Cycles of American political thought

141 Pages·2006·1.709 MB·English

by  Kobylka, Joseph Fiske

Cycles of
American Political Thought
Part I

Professor Joseph F. Kobylka

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Joseph F. Kobylka, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Political Science, Southern Methodist University

Joseph F. Kobylka is an associate professor of Political Science and a founding member of the John Goodwin
Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University. He graduated magna cum laude from Beloit
College in 1978, with B.A. degrees in Government and History, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota
in 1985. His teaching and research interests include American politics, constitutional law, judicial behavior, and
American political thought, with particular interest in the interchange between constitutional law, theory, and
doctrine, and American political thought. An inaugural recipient of SMU’s Altshuler Distinguished Teaching
Professor Award in 2001, Dr. Kobylka has earned various honors for his teaching at SMU, among them four
Rotunda Outstanding Professor Awards, the Golden Mustang Award, the “M” Award, the Willis M. Tate Award,
the Bridge Award, and the Deschner Award in Women’s Studies. He is also a member of the University’s Academy
of Distinguished Teachers. In 1992, he received a Godbey University Lecture Series author’s award. He served as
the “Public Scholar” for SMU’s Maguire Center for Ethics and Public responsibility in the fall of 2006.
Dr. Kobylka has authored or co-authored three books: The Supreme Court and Legal Change: Abortion and the
Death Penalty (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), Public Interest Law: An Annotated Bibliography
(Garland Publishing, 1992), and The Politics of Obscenity: Group Litigation in a Context of Legal Change
(Greenwood Press, 1991). He is currently finishing The Judicial Odyssey of Harry A. Blackmun, a biography of the
former U.S. Supreme Court justice, which will be published by the University of Virginia Press. The author of more
than 20 articles in political science journals, law reviews, and edited volumes, Kobylka’s work on the politics and
thought of the American founding includes “Madison, The Federalist, and the Constitutional Order: Human Nature
and Institutional Structure” (Polity, 1987) and “The Dialogic Community: Education, Leadership, and Participation
in Madison’s Thought” (The Review of Politics, 1990).
Dr. Kobylka’s more topical writings have appeared in Legal Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia
Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, and The Indianapolis Star. In the winter of 2007, he
will appear in a four-part PBS series on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
He is a veteran of 27 years of marriage to Janet, the father of three boys, and the occasionally frustrated owner of a
rotisserie baseball team, “Publius.”

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Table of Contents

Cycles of American Political Thought
Part I

Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture One America—The Philosophical Experiment.................3
Lecture Two Historical Baggage....................................................5
Lecture Three Theoretical Baggage..................................................7
Lecture Four A Puritan Beginning..................................................9
Lecture Five Expansion and Individualism..................................11
Lecture Six The Revolutionary Context......................................13
Lecture Seven The Road to the Declaration of Independence.........16
Lecture Eight A “Natural” Revolutionary—Thomas Paine...........19
Lecture Nine The Unconscious Dialectic of Crèvecoeur..............22
Lecture Ten John Adams—“Constitutionalist”............................25
Lecture Eleven A Political Constitution...........................................28
Lecture Twelve A Philosophical Constitution—Faction...................31
Timeline.............................................................................................................34
Glossary.............................................................................................................38
Bibliography................................................................................................Part II
Biographical Notes....................................................................................Part III

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Cycles of American Political Thought

