"To Begin the World Anew" - Politics and the Creative Imagination
by Bernard Bailyn
The Jefferson Lecture
The National Endowment of the Humanities 1998
© 1998 by Bernard Bailyn
For some time I have been puzzling over the sources of the
creative imagination in various fields of activity. I began
close to home, so to speak, with an effort some years ago to
probe the creative imagination among historians, but have tried
to go beyond that, into other spheres, seeking to uncover some
general clues to the sources of those mysterious impulses that
propel the mind beyond familiar ground into unexpected territories
-- that account for the sudden appearance of strange and
creative configurations of thought, expression, vision, or sound.
At times the creative imagination seems to work in isolation,
when an individual, impelled by some uninstructed spark of
originality, glimpses relationships or possibilities never seen
before, or devises forms of expressions never heard before. But
most often the creative imagination does not flare in isolation.
Creative minds stimulate each other, interaction and competition
have a generative effect, sparks fly from disagreement and
rivalry, and entire groups become creative. We know something
about how that has happened -- how such creative groups have
formed -- in art, in science, and in literature; but the same, I
believe, has happened in politics, though in ways we do not
commonly perceive. I do not mean sudden turns in legislation or
public policy. I mean the recasting of the entire world of
power, the re-formation of the structure of public authority, of
the accepted forms of governance, obedience, and resistance, in
practice as well as in theory.
The creative reorganization of the world of power and all
its implications has happened at various points in history, but
rarely, if ever, I believe, as quickly, successfully, and -- so it
seems to me -- mysteriously as by a single generation on the
eastern shores of North America two hundred years ago.
The Founders of the American nation were one of the most
creative groups in modern history. It has now become fashionable
to mock them because of their apparent failings. Because they
did not do everything we wish they had done, what they did do can
be lost in a welter of accusations: of racism, sexism, hypocrisy,
power mongering, compromises and violations of principle that
good men should never have done. But this is the worst kind of
condescension. For we are privileged to know and to benefit from
the outcome of their efforts, which they could only hopefully
imagine. Complacently enjoying their successes, we condemn their
failings, ignoring their main concern: which was the possibility,
indeed the likelihood, that their entire creative enterprise -- to
reform, transform, the entire political system -- would fail:
would collapse into chaos or autocracy. Again and again they
were warned of the folly of defying the received traditions, the
sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer borderlands of
European civilization, knew better than the established
authorities that ruled them; that they could successfully create
something freer, ultimately more enduring than what was then
known in the centers of metropolitan life.
Since we inherit and build on their achievements, we now
know, what the established world of the 18th century flatly
denied but which they broke through convention to propose:
that absolute power need not be indivisible but can be
shared among states within a state and among branches of government,
and that the sharing of power and balancing of forces can
create not anarchy but freedom.
We know for certain, what they could only experimentally and
prayerfully propose, that formal, written constitutions, upheld
by judicial bodies, can effectively constrain the tyrannies of
both executive force and populist majorities.
We know, because they had the imagination to perceive it,
that there is a sense, mysterious as it may be, in which human
rights can be seen to exist independent of privileges, gifts, and
donations of the powerful, and that these rights can somehow be
defined and protected by the force of law.
We casually assume, because they were somehow able to
imagine, that the exercise of power is no natural birthright but
must be a gift of those who are subject to it.
And we know, what Jefferson so imaginatively perceived and
brilliantly expressed, that religion -- religion of any kind,
secular or revealed -- in the hands of power can be the worst kind
of tyranny -- that, as he wrote in his greatest state paper,
to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers
into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or
propagation of principles on [the] supposition of their ill
tendency, is a dangerous fallacy ... because [the magistrate]
being, of course, judge of that tendency will make his opinions
the rule of judgment ... Truth [Jefferson concluded in his
Statute of Religious Liberty] is great and will prevail if left
to herself ... she is the proper and sufficient antagonist of
error and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless, by human
interposition, disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and
debate -- errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted
freely to contradict them.
