Abstract
People during the second half of the eighteenth century commonly remarked that they lived in an enlightened age. This was as true in Revolutionary America as in western Europe. Yet in seeking to be universal in their scope, ranging from grand cosmology to political action and human behavior, perhaps they attempted too much, particularly as far as the United States was concerned. The Enlightenment, once so dominant as an organizing system within which to examine the intellectual character of early American constitutionalism, has come to seem diffuse and has fallen into neglect. In recent years it has been supplanted by two other competing rival theories, republicanism and liberalism.1 Each has contributed substantially to our understanding of the Revolution, but both are limited in scope. It is time now to reexamine the Enlightened thesis. The argument that U.S. constitutionalism has (or does not have) at least some basis in the Enlightenment is a proposition that can and should be tested by historical analysis.
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Notes
There is now an extensive literature on liberalism and republicanism as intellectual bases for almost all aspects of the Revolution, especially its ideological elements. See, e.g., Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 1–33 and 320–339; and Lance Banning, “The Republican Interpretation: Retrospect and Prospect,” in The Republican Synthesis Revisited, ed. Milton M. Klein, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1992), 91–117.
Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), 55–56.
Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 104, 133–134.
For a side-by-side comparison of the two Declarations, see Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (1959; paperbound ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 518–520.
Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (1943; New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 98–114, 123; Winton U. Solberg, ed., The Federal Convention and the Formation of the Union of the American States (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), xcix–ci; Charles A. Barker, American Convictions: Cycles of Public Thought, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 189–327; Adrienne Koch, Power, Morals and the Founding Fathers: Essays in the Interpretation of the American Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), esp. 1–6; Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment (New York: George Braziller, 1965). These titles are of course merely samples of a much wider literature.
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1978); Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment: 1750–1820 (Cambridge and London, England, 1997); Alfred H. Kelly, Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).
Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 1.
John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George A. Peek, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), 92.
Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963); Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).
Cf. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967), xviii, 179; J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 130.
George Mason, “Remarks on Annual Elections for the Fairfax Independent Company,” ca. April 17–26, 1775, in Papers of George Mason, 1: 229–230. The drafting and intellectual provenance of the Declaration are discussed in detail in ibid., 274–291.
Cf. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 497.
Cf. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, “The Spirit of the Laws,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), book XI, 411–414.
John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia: 1763–1783 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988), 108.
Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 31 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1: 353, 363; 6: 298.
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 57.
Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 72–73.
Thomas E. Buckley, S. J., Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 144–164, 180.
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© 2006 Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
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Bonwick, C. (2006). Enlightenment and Experience: The Virginia Constitution of 1776. In: McDowell, G.L., O’Neill, J. (eds) America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601062_8
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