in Wonderland."[6] The sarcasm!

"The term 'liberalism' came into existence in the nineteenth century. It serves as a convenient device that intellectual historians use to identify a pattern of behavior and a habit of mind that are historically significant. Note that 'liberalism' is an -ism; that is to say, it is an ideology. Simply defined, an 'ideology' is a system of integrated beliefs, theories, and aims that constitutes a sociopolitical program. Every ideology expresses some deep desire in man to realize a good. Yet in the process every ideology ends up isolating one or two elements of human nature at the expense of others. Marxism, for example, responds to man's envy and desire for equality with others. When such an ideology ossifies into a sociopolitical program, it may capture something essential to the moment. But it becomes just another period piece, it fails to be universally applicable, and it falls into Trotsky's proverbial ash heap of history. Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Those last words struck me and I wrote the sentence down carefully. It was the meat of the nut. It was why the Enlightenment inevitably involved an "endarkenment." Tonsor, again: "Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Tonsor punched his critique of modern ideologies and -isms -- liberalism included -- with lines of verse by the poet, Walt Whitman:

     Do I contradict myself?
     Very well then I contradict myself,
     (I am large, I contain multitudes).[7]

"Now, the modern ideology of liberalism seeks to order the human condition. It is the modern instantiation of an older spirit of liberty that resides deep in the constitution of man. The liberal spirit is ever on the lookout to free the individual -- free him from oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos. It is premised on man's free will. It rejects determinism. Above all, it recognizes the individual's freedom of conscience, his decision to choose between right and wrong, his freedom to order his life as he chooses within the framework of the historical options available to him. As we shall see, it can also refer to the many misguided things individuals do to liberate themselves from an otherwise reasonable order. In short, liberalism tries to account for the sum total of decisions individuals make when they elect to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. It is thus no artifice or windy abstraction. It is grounded in historical evidence that strongly suggests the human preference for freedom. Again and again we see the instantiation of freedom in very concrete actions. I shall give you examples.

"Some ten thousand years ago, man chose to quit the paleolithic lifestyle and instead adopt the neolithic lifestyle. Beginning in Asia Minor, he made the decision to stop hunting and gathering in a Hobbesian state of nature, and instead to focus his energies on growing crops. By doing so, he was electing not to get up every morning wondering where his next meal would come from. I emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about the Neolithic turn. Man chose to diminish the realm of necessity imposed by hunger, and to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by storing surplus food in ceramic pots and granaries. Of course, it was not a linear development. The neolithic era arrived across the face of the earth in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks during droughts and shortages caused by war and pestilence. Yet the point stands: Men apparently calculated that the net result of their preference for the neolithic lifestyle would yield greater liberty. The anthropological evidence shows that once the choice was made, man never voluntarily went back, en mass, to hunting and gathering."

Tonsor paused: "The deer heads mounted in suburban houses suggest that middle-class men miss the call of the wild. Apparently so do the intrepid hunters who travel up to Canada to experience the wilderness by shooting wildlife from a helicopter!" A few of the outdoorsmen in the class laughed.

"Some five thousand years ago, man chose to quit the neolithic lifestyle and instead adopt civilization. Beginning along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, he decided to build walls and provision armies. He apparently did so to diminish the realm of necessity: He sought to buy time before his death and avoid being enslaved in the first organized wars. So he chose to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by greater security. I again emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about this turning point. Yet civilization spread across the face of the earth, from Sumer to Egypt to India to China to Central and South America. It grew in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks when city walls were breached and when armies invaded, but man apparently calculated that the net result of his choice would be greater liberty. The historical evidence shows that once the choice was made, he never went back voluntarily, en mass, to the neolithic lifestyle.

Tonsor again paused: "I know a few flower children who tried to do so back in the sixties, without success. Today they are all on Wall Street."

The students laughed at Tonsor's display of sarcasm.

"What we call Europe -- the westernmost extension of the Eurasian land mass with its numerous peninsulas and isles -- was a locus of the spirit of liberty. We see it in the democracy of ancient Athens and in the republic of ancient Rome. We see it among the Saxons in the time of Hengist and Horsa (as Thomas Jefferson was at pains to point out). We see it in the interminable struggle between church and state, as well as in the emergence of the medieval commune.