These were extraordinary flights of the creative imagination
-- political heresies at the time, utopian fantasies -- and their
authors and sponsors knew that their efforts to realize these
creative aspirations had no certain outcomes. Nothing was
assured; the future was unpredictable. Everywhere there were
turns and twists that had not been expected. Though they
searched the histories they knew, consulted the learned authorities
of the day, and reviewed the master works of political
theory, they found few precedents to follow, no comprehensive
guides, no models to imitate. They groped in darkness with
logical, ideological, and conceptual problems that seemed to have
no solutions. The deeper they went the more intractable the
problems appeared.
So they were asked: how could constitutions that were to restrict
the exercise of power effectively dominate the agencies of
power that had created them?
Were individual rights to be protected against the state?
What rights? Who defines them?
Conscience was declared to be free. But was not religion,
and specifically Christianity, the ultimate source of morality
and probity and hence of justice and fairness? So should
Christianity not be enforced as a matter of state policy?
There was no end to the problems, and there was never any
certainty in the outcome. Some of the problems in the course of
time would be solved, some persist to this day and will never be
fully resolved. But what strikes one most forcefully in surveying
the struggles and achievements of that distant generation is
less what they failed to do than what they did do, and the
problems that they did in fact solve. One comes away from
encounters with that generation, not with a sense of their
failings and hypocrisies -- they were imperfect people, bound by
the limitations of their own world -- but with a sense of how
alive with creative imaginings they were; how bold they were in
transcending the world they had been born into -- a world in which
the brutality of unlimited state power was normal -- and in
conceiving of a state system in which power was limited, defined,
and defensive, and whose force would liberate people, not confine
them.
How did that happen? What accounts for their creative
imagination? What conditions made it possible? Can such
conditions and such achievements recur?
I do not know the answers to those questions. But surveying
that lost, remote world, one comes repeatedly on a distinctive
element that seems to have played a role -- a significant role --
and which, in a very general sense, seems to have been an element
in the creativity of other circles, in art, in literature, and
even, perhaps, in science.
In a brief but brilliant essay entitled "Provincialism," the
art critic Kenneth Clark commented on the differences between
metropolitan and provincial art. Through the centuries, he
wrote, metropolitan art, emerging from dominant centers of
culture, has set the grand styles that have radiated out into the
world, creating standards and forming assumptions that only
idiots, Clark wrote, would challenge. But in time metropolitan
art, for all its successes -- and in part because of them --
becomes repetitive, over-refined, academic, self-absorbed as it
elaborates, polishes, and attenuates its initial accomplishments.
A kind of scholasticism sets in, -- while out on the margins,
removed from the metropolitan centers, provincial art develops
free of those excesses. Artists on the periphery struggle to
free themselves from what they know of the dominant style. They
introduce simplicity and common sense to a style that has become
too embellished, too sophisticated, too self-centered. The
provincials are concrete in their visualization, committed to the
ordinary facts of life as they know them, rather than to the
demands of an established style that has taken on a life of its
own. And they have a visionary intensity, which at times attains
a lyrical quality, as they celebrate the world around them and
strive to realize their fresh ambitions.
There are dangers in the provincial arts, Clark points out:
insularity; regression into primitivism; complacence in the
comforting familiarity of local scenes. But the most skillful
provincial artists have the vigor of fresh energies; they are
immersed in and stimulated by the ordinary reality about them;
and they transcend their limited environments by the sheer
intensity of their vision, which becomes, at the height of their
powers, prophetic.
Thus Kenneth Clark on provincialism in art. To a remarkable
degree I believe the same might be said of provincialism in
politics and the political imagination -- particularly, in my
view, the politics of Revolutionary America.
