The Founding Fathers

Gordon Brittan | Regents Professor of Philosophy, Montana State University

Good afternoon. My name is Gordon Brittan and I have taught at Montana State University since 1973. I’ve specialized in the eighteenth century and tried to uncover for myself and my students basic core principles of the American Enlightenment generally, but more especially the background of the United States Constitution.

I want to make three points. I hope that the implications of these points will be clear. I won’t try to spell them out now as they will be the subject of future discussion and debate.

The first point is that although we talk about the Founding Fathers generically, there were terribly important differences between them.

They shared certain common ideas and among those was a resistance to arbitrary and, in the case of King George, what they thought was capricious rule. And they shared a tremendous optimism about the future of this country. Every time I go to Washington and I see the scale on which the capital was planned I understand that they thought this was going to be, someday, a great world power. The capital was designed with that in mind.

And they shared a core belief, to which I’ll return eventually, in our ability to govern ourselves.

That said, there were tremendous differences between them. Some saw the future of the country as primarily rural and agricultural. Jefferson certainly was among them. Others saw the country as urban and industrial. Perhaps the most prominent advocate of that view of national destiny was Benjamin Franklin. They differed in many, many, other respects as well.

Some of them wanted a strong central government. Some of them wanted a weak central government. Some of them wanted a closer relationship to Britain. Others wanted a closer relationship to France. Some wanted to follow the European model, even to the extent of appointing Washington as King. Others wanted to break as completely as they could with every vestige of what they thought of as the European feudal system.

They held all of these common core notions and widely separated views concerning this country and its future; what they didn’t have was a strong sense of civility.

There is all this talk lately about how we need more civility. I’m all for civility. We all are for civility. But we need to remember that the Founding Fathers abused one another all the time. I’m just going to quote very quickly Alexander Hamilton, a great man, on Jefferson:

“A man of profound ambition and violent passions,” and then he went on to say, “…the most intriguing man in the United States.”

By intriguing he meant up to his elbows in intrigues of particularly notorious kind, not that he was a fascinating man. He called him, “…the intriguing incendiary, the inspiring turbulent competitor, the heart and soul of faction.”

And not to be outdone, here is Jefferson on Hamilton:

“I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

Now what’s interesting is that while they were not particularly civil with one another, they were at the same time prepared to compromise. And those who think that the Constitution is somehow the revealed word of reason do not understand the tremendous debates that took place in 1787 that led to its adoption.

There were tremendous debates, raucous debates. And in every case they ended in compromise.

What we’ve lost in the present time is not our civility. It has rarely characterized American public discourse. What we’ve lost is our readiness to compromise on basic issues. Now I know there are those who think you can never compromise on principle. But the only reason we have a Constitution, the only reason we have a United States of America, is because people were willing to compromise on what they thought were basic principles.

One issue that they had great difficulty compromising on was slavery. And the only reason they were able to adopt the Constitution was that they ignored the problem of slavery in that document. The reason they ignored it was that they thought slavery was going to disappear as an institution within a generation. Certainly Washington did. He freed the slaves on his death. Certainly Jefferson did, although he continued to be a slave holder—a source of inner contradiction and a great deal of personal suffering. They thought slavery was going to go away and therefore didn’t have an explicit compromise on slavery within the Constitution. But everywhere else there were compromises.

What I suggest is that the lesson to be learned is that we compromise even on basic issues. We’ve lost that ability to compromise.

Second point I want to make is this: There are two great moral questions. One great moral question has to do with justice and the other great moral question has to do with goodness. The Founding Fathers closed the question of justice in the constitution and they left open the question of goodness.

The question of goodness has typically been answered, that is to say, from the very beginning of Western Philosophy among the Greeks in terms of two basic notions. One is the notion of excellence, personal excellence. The good man is the virtuous man and the virtuous man is the man who follows certain ideals and displays excellence in his life.

The Founding Fathers found it hard to agree on a standard of personal virtue; they opted instead for a standard of public virtue in the Constitution. That standard of public virtue was justice. However, happiness was even more difficult to build into the framework of our government. There were at least three reasons why this was so.

First, happiness is, at least they thought in the eighteenth century, largely subjective. There could be no governmental policy which would promote universal happiness because there was no such thing as universal happiness. It varied between one person and the next.

