in shaping the contours of American political thought? How and in what ways?8 How much of the American political thought tradition has been determined by broad, impersonal social forces (geography, demography, economics, ideology), and how much by individual agency?
9 In studying American political thought, how useful, or dangerous, is it to avail ourselves of apparently hermetic categories – often in the form of binaries – to get an analytic grip on the politics of a moment (e.g. founders v. loyalists; liberal v. republican; Federalists v. Antifederalists; the people v. the interests (or elites); progressives/liberals v. conservatives)?
10 What role does time (chronology/development) play in American political thought? Is there a consistency to ideational frameworks across time? Or do things change over time in critical ways? Relatedly, how might we think about the forces driving chronological patterns? How is the influence of ideas, ideologies, and frameworks temperally reproduced or institutionalized or, for that matter, interrupted and de-institutionalized?
11 How much of the study of American political thought should be about what is (in a positivist sense), and how much should be about what ought to be (in a normative sense)?
12 Are progressives/liberals and conservatives likely to study American political thought in different ways? Americans and non-Americans? Members of historically powerful and historically marginalized groups?
13 Is the American political thought tradition one of which Americans should be proud, ashamed, or something in between? Why?
Notes
1 1. Locke: “[T]he beginning of politic[al] society depends upon the consent of the individuals to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.” Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), Ch. VIII. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson slightly altered Locke’s formulation of the animating rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
2 2. Locke: “[F]reedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where that rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” Ibid., Ch. IV.
3 3. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Moderns and The Liberty of the Ancients” (1819).
4 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (1761), Book IV, Ch. 8.
5 5. Believing this to have been a mistake, the framers of the pro-slavery Constitution of the Confederate States of America (1861) remedied the omission by announcing its promulgation by “We, the people of the Confederate States … invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God ….”
6 6. Isaac Kramnick, “‘The Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787” (1988).
7 7. Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” (1993); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (1999).
2 Settlement, the Road to Revolution, the Founding, and the Early Republic
The Theological Dimensions of Colonial American Thought
In the early seventeenth century, European colonists began to settle the original strip of land that became the United States on North America’s Atlantic coast, previously populated exclusively by native aboriginal tribes. Commerce provided much of the impetus for the European migration, including the early Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later, New York). Over time, fueled as well by the forces of imperial ambition and competition, the thirteen North American colonies matured into an estimable outpost of the globe-spanning British Empire.
Other European settlers, however, were drawn to the colonial settlements for religious reasons. While, as noted, the Southern colonies were initially settled by Anglicans, and Maryland by Catholics, the New England colonies were disproportionately settled by members of England’s “dissenting” Protestant religious sects. A religious minority in the mother country (7%), members of these sects were subject to discrimination, and even persecution. They were Calvinists of different sorts (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists), but also Quakers. Given their predicament as dissenters from the prevailing political order, undergirded by the officially established Church, ministers and theologians in the colonies spent time reflecting upon questions of the sources of legitimate worldly political authority, the relationship between that and otherworldly, divine authority, the respective claims of the individual and the community, and the appropriate relation between Church and State. As such, theological investigations by Christian ministers (and other Christians) in the American colonies addressed some of the most significant political questions. These investigations and discussions were transatlantic.
The English Enlightenment political philosopher John Locke had contemporaneously argued for “the reasonableness of Christianity” (1695) – that reason could be used to test the soundness of religious beliefs, and measure and confirm the authenticity of revelation. Locke’s views were widely disseminated by Puritan preachers in the American colonies. While the epithet “Puritanism” came to be associated with religious, and often sexual, oppressiveness, the most significant calling card of the Puritans was the role its theology afforded to reason, particularly as that reason was practiced outside of – and even against – the strictures of a government-sponsored, officially established Church. As such, Puritan thought in the Anglo-American tradition was allied, albeit imperfectly, with developments that led to modern conceptions of both religious and political liberty. It was the English Puritan writer and poet John Milton, for instance, who, in Areopagitica (1644), penned what is still one of the seminal arguments against censorship, and in defense of the freedom of speech. The Cambridge-educated Puritan minister Roger Williams (1603–1683), whose radical views concerning the liberty of conscience and the separation of Church and State led to his expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay colony, was a peerless champion of religious freedom. Puritan theologians authored pioneering challenges to the claim of the divine right (authority) of Kings.
As their name suggests, Puritans were additionally preoccupied with what they took to be the worldly corruption of the Church of England. They responded by founding new “purified” churches, where they could live and worship in the true light of God. It is this critical, moralizing impulse, and passion for purifying the corrupted and debased, that provides the basis for the epithet “puritanical” commonly directed not only toward Puritans (or their latter-day epigones), but also toward American culture more generally, which Puritan thought, in this regard, is held to have foundationally influenced and pervaded.
Protestantism, born in the call by Martin Luther, in his Ninety-Five Theses, for “Reformation,” had itself originated from similar concerns about the worldly corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, as manifested by a rampant materialism and a decadent, venal, and power-hungry clergy (including, at the apex, the Pope), at the expense, it was said, of genuine spiritual concerns. England underwent its own Protestant Reformation when, after King Henry VIII sought an annulment which the Pope refused to grant, reformationists helped underwrite Henry’s break from Rome and establish the Anglican Church, with the English monarch replacing the Pope as its head.
Some English Protestants expressed increasing disappointment and dissatisfaction with the course of the English Reformation. The Puritans thought that the Church of England had not gone far enough in cleansing itself of the vestiges of Catholicism. The growing body of dissenters complained