"Beginning in the 1300s and 1400s -- and gathering momentum during the Enlightenment in the late 1600s and 1700s -- the liberal spirit expanded into sphere after sphere of human activity. Men began to see increasing opportunities to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. In economics, politics, and society -- slowly but surely -- oppressive authorities were overthrown. Dead customs were cast off. Restrictive laws were repealed. Marketplace regulations were lifted. Social taboos were relaxed. All these developments were intended to free the individual from anything that oppressed, anything that kept him down. That impulse to free the individual from arbitrary oppression would always be the true north of the liberal spirit.

"At the dawn of the modern age, in the Renaissance, artists, writers, and men of intellect seized on the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom. Beginning in the fourteenth century, clerics did a radical thing. They embraced pagan classicism at the inevitable expense of Christian scholasticism. In doing so they inadvertently raised paganism to the point that it almost rivaled Christianity. Now, these men were not apostates -- they regarded themselves as good Catholics. But their love of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome started an intellectual revolution within Christendom, a revolution that would legitimate two sources of civilizational authority where only one had existed before. To the Renaissance mind, the Greco-Roman classics spoke almost as much to the human condition as did Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Because paganism was elevated, it rivaled Christianity as a source of authority. Men now had a choice in how they would mediate the two. This is the key to understanding how the Renaissance expanded freedom. Indeed, if Jacob Burckhardt's thesis is correct (as developed in his groundbreaking cultural study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), then it was this freedom that emerged hand-in-hand with a radical new concept: the individual. Now Renaissance Man could publicly laud both the pagan hero and the Christian saint. Each type presented a model of human excellence. Each type generated its own criteria of human flourishing. Renaissance Man accepted both these models of excellence and held them in a state of tension. All the while the Church went along with the development. There was no Albigensian crusade to stamp the pagan ideal out, and even the popes went along with the new pagan humanism. Never before had Christendom given this degree of license to intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom. You can now see how the Renaissance, by embracing two different sources of authority in paganism and Christianity, and by lauding two different models of excellence in the hero and the saint, became a dress rehearsal of the Enlightenment.

"In the early modern age, men also saw the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom when it came to shaping their fundamental worldview. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Age of Exploration, the Europeans' encounter with new worlds opened men's eyes to the proliferating variety of human cultures. Believers lost their innocence. Now they were aware of the possibilities of other worldviews. Were some truer than others? The resulting pluralism opened the way to an a la carte skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism on a scale never before seen in world history. To understand what I mean, I would refer you to a book that is often assigned by my colleagues, The Cheese and the Worms (1980), by Carlos Ginsburg. It is the true story of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who was put on trial for his heretical musings. Contrast Menocchio's story to that of the more radical philosophes in the Enlightenment, men like Baron D'Holbach and Denis Diderot, who two centuries later could openly proclaim they did not believe in God. The taboo against atheism had been lifted. In the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience and of religion was dramatically expanding.

"In sphere after modern sphere, men willed themselves into greater states of freedom. The spread of freedom did not occur because of some abstract force of history. It was not Hegelian nonsense. Rather it was due to men making the choice, again and again, to be more free.

We see the spread of freedom in the new town charters, the new constitutions, the evolution of Parliament, and newly articulated rights. We see it in marketplace reforms and free labor contracts. We see it in the decline of arranged marriages as well as in the abolition of entail, primogeniture, and ultimogeniture. We see it in religious reforms and in many other concrete actions. To know this quest for freedom is to know the modern age in a major key. The Enlightenment was its spearpoint. None of this should surprise you -- we Americans know it well because the quest for liberty rallied the patriots of the American Revolution.

"Diminishing necessity, enlarging freedom -- these can be good things befitting the nature of man. 'Can be,' because when men enlarge freedom, they do not lose the need for order. Indeed, it is precisely when they enlarge freedom that they need to be attentive to order -- to what Tocqueville called the "habits of the heart." Such habits are formed by family life, religious communities, civil society, and participation in local politics. Think of these habits as part of a culture's unwritten constitution, which is the foundation of the written Constitution.

