Traditionalism in American Political Thought

Abstract

T THE simultaneous appearance of a constitutional anniversary and of a new book on recent American political thought' furnishes an excuse for discussing once more the dependence of Americans upon the political thinking of their sesquicentennial ancestors. During one short generation, from about I76i to I788, there was a flowering of political theory in this country which has not often been equaled and very rarely surpassed in any comparable period. The controversial literature of the time occupies a position of hardly less importance than the literature of the English civil wars, upon which it so heavily drew. The institutional products, and especially the written constitutions, have not only continued to serve as patterns here but they have also been widely imitated-in France, in the British Empire, in Latin America, and even in post-war Europe. Nor did the age fail to produce its great political treatise, for the Federalist is a far more significant work on politics than many a book more generally studied from that point of view. It has suffered from 'an excess of oratorical praise and an almost total absence of analysis. To most students of American history it is simply the longest argument in favor of the ratification of the Constitution, and the depth and originality of its theoretical analysis is rarely considered. Even the famous No. IO is well known only for a paragraph or so which, wrested out of its context, gives aid and comfort to the exponents of the economic interpretation of history. Because to an extent unparalleled among modern peoples we have been living upon the ideas of our forebears we have at least had a relatively stable political tradition. Changes there have been-in constitutional institutions and in ideas about them-but the changes have been in terms of the ideas of the founding-fathers. There is no safety in prophecy, but at present it appears that for a long time to come further changes will be in those same terms. I shall have more to say on the subject later in this essay, but it may be remarked in passing that this traditionalism is certainly one of the main reasons why the Marxian philosophy has had so little success in this country. This political tradition is not to be defined by the use of a single word. Not democratic, nor revolutionary, nor conservative, nor constitutional,