June 20, 2006
Democracy and Republicanism Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST In our exchange on the nature of democracy, John Steele Gordon responded to my remarks about the republican (small R) origins of certain strains in democratic theory—particularly, the emphasis on organic community and disinterested government that many of the founding fathers shared.
Mr. Gordon writes: “I hereby nominate ‘disinterested government’ as the oxymoron of the week. Only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested. Hamilton and Madison had no such illusions. Brilliant as they were, and deeply versed in political theory as they were, they wanted a government that would work in the real world, the world of real human beings, not so many tabula rasas to be written on by intellectuals. In that sense they were engineers, not intellectuals at all.”
Actually, Madison and Hamilton—along with most of the founders—were deeply versed in classical political theory and very much subscribed to the tenets of republicanism, however unrealistic those ideas would prove in later years.
Gordon Wood, a Brown University historian who is one of the foremost authorities on the American Revolution, and who has spent decades reading and analyzing the political discourse of the eighteenth century, writes the following in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution: “Most of the revolutionary leaders . . . continued to hold out the possibility of virtuous politics. They retained the republican hope that at least a few . . . still had sufficient virtue to become disinterested umpires and promote an exclusively public sphere of activity in government.”
Hamilton, for instance, believed that learned men like himself “form no distinct interest in society” and were prepared to serve as “impartial arbiter[s]” in the pursuit of the common good. Madison believed that the Constitution was designed perfectly to exclude from government “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs,” and to include in their place men whose “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices, and to schemes of injustice.”
Madison and Hamilton were desperately trying to reconcile a deeply-held faith in republican virtue with the realities of an increasingly complex, diverse post-colonial society. Time would prove their vision unrealistic, as Mr. Gordon has himself maintained.
Actually, Mr. Gordon’s assertion that “only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested” is more in keeping with the Anti-Federalist argument of the late 1780s than with the Federalist argument put forward by Madison and Hamilton.
Anti-Federalists believed that there was no such thing as a disinterested elite that could safeguard the “wants of the people” and insisted (correctly, it would seem from hindsight) that everyone—even James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington!—had interests to protect. What’s more, they believed that such a status quo was all right, as long as everyone was honest about the existence of interest in politics.
Such was the thrust of the extraordinary debate in the Pennsylvania assembly in 1786 between Robert Morris, a financier who would later be a backer of the new Constitution, and William Findley, an ex-weaver from the western part of the state who would soon emerge as a leading Anti-Federalist. Findley claimed that even self-styled virtuous men like Morris had their own interests to protect, and what’s more, that they had “a right to advocate their own cause.” What they didn’t have a right to do, he argued, was deny that they acted from a position of self-interest. In this sense, the Anti-Federalists were the truly gifted prognosticators of the moment. They anticipated the sort of hyper-competitive, interest-block democracy that America would soon become.
What I mean to suggest here is the same point I’ve tried to press with Mr. Gordon over the last week. Democracy is a big word with a terrific number of meanings. It’s nothing so simple as political sovereignty resting in the people rather than the elite. Which is to say, Ellen Feldman’s original point—the point that began our discussion here—is right. One can speak of an American brand of democracy (if, of course, one recognizes that this brand of democracy is in a constant state of evolution).
On a somewhat related note, I’m a little taken aback by Mr. Gordon’s denigration of “intellectuals,” whom he compares unfavorably to engineers. (My engineer friends would also take exception to the dichotomy. They are some of the best intellectuals I know.)
Mr. Gordon is certainly within his right to deride those who thrive on theory and theoretical disputation. But Madison and Hamilton would have prided themselves on being just that—on belonging to a learned, cultivated class of men who gave themselves over to books and lofty ideas. This was the entire point of republican virtue. It’s why Ben Franklin, having earned his fortune, made an ostentatious show of retiring from business so as to devote his full attention to more virtuous matters of the mind.
Anti-intellectualism is all good and fine, I suppose. But the founders wouldn’t have had anything of it.
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