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
—Margaret Thatcher

Scope:
Commentators often suggest that Americans have no political philosophy. The standard line is that Americans are
doers, not thinkers; pragmatists, not philosophers. On first glance, this seems insightful; however, close examination
of the corpus of American political thought makes clear that this thought-action dichotomy is illusory. Born of
English parents and developed in changing and increasingly heterogeneous contexts, American political thought has
cycled around an essentially liberal core for nearly 400 years.
Although Americans tend not to think explicitly in terms of abstract theory, our very institutions are informed by
theory. In fact, as Garry Wills has noted, America is an “invented” country, the construct of men who consciously
built political structures to govern a nation. The traditional concerns of political philosophy guided them: the nature
of humans, the sources of legitimate social and political authority, the nature of community, the role of the
individual citizen, and the proper ends of social and governmental order. Thus, instead of being theory-poor,
American institutions are rooted in, and have developed from, explicitly philosophical origins. Wittingly or not, this
conditions American citizens: Our thought and actions are theory bound and guided.
This lecture series is about the origins and development of that thought and the philosophical cycles that have spun
off from it. Tracing these cycles will take us from Plymouth to the present.
An introductory comment on the American tradition is in order. Louis Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America
(1955), argued it to be irreducibly liberal. Anchored in John Locke, American thought revolves around liberal
conceptualizations of individualism, natural rights, consent, and limited government. Hartz paints a two-
dimensional picture of a “liberal” society that has remained remarkably stable over its history.
Although liberalism is a consistent presence in America, reducing the tradition of American political thought to it
ignores two essential points. First, non-liberal thinkers, from the Puritans to the Students for a Democratic Society,
have been recurrent participants in the American political conversation. Their arguments are part of its philosophical
tradition. Second, liberalism itself is not a single, univariate force. Locke’s liberalism could accommodate a king;
America’s could not. Further, America’s liberalism has never spoken with one voice. Stressing different elements of
Locke’s argument, American liberals contested one another over proper responses to changing realities. This
occasioned development of subtly different but politically significant variants of liberalism. To understand the
richness of the American political tradition, we must account for these permutations in liberalism, the arguments of
those who challenged them, and the cyclical ebb and flow in thought that resulted from this dynamic. Hartz’s insight
is a beginning, not an end.
To this end, our survey of American political thought will be broad. We will examine the history of American
political thought (including the various contending schools of thought that have emerged, waxed, and waned) and
elements of political theory (such as the fundamental assumptions, concepts, and concerns that orient these
analyses). We will not confine ourselves to recognized “political thinkers.” The development of thought is not
confined to scholars writing at desks for people reading in studies; it is a dynamic conversation of broad scope. We
will examine thinkers commonly associated with political philosophy (e.g., James Madison, John C. Calhoun, and
Herbert Croly), but we will also treat the theoretical dimensions of political statesmen (e.g., Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan), activists (e.g., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eugene Debs, Martin Luther
King, Jr.), and institutions. Foremost among the latter will be the Supreme Court. Because the American founders
bequeathed a “Republic of Laws,” the Court has played a profound role in our ongoing philosophical dialogue. The
reason for this inclusive approach is simple: Philosophy does not confine itself to dusty volumes on library shelves.
The development of a living tradition of political thought is a dynamic interaction among thinkers, actors,
institutions, and their times.
Our story will unfold historically, but five themes will recur. First, the notion of American exceptionalism permeates
American thought. John Winthrop called America a “Citty upon a Hill.” His gloss was religious, but the notion that
America is an experiment and “the best hope of mankind” intertwines with much secular thought, as well. In the
various guises of exceptionalism, we find distinctive American senses of self and mission. Second, we will attend to
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the dynamic malleability of liberalism. Born in England; transported to a new world; hovering over the design,
practice, and critique of government; and subjected to changing historical contexts, liberalism developed contending
variants in America. The dialogue between them—often accounting for political, social, and economic problems
highlighted by non-liberals—underpins the cycles of American thought. As our third theme, we will consider the
idea that, rather than being founded once, America has had many foundings. These “reconstitutions” resulted from
the interplay of thought, practice, and critique, and they framed the philosophical cycles that define the American
tradition. Fourth, we will confront the demands that an increasing inclusiveness have placed on American thought.
From what was called “We the People” by 55 white, propertied men in Philadelphia has emerged a notion of “the
people” far more vast and philosophically challenging. Finally, we will focus on the role of “space” (sometimes
referred to as “the frontier”) in shaping and shifting the substance of thought. In many ways, it is the most uniquely
American dimension of political theory, and it is fundamental to understanding its development.
Discussions of political philosophy too often turn abstract and acrid. This is a shame, because philosophic
assumptions are all around us. They inform, implicitly and explicitly, how we make sense of (and act in) the world
in which we live. The American political tradition is rife with nuance and difference. By looking at it closely, we
will see that it is defined by cycles in which different kinds of liberals accommodate challenges by changing
contexts and non-liberal thinkers. In doing so, they argue (often heatedly) among themselves in an effort to claim a
“true” liberalism that never really existed in a country invented to accommodate the dynamism of political life.