"Now, there can be too much of a good thing. Liberalism promoted freedom, but its individualism did not reinforce the moral and social restraints that are needed to sustain freedom.When man's freedom outruns his self-imposed restraints, when he has experienced the anxiety that arises from political anarchy and personal licentiousness, he feels the rage for order. Yes, the rage for order. Men will not tolerate chaos. It is not in our nature to tolerate chaos. Chaos has erupted in the modern age and this has provoked numerous reactions against liberty. We have seen chaos when men are uprooted from their traditional communities. We have seen it in the new industrial economy with its ant-heap societies. We have seen it in the wars of competing -isms, so many that fewer and fewer men knew what to believe. We have seen it in political revolutions, first in England, then in America, then in France -- and ultimately in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. What is Nazi Germany but the rage for order after the mounting chaos of World War I, hyperinflation, depression, and confusion in the Weimar Republic?

"Any questions?"

Oh, yes, there were questions, but before anyone could raise a hand, Tonsor seemed to want to plow forward. "Let's next consider rationalism," he said, putting one set of notes into a folder and removing another set from a different folder. As he scanned yellow ruled pages of handwritten notes, he stuck his lower jaw out. His face projected a bulldog determination.

____________________


[1] Stephen J. Tonsor credited Friedrich Heer with the above-below struggle at the heart of "Europe's inner history"; see Tonsor's essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 263-64. If the West's "inner history" created the tension between classical, medieval Christianity and the modern Enlightenment, an additional tension came about in the 1960s when both classical medieval Christianity AND the modern Enlightenment were overthrown by postmodernism, which rejected both the norms of faith and reason. Adding to the tension was the simultaneous rejection of Western worldviews and the adoption of non-Western worldviews such as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, and other forms of Eastern thought. Today it is clear that our civilization's inner tensions arise from the fact that large parts of the population now recognize one of three authoritative sources. Nowadays there are Christians, scientists, and counter-cultural thinkers.
[2] Tonsor consistently emphasized how mental, moral, and spiritual changes preceded material changes. See his essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, pp. 266-67.
[3] My reconstruction of Tonsor's lectures is an amalgamation that combines (1) my notes taken during the lecture; (2) further research I undertook to prepare for his midterm and final examinations; and (3) later reading of Tonsor's essays, research in the archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and at the University of Minnesota, and interviews with those familiar with Tonsor's work.
[4] I am grateful to the intellectual historian Seth Bartee for this characterization of Stephen Tonsor as a "fierce intellect," conveyed in private correspondence, October 16, 2016.
[5] At the time Tonsor was giving this lecture, during the fall of 1987, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was leading the campaign in the U.S. Senate against Justice Robert Bork, who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservatives like Tonsor went on record to charge Democrats, who held the majority in the Senate, with being so hostile to Bork that they could not give the nominee a fair confirmation hearing. In the heat of the battle, conservatives coined a new verb, "to bork." To bork means to engage in relentless personal and misleading professional attacks against a judicial nominee to prevent the nominee's advance. Tonsor's public view was expressed as a signatory to Sidney Hook's letter of support of Bork in the Congressional Record, October 22, 1987, and October 23, 1987.
[6] See URL https://aliceproject4.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/down-the-rabbit-hole-what-does-it-mean/, accessed October 18, 2016.
[7] Excerpt from Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," 51, at URL http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27, accessed October 24, 2016; quoted in Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, p. 247.

Tonsor #7 -- The Rage for Order

My first class at Michigan had me churned up. Tonsor's introduction to Ernst Cassirer unloosed a Niagara of imponderables that were cascading through my brain. Had this bold humanist pulled off one of the most audacious philosophical projects of the twentieth century?

The iconic Erwin Panovsky

As Tonsor erased the board and stuffed his folders and books back into his satchel, I went to the front of the class and joined a few other students who had follow-up questions to put to the professor. I did not push myself forward but stayed a little back so that I could pick up additional insights from his answers. To one student he said something about Peter Gay being an American disciple of Cassirer's. To another he put Cassirer in the context of the so-called Hamburg School that included Aby Warburg and Erwin Panovsky. To yet another he quipped that the task of dethroning Aristotle proved more difficult than that of decapitating Charles I[1]. These little insights piqued my curiosity, but when my turn came I pursued a different line of questioning:

"Given the breakdown of the Enlightenment in the nineteenth century, did Cassirer really think an age of reason could be resurrected in the twentieth? I mean, after trench warfare, Nazi concentration camps, and Soviet gulags -- didn't these catastrophes destroy the idea of progress and turn Enlightenment aspirations into an Endarkenment?" I had recently read an article with that sophomoric neologism, "Endarkenment," in the title and thought myself clever.[2]

"Sometimes all one can do is weep at the grave and hope for better things to come," said Tonsor with mock seriousness. "Mr. Whitney, do you have plans for lunch?"

