Founding Visions: The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections that Created America PDF
Preview Founding Visions: The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections that Created America
Founding Visions Founding Visions The ideas, individuals, and intersections that Created America Lance Banning Edited and with an Introduction by Todd EsTEs Foreword by Gordon s. Wood Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results. Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical society, Kentucky state University, Morehead state University, Murray state University, northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 south Limestone street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Frontispiece: Lance Banning (Courtesy of the University of Kentucky History department). Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. IsBn 978-0-8131-5284-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) IsBn 978-0-8131-5286-8 (epub) IsBn 978-0-8131-5285-1 (pdf) This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American national standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United states of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses Contents Foreword by Gordon s. Wood vii Introduction 1 Part 1. The enduring issues of the american Revolution, 1776–1815 11 The Problem of Power: Parties, Aristocracy, and democracy in revolutionary Thought 13 Part 2. Republicanism, Liberalism, and the great Transition 33 Jeffersonian Ideology revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the new American republic 37 The republican Interpretation: retrospect and Prospect 57 some second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of revolutionary Thinking 81 Quid Transit? Paradigms and Process in the Transformation of republican Ideas 101 Part 3. The constitution 107 The Constitutional Convention 111 The Federalist Papers 133 1787 and 1776: Patrick Henry, James Madison, the Constitution, and the revolution 145 Part 4. James Madison 173 James Madison and the nationalists, 1780–1783 177 The Hamiltonian Madison: A reconsideration 211 The Practicable sphere of a republic: James Madison, the Constitutional Convention, and the Emergence of revolutionary Federalism 237 Part 5. The First Party conflict 265 Political Economy and the Creation of the Federal republic 269 The Jeffersonians: First Principles 313 Acknowledgments 343 Appendix: Bibliography of Published Works by Lance Banning 347 Copyrights and Permissions 357 Index 359 Foreword Gordon S. Wood Lance Banning was no ordinary historian. Indeed, he was one of the most distinguished American historians of his generation. not only has he had an important and lasting effect on our understanding of the ideas and politics of the early republic, but, more important, his writings (the best of which are collected in this book) have become a model of what historical schol- arship ought to be. In his approach to the past he had no present-minded political agenda, no desire to browbeat the past for the sake of reforming an oppressive present. All he sought to do in his scholarship was explain as care- fully and as scrupulously as possible what the ideas and politics of the early republic were like. not that he was uninterested in the present. nor did he deny any connec- tion between then and now. In fact, he always believed that the discussions that the Founders had among themselves were worth listening to. Perhaps if we listened closely enough to the past, he said, we might be able to see our present problems from fresh perspectives. He was convinced that we could learn something from the Founders, that their ideas and values, though com- ing from a different world, still had relevance for us. He realized that the Founders he studied and admired, especially James Madison, knew only too well that political power was dangerous and that it had to be separated and balanced but not repudiated. Ultimately, however, Lance respected the integ- rity and separateness of the past. He was a historian’s historian; he took the fears and fantasies of the participants in the past seriously and always sought to be objective and fair to the figures he studied. And he never wrote his his- tory with any crude didactic purpose in mind. I first met Lance in the early 1970s when he became executive director of the American Civilization Program at Brown University, where I had been vii viii Foreword teaching since 1969. He had just received his Ph.d. from Washington Uni- versity, where he had encountered two of the most stimulating scholars of the early modern Anglo-American world, John Murrin and J. G. A. Pocock. Interacting with those scholars helped prepare him for a fresh approach to intellectual history in the writing of his dissertation, “The Quarrel with Fed- eralism: A study in the origins and Character of republican Thought”(1971). He soon developed that dissertation into his book The Jeffersonian Persua- sion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978). In this work Lance did not neglect the great minds of political theory. James Harrington, John Locke, and david Hume were present. But his work was not a traditional study of the influence of the ideas of these great thinkers; it was not a history of ideas abstracted from their social and political circumstances. Instead, his work moved along the borderland between ideas and politics, where ideas interacted with poli- tics and became what he labeled ideology. His book was the cultural history of politics at its best, and it profoundly influenced our understanding of the early republic. since in the early 1970s when we first met Lance was preparing his dis- sertation for publication and I had recently published my book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969), we discovered that we had a lot in common. Indeed, we could scarcely keep from seeking out opportunities to talk about the history of the early republic. I still recall our many conver- sations with excitement and pleasure. We marveled at the emergence of what was already being called the “republican synthesis,” little realizing at the time what a monster that “hypothesis,” as Lance labeled it, would become. It was an intellectually stimulating time for me, and I only wish that Lance could have stayed at Brown. But his administrative position at Brown was tempo- rary and carried no tenure. In 1973 he became an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, where he spent the rest of his career. We kept up our intellectual relationship, of course, but it was more hit or miss. Because we were interested in the same material, our scholarly paths crossed more often than most. We were invited to nearly every conference on republicanism or the Founding and had many opportunities at these meetings to renew our conversations about the early republic. Although we occasionally differed on some points (I thought he played down Madison’s nationalism in the 1780s too much, which he needed to do in order to make sense of Madison’s states’ rights position of the 1790s), we both agreed that the supposed opposition between a republican tradition and a liberal tradition maintained by many historians, political theorists, and law professors was wrongheaded. We both believed that a sharp dichotomy between two clearly Foreword ix identifiable intellectual traditions could not be supported by the complicated reality of the Founding era. But it was Lance who produced the series of articles that undermined that dichotomy. In his work, much of which is col- lected in this book, he showed the scholarly world how the Founders, grap- pling with an ever-changing political reality, linked and blended together the two seemingly incompatible traditions. Few bodies of scholarship have had as great an impact on the study of the political thought of early America as has Lance’s. What in my mind is most impressive about Lance’s scholarship is the care and honesty he brought to it. nothing for him was ever simple about the past. He thought through every problem and wrestled with every issue concerned with the ideas and politics of the early republic. For him, everything about the era of the Founding was more complicated, more nuanced, more filled with tension than most scholars were willing to admit. Where others saw simplicity, he saw complexity. Where others lumped things together, he drew distinctions. He had a subtle and scrupulous mind. no one in my opinion was a more painstaking scholar than Lance. Lance always worried that he was too slow in bringing his work to press, that he was not productive enough. He should not have worried. When the works of other scholars will be long forgotten, Lance’s scholarship on the era of the Founding will continue to be discussed and plumbed. We are indeed fortunate to have much of that important and insightful scholarship brought together in this book.
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