2 ©2006 The Teaching Company
Lecture One

America—The Philosophical Experiment

Scope: Discussions of political philosophy too often turn abstract and acrid. This is a shame, because philosophic
assumptions are all around us. Despite our reputation for being pragmatists, Americans are enmeshed in
political theory. The United States is an invented country: one designed by men guided by philosophical
and historical “truths” they held to be “self-evident.” Its government is framed by a Constitution that
embeds some of those “truths” in fundamental law.
Louis Hartz argued that American political thought was simply liberal. This is an oversimplification.
Although liberalism is the dominant philosophical strand in the American tradition, it is a multifaceted
theoretical framework that admits of many, often competing variations. Further, many alternative
perspectives dot the American philosophical landscape, beginning with the religious authoritarianism of the
Puritans. In this course, we will explore the rich philosophical history of America and discover the cycles
of thought that characterize the experiment of the “Citty upon a Hill.”

Outline
I. Why does the history of American political thought matter?
A. America is a political entity self-consciously designed by philosophically informed architects.
1. It grew from seeds planted by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment.
2. As such, it gives us a living, breathing example of philosophic development.
B. We will assess three elements essential to the development of American political thought:
1. The main currents of American thought cycle around a hub of liberalism.
2. As we will see, liberalism is a philosophy with the individual at its center.
3. It entails certain concepts—autonomy, liberty, equality, consent, and limited external authority over
the individual—though each concept can be read differently.
4. As the course develops, we will see that the “play in the joints” in these liberal conceptions creates
contending “liberalisms,” which we will call minimal state and active state liberalism.
5. In addition, alternative philosophies arise to challenge liberalism and respond to changing times.
6. The interaction among these contending schools of thought, liberal and otherwise, creates the context
for the development of American political thought and conditions the cycles that it experiences over
time.
C. We will examine two interrelated aspects of the American political tradition:
1. The explicitly theoretical arguments that different thinkers make.
2. The ebb and flow of arguments as the historical context changes.
D. We will sample from a broad scope of materials:
1. The arguments of self-conscious, intentional political theorists.
2. The theoretical implications of the positions and policies of political actors.
3. Opinions in Supreme Court decisions that are central to themes of political theory.
II. In canvassing American political thought, we will touch on five recurring themes:
A. The first is American exceptionalism, which takes on sectarian and secular forms.
B. The second is the dynamic malleability of liberalism, which allows one core philosophy to adjust its
contours to changes in context.
C. Third, we will see that rather than having one “founding,” America has experienced at least three
“reconstitutions.”
D. Fourth, we will look at the concept of “the people,” which has been an expansive idea, with pressures for
greater inclusion pressing on the polity from the time when 55 white, property-holding men gathered in
Philadelphia to write the Constitution.
E. Finally, we will explore the distinctly American notion of space, which in the context of the vast virgin
continent becomes a multifaceted and central part of the political thought that emerges from it.
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III. The course will take us over the broad and varied range of thought that has arisen as the American experiment
has unfolded.
A. Central to the development of American political thought is the way thinkers, actors, and institutions have
interacted.
1. The historical, social, and economic context of the times frames thought.
2. The relationship between ideas and context is dynamic.
3. In this interplay, we will see cycles of thought: elements of older arguments reemerging to contest with
contemporary conceptions.
B. Louis Hartz, a historian of American thought, argued that America’s political tradition is liberal, but the
story is more complex and interesting.
1. In this series, we will see that a variety of political philosophies have emerged from the fertile soil of
the New World.
2. In the beginning, there were the Puritans and their conservative attachment to order, hierarchy, and
truths defined for the people and imposed on them.
3. During the revolutionary period, different conceptions of liberalism emerged and contested to control
the philosophical content of the American idea.
4. In the early 1800s, pressures for greater inclusion expanded “We the people,” but divided them over
issues of race and gender, as well.
5. The Civil War and the events leading up to it brought non-liberal arguments grounded in socialism and
conservativism to the national fore.
6. The Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century saw socialist and anarchistic arguments reemerge to
challenge the liberalisms competing at the war’s end.
7. With industrialization and the rise of nationwide corporations came an economically defined
liberalism (Social Darwinism) that spawned a rich array of philosophical response.
8. The Great Depression of the 1930s clipped the wings of minimal state liberalism and helped usher in
the active state liberalism implicit in Jefferson and Lincoln.
9. Political thought since the end of World War II has been a tussle between minimal and active state
liberalism as the nation continues to define itself in the present by, in part, reaching back to its past.
10. In sum, the liberalism that Hartz saw as defining American political thought has itself been defined, in
part, by this rich field of philosophical traditions.
C. In understanding the strains of political thought of the past, we must understand the present.
1. To talk about where we are, we need to talk about where we came from.
2. Knowing where we came from helps place present-day debates about political philosophy, often called
“ideology,” in a broader perspective.
3. This perspective shows us where—and why—we differ.
4. It also shows us what we share as the inheritors of what John Winthrop called in 1630 the “Citty upon
a Hill” that we understand to be America.