In the second place, they thought that in addition to being somewhat subjective, happiness is a matter of luck. Aristotle, who has more to say about happiness that anyone else among the ancient philosophers, thought that the happy man had certain great traits. But these were a matter of luck. Some are born rich, some are born poor. Some are born handsome, some are born ugly. Some are born intelligent, some are born slow. And there is nothing that we can do about them as a matter of public policy or even as a matter of even changing our lives.

Happiness is something about which we have no control and therefore is not the proper aim of government.

In the third place, it wasn’t happiness that was crucial, but rather to be worthy of happiness; it was not to be a happy individual but to be a virtuous individual. That they took as the ideal of American citizenship.

On the other hand they thought that the question of justice could be closed. To say that is to say that the Constitution enshrines a particular concept of a just society. That is the public virtue. And for enshrining a concept of a just society, the Constitution is for that reason above all else a moral document. It has a particular moral philosophy built into it. And what are the requirements of public virtue? What are the requirements of justice?

Among other things, your birth is not a factor in the position which you eventually attain; everyone has a vote. And of course they restricted it to suffrage, but in principle every human being has a right to vote and determine our collective destiny just as individually we can determine our personal destiny. The final requirement was that we all have the power of speaking freely and without censorship.

They sought equality before the law, with no distinction or discrimination on the basis of our station into which we are born. Liberty was a matter of exercising our vote, of deciding where our own destinies lie, and being free to pursue it up to that point where we don’t interfere with the destiny of somebody else.

So it’s not happiness. It’s the pursuit of happiness.

“If the race is to the swiftest,” Lyndon Johnson said in his great 1965 civil rights speech at the University of Florida, “at least we should have an equal place in the starting line and a level race course.”

And that is what the Constitution is supposed to guarantee, a particular concept of justice.

Now, I mentioned liberty. That is the third point I want to make. The Founding Fathers had a particular concept of liberty which strikes us, I think, today as somewhat strange, and which we don’t pay adequate attention to. Liberty is not the capacity to do whatever you feel like. It’s not the capacity to do whatever you want to do. It is rather the ability to follow rules which are self-imposed. There is no liberty without, in this sense, necessity. And what is that necessity? That necessity is following certain basic, self-imposed rules. The Constitution consists of a series of rules or laws which we adopted for ourselves and the following of which guarantees our liberty.

Now what does it mean to say that these laws are self-imposed? It means to say that we are self-governing. We are not imposed upon by some outside authority, in our own case the King of England George the Third; we impose laws upon ourselves. It isn’t that we should have no rules, or that the minimum set of rules is better than a larger set of rules, but that the rules that we have are of our own choosing.

Now there are two preconditions to this following of rules. One is that we are rational, that we are able to govern ourselves. So, too, is trust in other people, that they will follow those rules. Living in this country involves a tacit acceptance of those rules, that they are mine and I pledge myself to obey them. I trust that you are going to pledge yourself to obey these same rules.

Trust and rationality come together in the doctrine of autonomy. Each individual is autonomous. We are autonomous to the extent at which we can follow our own path in life, have a particular concept of happiness, and pursue that as best we can, and autonomous in so far as we’re all jointly responsible for the rules that we make for ourselves individually and for ourselves collectively.

The big problem that the eighteenth century faced was tying the notion of the individual as the ultimate source and aim or object of value and with living in a society that was jointly or collectively responsible for its behavior. They accomplished that by laying the foundations for a liberal democratic society and a republican constitution. The Constitution is simply an expression of those rules that we’ve adopted for ourselves and which we’ve promised to obey.

The fact that they did such a magnificent job of reconciling these two, the claim of the individual and the claims of society, is born out by the fact that here we are two hundred and twenty four years after the adoption of the Constitution and it is still here. It is an evolving document that needs to be changed in certain kinds of ways, it has in the past and will continue to be in the future, but the basic framework, the terms in which we live our lives individually and collectively, was laid out in an absolutely brilliant way.

If we go back to the Constitution as many people are urging us to do these days, I suggest that it be in the spirit of compromise, that we understand that the Constitution is a moral document that requires justice, and justice requires a society in which no one is discriminated against, a society in which anyone is willing to trade places with any other member of that society, and that we live in a society which is made up of rules and regulations, which are not to be despised for that fact. They are only to be despised if we don’t impose them on ourselves.

And in fact, through our Republican form of government, we have imposed them on ourselves.

Thank you very much.