The American founders were provincials -- living on the outer
borderlands of an Atlantic civilization whose heartlands were the
metropolitan centers of England, France, the Netherlands, the
German states, and Spain. The world they were born into was so
deeply provincial, so derivative in its culture, that it is
difficult for us now to imagine it as it really was -- difficult
for us to re-orient our minds to this small, remote world. We
cannot avoid reading back our powerful cosmopolitan present, the
sense we have of our global authority and our expanded social
consciences -- reading back all of that into that small, unsure
pre-industrial borderland world. Language can mislead us. The
vocabulary of politics in 18th-century America was metropolitan,
trans-cultural, European if not universal; but the reality of
their lives, the political and social context in North America,
was parochial, and the provincialism of those borderland people,
had, I believe, precisely those creative qualities that Clark
describes in provincial art.
How provincial were they? There is literary evidence, some
of it eloquent. William Byrd II, returning to Virginia after 10
years of intense striving in England's literary and political
circles, called his native land a "silent country." Though
surrounded by "my flocks and my herds," he wrote back to England,
"my bond-men and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my
own servants," he was lonely. There was no one to respond to his
wit, his satire; no one to acknowledge his intellectual
achievements, no way to establish his worth as a man of letters, as a
man of the world. He was no longer in the world. Nostalgically,
he kept his rooms in London, practiced his languages, continued
to write -- for his own satisfaction -- and poured out his heart
to his diary. Later, throughout the pre-Revolutionary period,
there would be an outpouring of belles lettres in the colonial towns
and cities -- "aping metropolitan rites and fashions," aspiring
to the images of a greater beau monde, echoing the metropolitan
styles in amusement, wit, and social discourse.
In 1763 Benjamin Franklin, back in urban and enterprising Philadelphia
after years in England, knew better than anyone else how far that
city had advanced in literary accomplishments in the 40 years since
he had launched his Junto's program of cultural development. But
he wondered why it was that the "petty island" from which he had just
returned -- a mere stepping stone in a brook next to America, "scarce
enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry" -- should have, in
every neighborhood, more sensible and elegant minds than could be
collected in "100 leagues of our vast forests." The most gifted Americans,
he wrote, merely "lisp attempts at painting, poetry, and musick."
But the witness of art and architecture is more objective
and more revealing.
John Adams spoke with bitter envy of the rich and powerful
in his world, of a smug, arrogant almost unreachable American
aristocracy, of great American mansions, of grand estates and
grand prospects. But what was the scale? How grand was grand?
Some of the grand places he and his contemporaries knew are
familiar to us -- they have survived or been rebuilt -- though we
don't often think of them in this connection.
(NB: At this point, Professor Bailyn began showing a number of slides
to illustrate his lecture.)
Longfellow House (1759)
Wentworth-Gardner House (Portsmouth NH 1760) -- built
with Wentworth wealth derived from timber conracts with the British navy
Westover, the Byrd's house in Virginia (1730-34) and its entrance hall
Carter's Grove (1750-53) and its entrance hall
Gunston Hall (1755-58) (George Mason's) and its proud "Palladium Room"
Van Cortlandt Manor, on the Hudson (1740's), built with third generation
Anglo-Dutch wealth
These are typical houses of the American aristocracy that
Adams knew. But how should we understand their scale? How grand
were they? With what should they be compared? With...
Blenheim (Woodstock, Oxfordshire), the establishment of the Dukes of
Marlborough?
or with any of the other dwellings of the English nobility or higher
aristocracy:
Stowe House in Buckinghamshire?
Chatsworth, in Derbyshire (Dukes of Devonshire), with its grand entrance
hall?
Longleat (Wiltshire), the Marquesses of Bath?
Walpole's Houghton (Norfolk), with its snug, comfy living rooms?
Between Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Westover in Virginia --
between Longleat and Carter's Grove -- the gulf is too great, the
scales are simply incommensurate. A more meaningful comparison
is with the properties of the prosperous English gentry in
Britain's domestic borderlands -- places like William Weddell's
Newby Hall, in remote northeast Yorkshire -- a person and place,
Weddell and Newby Hall, that have a peculiar role in North
American history since in order to finance his building plans
Weddell raised his rents, with the result that some of his
tenants left the land and emigrated across the Atlantic, where
their destinies can be traced.