Suggested Readings:
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.
Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought.
Lyman Sargent, Contemporary Political Ideologies.
Glenn Tinder, Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why is it important that we attend to American political thought?
2. What is the relationship between ideas (theory) and context (history)?

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Lecture Two

Historical Baggage

Scope: Before there was an America in the European mind, the seeds of the American experience were sown by
what Thomas Paine would later call “the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” William the Conqueror is
the focal point for the genesis of the British state; 450 years later, descendants of that state traveled to the
New World. Much had changed in England over those years, and these changes came in the baggage the
colonists brought with them to America.
It has been said that “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” It is significant that the British colonized
America. The “tree of liberty,” with its conception of rights, law, and legitimate governance, was planted in
England and transplanted, with all the growth it had experienced, in America. From this plant grew a
uniquely American field of political thought, thought with roots in the British historical experience. To
understand where we ended up, we must understand where we started, and to understand where we started,
we must look back.

Outline
I. America did not fall from the heavens fully formed.
A. The first European settlers to the “virgin” continent were English.
1. They brought with them pre-formed conceptions of society and government.
2. These conceptions framed their approach to life in the New World.
3. To understand American thought, we need to unpack the baggage its first settlers brought with them.
B. The next lecture will look at the theoretical baggage they carried; in this lecture, we look at the historical.
II. Any thumbnail sketch of historical development will be incomplete, but here, we look at signal events in the
development of the British constitution.
A. England does not have a written constitution but a collection of documents and decisions that collectively
establishes an unwritten constitution.
1. A constitution creates forms of governmental decision making.
2. A constitution frames the scope of, and limits on, the authority of government.
3. A constitution establishes canons of legitimacy by which governmental actions are evaluated.
B. The following events had signal importance in defining the British norms of governance that the colonists
carried to America:
1. The institution of the English state in 1066.
2. The Salisbury Oath taken by the barons in 1086.
3. Development of the Curia Regis during the reign of Henry II (1154–1189).
4. The acceptance of the Magna Charta by King John in 1215.
5. The decision in Bonham’s Case (1610) by Chief Justice Edward Coke.
6. The Petition of Right (1628) presented to Charles I.
7. The English Civil War (1642–1651), the Interregnum (1649–1660), and the Restoration (1660).
8. The Habeas Corpus Act (1679).
9. The Glorious Revolution (1688–1689).
10. The English Bill of Rights (1689).
11. The Act of Settlement (1701).
III. English constitutional governance was born of a long political struggle for power.
A. This struggle created a conception of proper governance.
1. The power of government is limited.
2. Citizens have rights against the state that cannot be infringed.
3. Executive authority must coexist with popular authority.
B. As Englishmen, American colonists followed and learned from this history.
1. Many of these events occurred during the early American settlements.
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2. In part, they reflected some of the religious concerns that animated the migration to America.
3. They informed the “English way” of governance.
4. And, although the colonists did not know it at the time, these events also foreshadowed the future
course of events that their descendants would experience.
C. This history created the context in which the colonists would craft their politics.
D. This crafting would be informed, in part, by the theoretical reconstruction of this history.