"No, I don't. I'm free," I said with slightly too much enthusiasm; I wondered if I looked like a dog on point.

"Why don't you accompany me back to the house, where my wife Caroline will have prepared lunch, a hearty midday meal in the German style," he said grandly.

All I could think was, "Wow!"

Near Community News on South U and Forest

We walked out of East Engineering into a light drizzle and onto the noisy bustle of South U. A couple of blocks down was Community News, a claustrophobic shop where Tonsor liked to pick up his morning New York Times and Wall Street Journal. "In these pages I read about the strife of interests masquerading as principles," he quipped.

The newspapers securely tucked into his satchel, Tonsor set a moderately fast pace across the grid of leafy streets south of the main campus. Over the next twenty minutes we went through Burns Park, an older neighborhood with cozy, well-preserved houses. A gray sky enclosed us like Tupperware. Once we reached the quieter streets, I could hear Tonsor breathing but he was not too winded to talk.

The northern boundary of Burns Park is in the bottom right of this 1880 bird's eye view of Ann Arbor.

"After class you asked a good question that probes the limits of the Enlightenment. The fact is, it was self-limiting. Human nature is inclined to follow reason to a point, but no farther. Recall the passage in Boswell that describes Dr. Johnson kicking the stone: It was real and it was unmovable. Human nature is that stone -- real and unmovable.[3] For better or worse, human beings do not want to live by unaided reason alone, but also by passions and emotions, irrationality and violence, magic and mystery, spiritual insight and divine revelation.

"There is evidence going back 10,000 years of human beings revolting against rationality. Because it's a given of human nature, you can see the revolt all around us to this day. Look at the current proliferation of psychotic lifestyles!"[4]

The sarcastic way he said "psychotic lifestyles" made me laugh.

"It was a rare revolution that could base itself on rationality and mount a serious challenge to all the spiritual orders established in the Axial Age. The Enlightenment posed that challenge. It took root in the late seventeenth century when the exhausted soil of Christendom could nurture little else. Europe had depleted itself in savage wars of religion. These civil wars were fought in part over which Christian authority would prevail -- Catholic or Protestant, Lutheran or Calvinist, Trinitarian or Unitarian. With the spectacle of Christians turning Europe into one giant Roman Colosseum for their mutual slaughter, some thinkers opened their minds to new sources of authority that could win universal assent and put an end to the strife. With the rise of experimental science, certain men began to believe they had discovered a promising source of authority. It would not be long before the scholastics' Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis would start to unravel. The medieval disputatio would no longer be regarded as a satisfactory way to mediate the world. A revolution was under way. Christendom would never be the same."

"Didn't the Enlightenment eventually prompt intellectuals to quit using the word 'Christendom' and start referring to our civilization as 'the West'?" I asked.

"Yes," Tonsor said with emphasis. "The evangelists of the Enlightenment were a confident lot. They believed reason and science came closer to commanding universal assent than any particular religion could. But the unintended consequences of a revolution are often more interesting than its intended ones. The hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment would spark a reaction. The romantic movement was the most obvious counter-Enlightenment, but to make that point does not take us very far. At a more primal level, there was an anomic reaction that undermined the Enlightenment from within. It is important to teach students about the long shadows cast by the Enlightenment itself across the eighteenth century. Otherwise they will never understand it."

Tonsor abruptly halted and leaned over. Since he was in his sixties, for an instant I wondered if it were his heart. To my relief he was only picking up a penny on the sidewalk. "For my grandchildren," he said, the pink skin of his face flushed from bending over. "I'll add it to their piggybank."

I registered this little kindness and asked how many grandchildren he had; it would be a good talking point to raise with his wife whom I was about to meet. But my mind was on the stretch. Since I was not sure what "anomic" meant, I sought clarification.

The 1897 source of the word "anomie"

"Anomie is one of the marks of modernity. It is as much a psychological condition as a social one. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim popularized the word in his study on suicide. 'Anomie' describes the psychological and social instability that results from the breakdown of values, beliefs, social norms, and social structures. In both individuals and institutions, you can detect symptoms of anomie in the loss of vision and purpose. People who lose their faith, who do not know the rules of the new order, or who have not discovered the role they should play in the new order, become disoriented and neurotic. That is to say, they become anomic."