Weddell's Newby Hall is, I believe, the comparable
English provincial establishment. In
exterior appearance it is not of a different scale from Byrd's
Westover, but it was conceived, built, and furnished at a
different level of worldliness.
One begins to see the difference in the
Entrance Hall and Staircase. But the Tapestry Room is
in a different world from anything in Westover. The Palladium
Room of George Mason's Gunston Hall is a nice country parlor in
comparison. The hangings in the Tapestry Room were made on order
by the Gobelins factory, to designs by Boucher; and the chairs
were made by Chippendale.
Finally, Weddell's pride and joy,
his Statue Gallery: 3 rooms especially designed by Robert
Adam for the contents of 19 chests of statuary
Weddell had shipped from Rome in the same months of 1765 when the
Americans, on the far periphery of his world, were rebelling
against the Stamp Act duties.
At the end of his gallery were, and still
are, his 2 main treasures, the wonderful Venus, once in
the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, for which Weddell paid a
great sum -- some said £3,500, some £6,000 -- and the
statue of Athene, for which he paid over £1,000.
There is nothing in the American provinces to compare with this.
Weddell too was a provincial Briton, though well connected, but
what distinguishes him from his wealthy American counterparts was
not his affluence -- the Carter family in Virginia was worth half
a million pounds sterling, and prosperous Philadelphia merchants
had estates of £70 or £80,000. What distinguishes Weddell was
not his wealth but his cultural awareness, the worldliness of his
sensibilities, in a word, his sophistication.
And what of the people, the American aristocracy, the local
elites that so intimidated Adams -- what of their style, their
manner, the images they projected? We know how they presented
themselves: many portraits survive. Sometimes they posed
theatrically, self-consciously, with somewhat painfully contrived
elegance heightened by the painters' -- especially Copley's --
ambitions:
Jeremiah Lee of Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Mrs Lee
Isaac Smith of New York, and the formidable, no-nonsense Mrs Smith
Thomas Mifflin of Philadelphia, and his wonderfully beady-eyed wife --
wealthy Quakers who travelled in Europe;
and Boston's shrewd, successful merchants:
Peter Faneuil (Smibert)
John Erving (Copley)
and Eleazer Tyng (Copley)
Wonderful faces -- but with what images should these
portraits of the provincial elite be compared? With ...
William, Duke of Cumberland, the victor over the Scots in the rebellion of '45
-- or others of the nobility or higher aristocracy?
The younger Duke of Cumberland?
His Duchess?
The infamous Duchess of Devonshire?
The 2d Earl of Buckinghamshire?
The gulf between these truly grand, worldly, sophisticated images
and those of the Americans is too great, the comparison almost
useless. The comparison is not very useful even with the lesser,
less olympian aristocracy:
The Earl of Hillsboro, for example, whose imperious attitude
toward America when he was secretary of state and whose
personal snubs Benjamin Franklin never forgot
and never forgave; OR
Mary, Countess Howe, a superbly graceful person, whose
husband Sir Richard would lead the naval forces against
America in the Revolution
The most meaningful comparisons must be with the domestic English
gentry, people like Gainsborough's immediate neighbors and
friends in the Suffolk countryside, near his native village of
Sudbury, whom he painted in studiously casual poses against the
background of their property:
Mr and Mrs Andrews;
Mr and Mrs William;
and a near caricature of studied nonchalance,
John JoPlampin
Again, there is a different level of worldliness and sophistication
-- not so much a matter of wealth, but of style, and the
sense of what Edmund Burke called the necessary condition of any
true aristocracy -- "uncontending ease, the unbought grace of
life."