Suggested Readings:
George Burton Adams, The Origin of the English Constitution.
Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485–1714.
Ann Lyon, Constitutional History of the United Kingdom.

Questions to Consider:
1. What is the significance of English history for American political thought?
2. What is the British constitution, and how does it differ from America’s constitution?
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Lecture Three

Theoretical Baggage

Scope: The early colonists also brought theoretical baggage with them. They arrived on American shores with a
distinctly English understanding of politics, society, and governance. The last lecture examined English
historical development. This lecture focuses on the theoretical elements of that development. First, we
touch on Protestant understandings of social and political life unleashed by the Reformation. Second, we
examine the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
The American tradition of political thought was born from this interplay of thought and action, theory and
history. Locke provided the colonists with a logic and vocabulary of politics that grew in importance over
the 18th century: liberalism. Central to it were concepts of individualism, rights, freedom, equality, contract,
and limited government. The English (and Calvinist) version of the Reformation arrived in the colonies
earlier and brought its own distinct arguments. In these competing visions of liberalism and Calvinism, we
find the beginnings of the cycles of American political thought.

Outline
I. The political drama discussed in the last lecture was not the only baggage the colonists carried to America.
A. Historical events do not exist in a vacuum.
1. As events occur, people attempt to make more general sense of them.
2. One way to do this is to create explanations for events that put them in a larger interpretive context.
3. The birth of liberalism was an interpretive response to this historical drama.
B. In addition to the political tumult that shook England in the 17th century, there was also significant
religious ferment.
1. The Reformation in Europe touched England in the mid-16th century.
2. In reaction to this, many competing Protestant sects emerged.
3. One of these, the Puritans, brought the Reformation to the New World.
C. These two theoretical traditions—one political, the other religious—conditioned the ways in which the
English and the colonists viewed and understood their world.
II. The Protestant Reformation destroyed the Catholic Church as the fount of Christianity.
A. Martin Luther began this process in Germany.
B. John Calvin challenged Catholic authority in Geneva.
1. By 1541, Calvin had essentially become the governing authority in Geneva.
2. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) was declared holy writ in Geneva.
3. Institutionalized, Calvin’s teachings held that the role of the state was to enforce the dictates of the
church as law.
4. The moral values of the Old Testament became the basis of the law.
C. The Reformation in England was formalized by the Act of Supremacy (1534).
D. After the establishment of the Church of England, dissenters emerged.
1. Some found Anglicanism insufficient and sought Calvinist practices.
2. Among these were members of a sect called the Puritans.
III. Liberalism is the defining theoretical explanation of the Glorious Revolution, and its impact on America is
enormous.
A. Liberalism is a political philosophy grounded on the primacy of the individual.
1. Central to its argument are concepts of rational self-interest, consent, rights, limited government,
liberty, and equality.
2. These central concepts are all subject to different interpretations and weightings.
B. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is the intellectual father of liberalism.
1. He wrote in the context of the English Civil War and was animated by fear of disorder.
2. Man originally existed in a state of nature, devoid of authority external to him.
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