"Like starting a game of checkers and suddenly finding yourself playing 3D chess?" I asked, seeking an adequate analogy.

"More like going from dominoes to football," said Tonsor, making the analogy even more outrageous. "Both are contact games but the similarity ends there!

"When people experience the loss of order, they manifest all the traits of Hell -- fear, anxiety, depression, guilt, boredom, and alienation. They cannot remain in such a state. The need for order will not be denied. When chaos eventually sparks a rage for order, the result, ironically, can be more disorder -- anything from bread riots to revolutions.

"If the scientific revolution and Enlightenment pushed people to question intellectual authority -- in the Catholic Church, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Aristotelian philosophy -- a mere nudge could get them to question political authority. Why have a king? Why have a pope? The many abuses in the Old Regime left France in dire need of reform by 1789. But the revolutionaries did not foresee the unintended consequences of their revolution. As Augustin Cochin,[5] Francois Furet, and others have pointed out, the great paradox of the French Revolution is that it started with the goal of ridding France of absolute monarchy ... and ended with the most absolutist ruler the nation ever had, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Anomie accompanied the upheaval every step of the way. Indeed, anomic mileposts line the chaotic road from the Enlightenment to Napoleon. This central paradox of the eighteenth century, barely mentioned in textbooks, would be a most interesting path for you to explore, Mr. Whitney."

I appreciated that he was suggesting a future paper that I might research and write. I had never before considered the anomic roots of modern revolution.

"Anomie is one way to approach the problem of modernity. Historians seek out its sources in the disorientation that comes from encountering strange lands; the discovery that we live in a vastly more pluralistic world than was previously imagined; the skepticism that arises from exploration and pluralism, Reformation and Counter-Reformation; the rise of the new public intellectuals who questioned all the old authorities; the decline of religious faith in the face of growing relativity; the overthrow of kings; the destruction of traditional life-ways; the breakdown of communities through war, enclosure, industrialization, and continuous economic innovation; the new technologies that destroyed craftsmanship and made workers redundant; the mass migrations into big cities; the lack of mediating institutions in the slums of those crowded cities; the new ant-heap societies. All of these developments contributed to the problem of modernity."

"Which is why you've devoted your career to understanding and confronting modernity?" I asked.

"Yes," he said with emphasis. "The problem of modernity in general is also the problem of the Enlightenment in particular. The philosophes drove long nails into the coffin of Christendom. They were revolutionaries in the most fundamental sense: They changed the way people think. Through their conversations and writings they reorganized discourse and attitudes about key questions -- about intellectual authority, about who has permission to tell civilization's story, about who gets to debate, about who can say what is real, about what is persuasive, about what is considered beyond the pale.

"The bolder thinkers of the Enlightenment put forward the silly idea that the human mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; that changing the environment can change the sense impressions that reach the mind; that human nature can thereby be perfected; and that a utopia can be achieved in this life. That concatenation of reasoning would result in modernity's endless social, political, and economic experiments. All these things make the Enlightenment one of the most significant transformations in world history. Because the Enlightenment changed the way people think, it anticipated as well as precipitated Europe's transition from the Renaissance and Reformation to the fully modern world.

Preoccupation with Decline and Fall during the Enlightenment

"In an upcoming lecture, I shall present abundant evidence of the contemporary reaction against the Enlightenment. Throughout the eighteenth century, the possibility of decline lurked behind the salons' sparkling conversations like a bad shadow. You can see the reaction in the luxury debates that explored how wealth leads to personal, familial, and societal decadence. You can see it in Piranesi's cult of ruins. You can see it in the manneristic-anomic style of painting which depicts nightmares and death. You can see it in the books that are preoccupied with the decay of the Roman Empire -- in Montesquieu's great work on the decadence of ancient Rome, and then Gibbon's magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. You can see it in the graveyard school of poets and especially in Thomas Gray's fascination with mortality in his melancholic poem, 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' You can see it in Edmund Burke who identified terror's link to the sublime. The debates, the art, the histories, the poetry -- all give us abundant justification to unmask the so-called Enlightenment and to see its underlying darkness. Out the window goes the Age of Reason's self-congratulatory theory of progress -- a theory inadequate to explain the regress it brought about. For all these reasons, it is advisable to handle the so-called Enlightenment with tongs.[6]

"And now you see, Mr. Whitney, where Ernst Cassirer comes in. The Enlightenment project as originally conceived did not take adequate account of its own shadows. In the modern age, the more perceptive one was, the more one discerned the implications of a world unmoored from the old absolutes and devoid of meaning.[7] No one was happy to live in this theater of the absurd. Cassirer was among the European thinkers who revived the search for universally valid meaning. As a humanist he wanted to restore integration to knowledge as well as wholeness to the human condition."