Two American portraits make the point more precisely. Two
leaders of the Revolutionary generation who played key roles in
the creative restructuring of public law and institutions -- came,
as it happened, from Connecticut. Both were painted by Ralph
Earle when they were at the height of their powers; and Earle --
less accomplished a painter than Copley, less dramatic, less
artistically ambitious and stylized, more flatly descriptive, but
closer, I think, to the grain of everyday reality -- Earle
captured something of the essential qualities of these provincial
public men and their culture.
The first is a double portrait of Oliver Ellsworth and his
wife.
Ellsworth -- a lawyer, jurist, and politician; a key figure
in the Philadelphia convention -- made the first full formulation
of the principle of judicial review of legislation, hence the
juridical enforcement of a written Constitution. As a Senator,
he wrote the great Judiciary Act of 1789, which created out of
nothing the federal court system, devised the first set of Senate
rules, and drafted the legislative procedures for admitting new
states, something unheard of in European public law. Thereafter
he served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and commissioner
to France.
Ellsworth and his wife presented themselves for Earle's
portrait as the Halletts and Andrews's did, as a prosperous
married couple against the background of their property: in the
Ellsworths' case their renovated "seat" as it was called, in
Windsor, Conn.
The contrast with the Halletts and Andrews's could not be
more vivid.
They are a proud, carefully and elegantly dressed,
provincial couple. The details are interesting.
Mrs Ellsworth, then only 36 but the mother of nine children,
has on a silk robe over a matching silk skirt; she wears a stiff
muslin collar, and that strange, starched headdress, typical of
country gentlewomen of the time. And Ellsworth sits displaying a
copy of the Constitution. His expression is
arresting. Earle caught, I think, the man's
intelligence and firmness, his essential gravitas (lightened,
though, it seems to me, by a very slight suggestion of good
humor); there is about Ellsworth an
understated, quiet dignity and the basic simplicity that made him a
popular figure in his native town of Windsor, Connecticut, even
at the height of his national and international fame.
And the second is Earle's portrait of Roger Sherman, the
self-educated frontier farmer, shoemaker, surveyor, lawyer,
jurist, merchant, and landowner, a member of the committees that
drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of
Confederation, chairman of the committee whose "Connecticut
Compromise" created the bicameral structure of the United States
Congress, Federalist pamphleteer in the ratification struggle,
and United States Senator. He was, John Adams said, as "honest
as an angel and as firm in the cause of American Independence as
Mount Atlas." Sherman did not "pose" for Earle -- he was
incapable of "posing" for anyone -- he quite literally "sat" for him,
and the result is one of the most striking portraits of the
age.
Sherman is utterly unpretentious and unselfconscious -- the
painting is honest down to the worn spot on the right knee -- he
is wigless and sternly, starkly unfashionable.
Later, in the 19th century his image would be wonderfully
transformed as he appears in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.
But THIS is how he really was: rustic, awkward in
manner, terse, a severely self-disciplined and unbending
Calvinist, close to the soil and to small-scale mechanical arts.
Sherman, the ultimate American provincial, was one of the
most innovative thinkers of his age. He was awkward, a
contemporary wrote, "unaccountably strange in manner. But in his
train of thinking there is something ... deep and comprehensive."
Earle's stiffly posed, resolute faces -- and even Copley's
glossier and more fashionable portrayals of American businessmen,
lawyers, and politicians -- reflect the consciousness of recently
earned distinctions and relatively shallow prosperity. If these
people formed an aristocracy it was not a very secure, graceful,
or elevated aristocracy. Their acquisitions were within the
reach of everyday competition; they lacked the magnificence by
which a ruling order in the 18th century reinforced itself.
Striving, searching, and tense, they were, and were aware of
being, provincials.
