agent, the Pope’s authority extended downward both within and without the Church. In the latter realm, it extended downward to monarchs – Kings and Queens – held to rule by “divine right.” Under the feudal system, that hierarchical line of authority extended downward from the monarch to his or her Lords and Nobles, to their vassals and serfs. Under a feudal political order, the lines of authority concerning who got to tell whom what to do were clearly defined, running vertically from top to bottom. These lines of authority were understood to be not only the reality, but rightful.
The dawn of modernity, which was characterized by a new focus on men as unique, worldly, self-determining agents, was reflected in, and driven by, a series of revolutionary new departures: the invention of the printing press (c. 1440); the (Protestant) Reformation (c. 1517–1648) and, relatedly, the first translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, the Protestant elevation of the laity above the clergy, and the democratization of church structures. The new humanism, an incipient capitalism, and Protestantism generated a cascade of disputes that repeatedly raised more persistent questions about who gets to tell whom what to do, challenging in a more substantial and systematic way society’s long-settled hierarchies. Europe’s monarchs began to push back against the commands and dictates of the Pope. Feudal lords and nobles pushed back in a more pervasive way against the political power and authority of the monarchs. Vassals, serfs, and peasants began pushing back more vehemently and insistently against the authority of their Lords and masters.
As the feudal order unraveled at the dawn of modernity, a sense of crisis descended concerning the legitimacy of the full array of claims to authority. New, “modern” or “liberal” theories of the origins of political authority – of who gets to tell you what to do – emerged out of this crisis. These theories were forged with the aim of reconstructing some sense of legitimate, rightful authority that would underwrite a workable political order in a context of spiraling chaos, occasioning a succession of wars, rebellions, and acts of insolent disobedience. In time, “modern” political theorists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau alighted upon a new – and revolutionary – social contract theory of political authority, which emerged in conjunction with new understandings of sovereignty and nationhood. Who got to tell you what to do? The authorized ruler of your (geographically bounded and delimited) nation. Who was the foundational and authorized ruler of your nation? The sovereign (which, for some radical theorists, was constituted by the people as a whole).
With moderns chafing at hierarchies underwritten by the understanding that the stronger, the better, or the powers-that-be from time immemorial got to tell them what to do, a new group of political theories began with what, under conditions of dissension and disagreement concerning first principles, they assumed would be the least controversial starting point promising the broadest common ground. They proposed that each individual person (answering to his own understanding of God’s commands) got to tell himself what to do (the “his” here is deliberate: gender played a major role in structuring the public realm). Modern political theorists asked next, “Under what conditions would this person delegate the authority to tell himself what to do to someone other than himself?” The answer was: “Under conditions in which that person could help them get something that they needed or wanted but could not otherwise get if sovereignty were held only to reside in their lowly selves – all equals in the state of nature – and no higher.” In Leviathan (1651), the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as a condition in which
there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes posited the state of nature, bereft of common political authority, as a hellscape. His countryman John Locke’s subsequent understanding of the state of nature (Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1689) was somewhat more benign, but still undesirable. It was a condition in which the protection of highly valued natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” vouchsafed to all by nature was perpetually uncertain. Under such conditions, these modern political theorists proposed, men would agree to a “social contract” by which they would cede either all power, save that of self-defense (Hobbes), or all powers which did not transgress upon their core natural rights (Locke), to a sovereign who would stand, by their own hypothesized grant of political authority, above them. The sovereign would then have the good and rightful authority to tell them what to do, since the sovereign’s power was a power they themselves, acting in the posited state of nature as sovereign individuals of their own free will, would have logically conferred upon – delegated to – the sovereign to advance their own best individual and common interests. These modern ideas of the origins of political authority underwrote the rise of a distinctive species of modern nation-state. And they were enlisted by the American Revolutionaries as the basis for their Declaration of Independence (1776), and, under the theory of “popular sovereignty” – “We the People” – for the Constitution of the United States (1787/1789).
As such, many have argued that, from its inception in the “Age of Revolutions” (English, 1689; French, 1789), American political thought represents an apotheosis of the new genus of “modern” political thinking. In part by dint of its fictional and imaginatively willed origins in the settlement of an (ostensibly) unpopulated blank-slate wilderness, with none of the on-the-ground monarchical and ecclesiastical baggage of palimpsest England and France, the United States was heralded by many – not least the proud Americans themselves – as the first “new” nation, founded upon modern principles on the origins of legitimate political authority, free from the encrusted hierarchies and traditions of Old World assumptions and understandings. Indeed, John Locke himself was looking across the ocean to this altogether new departure: “In the beginning,” he wrote of the hypothesized state of nature in his Second Treatise, “all the world was America.”
While there is certainly something to this, the reality is considerably more complicated. For one thing, of course, the settlers who came to North America were hardly stripped clean of their prior understandings of political and other forms of authority – of their faiths, folkways, traditions, and hierarchical assumptions. All – including a belief in the rightfulness of monarchy – were imported, to greater and lesser degrees, into the North American settlement. To complicate matters further, the polity – or polities, since British North America was initially organized as a contiguous arrangement of separate self-governing colonies – was far from static or impermeable. From the beginning, new immigrants and new ideas were introduced into the polity, either from the outside, or as cultivated from within. These layered over and interacted with the peoples and the political thought already there. As such, “New World” or not, the US polity was its own palimpsest. The result was a lively political culture, and distinctive tradition of American political thought, grounded, dynamic, and perpetually becoming.
The Traditional Framing: Lockean Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, and the Liberal–Republican Debate
Frameworks of American Political Thought
1 (Lockean) liberalism (“The Hartz Thesis”)– Other liberalisms:J. David Greenstone’s liberal bipolarity Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear Rawlsian liberalism
2 (Civic) republicanism
3 Ascriptive Americanism
Lockean Liberalism
Some of the first phrases to fall from the lips of contemporary scholars seeking a core essence of American political thought (if they are so inclined) – whether to praise, condemn, or simply