When he paused I made a mental note to capture, later that day, Tonsor's key to the Enlightenment with this organizing image:

Light bulb (reason) > hard rock (human nature) > shadows (irrationality, etc.)

What you see in the shadows is perhaps more important than what you see in the light. 

This insight captured something much more profound than what could be read in the history surveys. It was why I came to the University of Michigan to study under Stephen Tonsor. The morning made me feel the giddy frisson of discovery.

Then I looked up and saw that we had arrived at 1505 Morton Avenue.

________________________

[1] Joseph Ward Swain, The Harper History of Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 791.
[2] R. F. Baum, "The Age of Endarkenment: Naturalism and Nihilism in Modern Thought," Intercollegiate Review (spring 1986), pp. 39-48.
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Technology and the Conservative-Classical Liberal Debate," January 5, 1981, pp. 27-29; in Stephen J. Tonsor collection, box 41, file 1, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.
[4] Ibid., p. 6.
[5] Later in the day I learned that the French historian Augustin Cochin had been on Tonsor's mind in the late summer of 1987. Cochin had been inspired by Durkheim, and the former's investigation of the sociological-anomic roots of the French Revolution was among the topics treated in a dissertation being completed by one of Tonsor's students, Lawrence Winnie. (Stephen J. Tonsor letter to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2, in GW's private possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.)
[6] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 267.
[7] Ibid.

American Founding: Getting It Right

Do you think you know the birth of our nation? John Adams doesn't think so. "The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other," he railed in a letter to his friend Benjamin Rush in 1790. "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures and war."

I ask audiences how they would characterize what happened between 1761-1815 in Anglo-British North America. Something obviously changed.

Words matter. Ideas have consequences. Different words are used to characterize the change. Does the grand term "American Revolution" best capture what happened? Or does emphasizing the more defensive nature of the conflict with the term "resistance movement" seem more accurate? Some people highlight the military conflict, the "War for Independence." Others underscore the more positive action encapsulated by the term "American Founding." Still others perceptively insist that the conflict on both sides of the Atlantic was in essence a civil war over the meaning of the British constitution and ancient rights of Englishmen.

Perhaps it takes all five terms to characterize the change in Anglo-British North America between 1761-1815: What began as a constitutional debate turned into a resistance movement; the resistance movement morphed into a kind of civil war for independence; victory on the battlefield enabled Americans to found a new nation; Americans had to reassert that victory on the battlefield and at sea in the War of 1812; in retrospect, some of the changes during the war and founding were intentional and revolutionary. This is, indeed, a precis of what happened in Anglo-British North America between 1761-1815.
 
The purpose of the following essays is to get behind the convenient label "American Revolution" that we put on the box crammed with founding era stuff. The purpose is to explore the meaning of the changes in Anglo-British North America between 1761-1801. February 24, 1761, is a convenient beginning because that is when one of the chief protagonists of the story, John Adams, listened to a James Otis speech in a courtroom and was later moved to claim, "Then and there, the child independence was born." March 4, 1801, is an important marker because another chief protagonist, Thomas Jefferson, would look back and see the day of his inauguration as a second American Revolution.

You note that I follow some historians who stretch the ending of the period to include the War of 1812, often referred to as the Second War for Independence since the Americans and Brits still had not settled fundamental differences. U.S. territory was invaded and our nation's capital burned.

Other historians measure the end of the era with the presidency of John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson, the nation's last commanders in chief to have participated in some capacity in the era of the Revolutionary War. 

