America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism

266 Pages·2006·1.132 MB·English

by  Gary L. McDowell, Johnathan O’Neill (eds.)

America and Enlightenment
Constitutionalism
STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS
Edited by James Dunkerley
Institute for the Study of the Americas
University of London
School of Advanced Study
Titles in this series are multidisciplinary studies of aspects of the
societies of the hemisphere, particularly in the areas of politics,
economics, history, anthropology, sociology and the environment.
The series covers a comparative perspective across the Americas,
including Canada and the Caribbean as well as the USA and Latin
America.
Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Cuba's Military 1990–2005: Revolutionary Soldiers
during Counter-Revolutionary Times
By Hal Klepak
The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America
Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell
Latin America: A New Interpretation
By Laurence Whitehead
Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina
By Arnd Schneider
America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism
Edited by Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives
Edited by Jens R. Hentschke
Caribbean Land and Development Revisited
Edited by Jean Besson and Janet Momsen
America and Enlightenment
Constitutionalism
Edited by
Gary L. McDowell
and
Johnathan O’Neill
AMERICAANDENLIGHTENMENTCONSTITUTIONALISM
© Gary L.McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill,2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7236-1
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53362-6 ISBN 978-0-230-60106-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230601062
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
America and Enlightenment constitutionalism / edited by Gary L.
McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Constitutional history––United States.2.United States––Politics
and government––1775–1783.3.Constitutional law––United States––
European influences.4.Enlightenment.I.McDowell,Gary L.,1949–
II.O’Neill,Johnathan G.(Johnathan George)
KF4520.A76 2006
342.7302(cid:2)9––dc22 2006044757
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First edition:September 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected merely
because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of
America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of
former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration
for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their
own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of
their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the
possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations
displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public
happiness.
—James Madison, The Federalist, No. 14
Contents
Introduction 1
Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
Part I Enlightenment Philosophy
and Constitutionalism
Chapter 1
Recovering (From) Enlightenment? 13
Steven D. Smith
Chapter 2
The Positivization of Natural Rights 57
Martin Loughlin
Chapter 3
Epicureanism and the Enlightenment 81
Frederick Rosen
Chapter 4
Preface to Liberalism: Locke’s First Treatise
and the Bible 99
Robert Faulkner
Chapter 5
Montesquieu and the Constitution of Liberty 123
Paul A. Rahe
Part II The Enlightenment and
the Constitution in America
Chapter 6
The American Enlightenment 159
Gordon S. Wood
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 7
Enlightenment and Experience:
The Virginia Constitution of 1776 177
Colin Bonwick
Chapter 8
Nation-Making and the American
Constitutional Process 201
J. R. Pole
Chapter 9
Ticklish Experiments: The Paradox of American
Constitutionalism 217
Jack N. Rakove
Chapter 10
James Madison and the Idea of Fundamental Law 243
C. Bradley Thompson
Contributors 265
Index 269
Introduction
Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
B
y some estimates the Enlightenment began in 1687 with the
publication of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy. Others would place the start earlier, perhaps in 1642 with
the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive, in many ways the pre-
cursor of his more famous work, Leviathan, which appeared in 1651.
Still others would push the origins back to Descartes’s publication of
the Discourse on Method in 1637, or even further to Francis Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning of 1605. All these thinkers and those who
followed in their paths undertook to open to the scrutiny of human
reason the mysteries of the universe and of man’s place in it. Through
science, they believed, the gloom of superstition and the dim lights of
dogma would be replaced; their goal was, in the strictest sense,
enlightenment.1
Whatever date one might choose to mark the beginning of the
Enlightenment, the fact is it stretched far into the future, dominating
the intellectual life of the eighteenth century and influencing most of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That “remarkable efflores-
cence” of human thought has never been without its defenders and
advocates. To them, the very foundation of Western modernity is the
result of all that is good in the thought of those seemingly disparate
thinkers who emerged from the medieval shadows and sought to train
the light of human reason on the world. Thus it is to that tradition—
to the likes of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Newton along with
John Locke and Adam Smith, among many others—that thanks are
owed for everything from constitutionalism and the rule of law to
advances in the natural sciences to liberal capitalism. Never, say the
friends of the Enlightenment, has a body of thought done more to
ameliorate the pain, insecurity, inconvenience, and suffering of so many
at every level of society over such a long period of time.
Yet neither has the Enlightenment been without its critics. To
many, the essence of the Enlightenment project was an effort to
2 GARY L. MCDOWELL AND JOHNATHAN O’NEILL
supplant faith with reason; inevitably, these critics insist, mankind was
left stranded in an amoral netherworld where all too often the results
have been predictably disastrous. From the terror that came in
the wake of the French Revolution to the purges in the aftermath of
the Russian Revolution to the startling atrocities of Hitler, all were the
result of the errors of Enlightenment thought being drawn out to
their logical and sad conclusions. As the twentieth century drew to a
close, the Enlightenment and its legacy were beset by a host of critics
offering alternatives, from postmodernists broadly considered to
communitarians who had grown weary of the moral hollowness of
individual rights that were bereft of any sense of public responsibility.2
When it comes to thinking about the Enlightenment and its place
in human history, there seems to be no middle ground between its
friends and its foes.3A few years ago The Economistobserved this strik-
ing dichotomy once it had again become fashionable to argue that the
Enlightenment had been “a catastrophic error.”4 The world seems
divided between those who “regard western modernity as a marvel
(despite its failings)” and others who see the Enlightenment tradition
as nothing less than “a disaster (despite its superficial attractions).”5
All is black or white with no muted shades of grey to be found. And,
given the stark opposition, it is a debate that promises to continue
indefinitely.
Whether one loves or hates the Enlightenment and all it has engen-
dered in the past several hundred years, there is one unmistakable fact
about it. There is no nation more closely associated with its most basic
premises than the United States, both in its very creation and in its
role of perpetuating those premises as the essence of the principles of
ordered liberty and republican justice. After all, the United States was
the first nation that could boast, as Alexander Hamilton would put it,
of having been created from “reflection and choice” and was not
merely the result of “accident and force” as were all the other nations
of the world.6America was not just created, but was created in light of
truths deemed to be universal.
In understanding the relationship of the United States to the
Enlightenment, it is necessary to look both backward and forward.
On the one hand, America was built upon a foundation that was, if
not exclusively at least primarily, the result of well-established
Enlightenment principles.7 On the other hand, the Americans’
European inheritance encouraged them to make their own original
contributions to the Enlightenment.8 Especially when it came to
politics, Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James
Madison, and Thomas Jefferson were innovators in, and contributors