But what of such worldly figures as Jefferson
and Franklin? Jefferson was the friend, indeed confidant, of
Condorcet, Lafayette, and La Rochefoucauld; advisor to the
liberal noblemen who began the French Revolution; correspondent
of Scottish philosophers and English scientists alike. Was he
not the ultimate cosmopolitan in his deep appreciation of
European art, architecture, technology, philosophy, science, and
history? But it was he who wrote so famously from Paris that
"No American should come to Europe under 30 years of age." For
in Europe, he warned, an American acquires a fondness for luxury
and dissipation and a contempt for the simplicity of his own
country, gets entangled in "female intrigue destructive of his
own and others' happiness, or a passion for whores destructive of
his health, and in both cases learns to consider fidelity to the
marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice and inconsistent with
happiness." Jefferson was, in fact -- despite our present
obsession with his supposed relationship with a slave woman -- a
provincial Puritan. He lectured his daughter Patsy, studying at
a fashionable French convent, on the importance of "the needle
and domestic economy" in the simple society to which they would
return, and he longed to be back in Monticello.
Franklin, of course, floated easily in French salon
society, but, keenly aware of his provincial origin, he shrewdly
overcame its stigma in France by flaunting it -- cleverly
establishing his cosmopolitan credentials by exaggerating,
caricaturing, hence implicitly denying, his provincialism. He knew that
by projecting himself as a gifted backwoods innocent, he would
become nature's own scientist and philosopher, and thus the very
embodiment of the fashionable ideas of the philosophs.
And he was subtlety itself in transmuting his provincialism in
the title of his final portrait, Duplessis' masterpiece.
The identification on the frame is
not "Benjamin Franklin" but, significantly, "Vir," that is, man --
mankind. It was, in other words, a portrait not simply of
Franklin the Pennsylvania printer turned philosoph, but a
portrait of the rich fulfillment of a humanity which provincials and
cosmopolites shared equally.
The founders were provincials, alive to the values of a
greater world, but not, they knew, of it -- comfortable in a
lesser world but aware of its limitations.
And as provincials, in the pre-Revolutionary years, their
view of the world was discontinuous. Two forces, two magnets,
affected their efforts to find standards and styles: the values
associated with unaffected native simplicity and those to be
found in an acquired cosmopolitan sophistication. For many -- the
ablest, best informed, and most ambitious -- the result was a
degree of rootlessness, of alienation either from the higher
sources of culture or from the familiar local environment. Few,
in that era, whose perceptions surpassed local boundaries -- and
over 1,000 Americans travelled to Europe in the generation before
the Revolution -- could rest content with a simple, consistent
image of themselves. Their view of the world and of their place
in it was ambivalent, uncertain; and that ambivalence tended to
shake their minds from the roots of habit and tradition. Like
the 18th-century Scots, whose similar borderland situation
stimulated an extraordinary renaissance in letters, natural
science, and social science, the Americans' ambivalent identities
led them to the interstices of metropolitan thought where were
found new views and new approaches to the old.
Never having been fully immersed in, never fully committed
to or comfortable with, the cosmopolitan establishment, in the
crucible of the Revolution they challenged its authority, and
when faced with the great problems of public life they turned to
their own local, provincial experiences for solutions. Like
Clark's provincial artists, they adhered to the facts of everyday
life, and from them developed a fresh vision of what might be
accomplished, what might be created. "The axioms of Montesquieu
or any other great man," the New Jersey engineer and pamphleteer
John Stevens wrote, "tho' [others] may deem them 'as [undeniable]
as any [axioms] in Euclid,' shall never persuade me to quarrel
with my bread and butter."
"Is it not the glory of the people of America," Madison wrote,
that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the
opinions of former times and other nations, they have
not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for
custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of
their own good sense, the knowledge of their own
situation, and the lessons of their own experience?
So they referred the great, classic problems of politics not to
the experience of the ages or to the wisdom of the metropolitan
authorities, but to their own provincial situation, and developed
their ideas and their vision of the future from what they knew to
be true, and then shaped them to conform to the idealistic
programs of political reform that were elsewhere deemed
hopelessly utopian.
They attacked head-on the over-refined, over-elaborated,
dogmatic metropolitan formulas in political thought, challenging
assumptions that only idiots, they were indeed told, would
question.