Historians vs. Hotheads

In any case, to understand two-and-a-half centuries of debate over the American Revolution, one must grapple with the legacy of the French Revolution (1789-'99). Although the French Revolution occurred in the 18th century, much of the history of the 19th century was a reaction to it. La Révolution française spawned or reinforced a passel of "isms" -- romanticism, liberalism, socialism, Marxism, progressivism, anarchism, social Darwinism, conservatism -- all competing in the marketplace of ideas. These ideologies generated a variety of polemical works not just about the French but also about the American Revolution. They can be fascinating reads, but they are not necessarily good history.

Out of the French Revolution and subsequent "isms" came the modern notion of the ideologue. The first known use of the word "ideologue" was, not surprisingly, in French in 1815. Merriam-Webster defines the ideologue as "an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology." Synonyms include crusader, fanatic, zealot, militant, partisan, red hot, true believer.

Philip Tetlock has humorously opined that partisan-ideologues "across the opinion spectrum are vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity."

If ideologues are by definition incapable of dispassionate work, can their writing be historically sound? Sure, parts of their writing can provide insights and the stimulus to further research. But the very definition of the word "ideologue" casts doubt on the historical integrity of their writing.

In part to take on the hotheaded "history" of the ideologues, academic history congealed as a profession in the 19th century. The new profession was an extension of the Enlightenment project and highly influenced by the German historian Leopold von Ranke. This father of modern history left a huge footprint on the historical profession. For he stressed the empirical method, gleaned facts from primary sources, constructed narratives that limited speculation, and resisted abstract theories. History should be written wie es eigentlich gewesen -- "as it actually happened." Moreover, professionally trained historians were to keep cool heads. They were to resist being co-opted by hotheads -- ideologues -- who subsumed all else to some religious, political, or social agenda. The antidote to ideology, this.

The trouble with historians is that they can appear to be dispassionate when in fact they are partisan. The trouble with ideologues is that their religious, political, or social agenda trumps the search for historical truth. Conflate the two, and such ideologically motivated historians should be handled with tongs. Their agendas are likely camouflaged by such trappings of objectivity as the use of archives, primary sources, direct quotations, footnotes, bibliographies, refereed literature, and other scientific apparatus. Don't be fooled. These trappings no more guarantee objectivity than makeup guarantees beauty. When a religious, political, or social agenda is considered more important than scrupulous inquiry into the past as it actually happened, then inconvenient evidence is ignored or manipulated. Tensions and paradoxes go unacknowledged. Historical narrative is warped by polemical assertion.

Ideology -- modernity's intellectual alchemy

Another antidote to ideologues and ideology goes farther back than Ranke. It is the scientific journal, an innovation that appeared in the 17th century at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Many honest seekers of knowledge about the natural world -- dubbed "natural philosophers" in early modern Europe -- were frustrated by alchemists who claimed secret knowledge of nature and refused to share that knowledge or submit their secrets to a candid world. To flush the alchemists out, these natural philosophers began publishing scientific journals. The idea behind scientific journals was to propose a more intellectually open and honest model to advance knowledge of the natural world. Pioneeering natural philosophers submitted their hypotheses, methods, data, knowledge, and assessments to a candid world so that anyone could test claims for themselves and evaluate the findings, consistent with the canons of evidence and the laws of thinking. Knowledge became established -- "laws" became paradigmatic -- when corroborated by subsequent experiments that were corroborated by universal reason over time.

We all know the limits of the Enlightenment ideal: (1) Reason is not the only way knowledge is acquired -- think of how important instinct, intuition, and emotional intelligence are to knowing. (2) Even when reason is scrupulously applied to the evidence, radically different interpretations -- each valid -- can result. (3) Believers in the three Abraham faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- believe that there are some things that human beings need to know but cannot know on their own, thus the necessity of God's revelation as a source of knowledge.

Whatever its limits, the Enlightenment model became normative for the historical profession. It proved useful for the acquisition of public knowledge of the past. It is the working assumption of historians trained after Ranke that knowledge of the past is advanced when researchers have open, equal access to the same archives and historical materials. Ideologues are not indifferent or friendly to this ideal. Worse, they do not have the courage, as Stephen Tonsor used to tell his students, to follow the evidence wherever it might lead, no matter how upsetting it may be to the status quo or to conventional wisdom. Ideologues are threatened by the open search for knowledge. They seek to coopt the evidence for their own purposes, often hiding behind jargon-laden theories that are comprehensible only to the gnostic few. They are yesterday's alchemists.

We have all heard about sensational instances of fraudulent science (fluoride, vaccines, aspartame, and both sides of the global warming debate). History is no less prone to fraud. Numerous flawed or fraudulent monographs have been foisted on the scholarly community and book-reading public. Perhaps most famous of all is David Irving's work that denied the reality of the Final Solution. Another notorious example of problematic "scholarship" is Michael Bellesiles's Arming America (2001). Because the author could not produce the evidence he claims to have consulted, the work appears to be more of an attack on the National Rifle Association than an accurate study of early American gun ownership. The History News Network has posted a longish list of authors who have been accused by of sloppy, misleading, or outright dishonest scholarship.

As William Kelleher Storey points out in Writing History, "Real historical writers probe factual uncertainties, but they do not invent convenient facts and they do not ignore inconvenient facts. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts."

McDonald vs. Beard

The American founding is one of the salients over which historians of various schools and ideologues of various stripes have fought. One of the most famous contests occurred when Forrest McDonald answered -- and corrected -- Charles Beard's highly partisan interpretation of the Constitution's framers. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) reevaluated the founders as economic agents. In deliberations over the Constitution, their votes yea or nay supposedly reflected class- and self-interest above all else. It was a questionable assumption but, among progressive historians, the work was well received. Beard's career took a turn for the worse when he asserted that Franklin Roosevelt was more to blame for American involvement in World War II than Japan or Germany.

As a graduate student, Forrest McDonald challenged Beard by revisiting the source material and discovering that the Constitution's framers were motivated not so much by economic interest as by the political ideals and experiences of a people living in the legacy of the Glorious Revolution and a century of self-rule. McDonald's work has stood the test of time. It is honest historical scholarship untainted by ideology. After McDonald published three books demolishing Beard, it was hard ever to read Beard's Economic Interpretation other than as a period piece of the Progressive Era.

One U.S. President's Interpretation of the American Revolution

Not surprisingly, U.S. presidents come to terms with the American Revolution in instructive ways. One president recently wrote of the Founders:

"It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of an idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course, to drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them.... They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity."

This passage is from The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (p. 93), by then-Senator Barack Obama. On the face of it, the author properly rejects ideologies and "isms." His interpretation sounds reasonable, but is it entirely plausible?

No doubt, some of the more intellectually radical founders -- Thomas Paine and the very young Thomas Jefferson -- did subscribe to the Enlightenment ideal of the open-ended pursuit of truth in all its manifestations -- theological, philosophical, political, and historical. But to claim that the Founders rejected absolute truth is inaccurate. More precisely, it is to commit the historical fallacy of presentism, which interprets the past not in its context but in ours.

There is evidence aplenty to refute the notion that the Founders were relativists. Even Jefferson by the time he was 33 years old was writing in the Declaration of Independence of self-evident truths established by the laws of nature and nature's God. Doesn't the notion of transcendent laws suggest that he and the 55 other signers of the Declaration subscribed to at least a few absolute truths, especially regarding the rights of human beings? Indeed, quite a number of founders were confident in a good many absolutes. Take John Jay, a devout, orthodox, church-going Christian through the entire founding period. He and other orthodox Christians rejected the more extreme claims of the radical Enlightenment then current in France. It was only because they were confident in "the protection of divine Providence" that the Founders could stake their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the revolution. It would be difficult to imagine such an assertion in the defense of a thoroughgoing relativism.

A later writer, John Courtney Murray, observed in We Hold These Truths -- and I thank Tracy Mehan for reminding me of the passage -- "The sense of the famous phrase ["We hold these truths"] is simply this: There are truths, and we hold them, and we here lay them down as the basis and inspiration of the American project, this constitutional commonwealth." Against the relativists, Murray argued that "the life of man in society under government is founded on truths, on a certain body of objective truth, universal in its import, accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible.... If this assertion is denied, the American Proposition is, I think, eviscerated at one stroke."

Getting It Right

The American founding deserves to be understood as it actually happened. After all, this is our founding. It realized our inherent rights as human beings. It makes our way of life possible. Not only that, but it is also one of the top 25 threshold events in human history, guided by the most remarkable generation of political thinkers and actors the world has ever seen. We owe it to the rising generation (and of course to ourselves) to get the history right.

In the spirit of getting the history right, the following essays explore big issues of the American founding that have been historiographic and ideological minefields.


To learn more, visit http://www.allpresidents.org/