So the great men had told them -- and the metropolitan world
demonstrated -- that dual sovereignties: sovereign states within a
sovereign state -- could not co-exist. That would lead, everyone
knew, systematically and inevitably, to conflict and chaos, for
sovereign power was in its nature indivisible. But "I ask,"
Ellsworth declared in a wonderful moment in the ratification
debate, "why can they not [co-exist]? It is not enough to say
they cannot. I wish for some reason." Their solution to this
ancient problem -- federalism: imperfect but effective -- was a
formalization of the de facto constitutional world that they, as
British provincials, ruled by both their local assemblies and
Parliament, had known for generations.
So they reconsidered the immemorial doctrine of the
separation of powers, and recast the elements involved from legalized
social orders -- crown, nobility, and commons -- which had never
been a direct part of their lives, to functioning branches of
government -- executive, legislative, judicial -- which had been.
So too they confronted the authorities -- Montesquieu above
all -- who propounded as absolute dogma the idea that free
republican states, like the Swiss cantons, must be small. For,
knowledgeable people said again and again, large republics,
lacking the coercive power of monarchies, would simply splinter
and crumble into anarchy until order was restored by military
force. How could representative government and consensual law
reach into the raw outer fringes of an extended republic?
To this they replied that the form of representation that
had developed in the American provinces demolished such received
logic. The actual representation of interests and people in the
governments of these colonies -- as opposed to Europe's
representation of estates and privileged localities -- made the extension
of the nation to continental proportions perfectly compatible
with republican freedoms. Ancient and modern thinkers both,
they said, simply had no notion, because they had no experience,
of the dynamic system of representation that had grown up in
America -- a system that shifted with the growth and movement of
the population and in which representatives were bound to
constituents' wishes. "For the American states [Madison said] were
reserved the glory and the happiness of diffusing this vital
principle throughout the constituent parts of government."
Disposed, in the upheaval of the Revolution, to find in
their own awkward, supposedly diminished provincial world not
deprivation but the source of new advantages -- discovering that
the glass was half full not half empty -- they weeded out
anachronisms in the received tradition, discarded elements that were
irrelevant to their provincial situation, and built, with great
imagination, a new structure on the actualities of the world they
had known and a new, intense vision of what the future might be.
But the effect of their provincialism ran deeper than that.
As their identity as a separate people took form through the
Revolutionary years they came to see that their remoteness from
the metropolitan world gave them a moral advantage in politics.
The leadership of Britain, like that of the rest of Europe, they
learned from innumerable publications and from the hundreds of
friends and relatives who returned from visits to the home
country, had succumbed to corruption and corrosive cynicism.
Since freedom in the end depends on the integrity and to some
degree the virtue of rulers and ruled alike, Britain was no
longer the bastion of liberty it once had been. America -- in the
provincial simplicity of its manners, its lack of luxury and
pomp, its artlessness, homeliness, lack of affectation and
cynicism -- America had taken Britain's place as the guardian and
promoter of liberty.
In a morally enervated world overcome with corruption,
America -- they believed -- was unique; and that sense of moral
integrity, nourished in the awareness of provincial simplicity
and innocence, fortified and justified their determination to
defy tradition, to build their own, different political world,
and to create a new and permanent model for the benevolent use of
power everywhere.
It was an intensely creative moment in western history.
America's Revolutionary leaders, Madison declared, "accomplished
a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human
society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model
on the face of the globe."
Convinced of their moral integrity and the rightness of the
principles they wished to make real -- well informed but relying
heavily on their own local experience and common sense -- the
Revolutionary leaders believed that, as Tom Paine put it, they
had it in their power to begin the world anew.
Their provincialism, and the sense they derived from it of
their own moral stature, nourished their political imaginations.
Uncertain of their place in the established, metropolitan world,
they had never felt themselves bound by it and were prepared to
challenge it and build on the world they knew. With fresh
energy, and ambitious to recast the over-refined, artificially
elaborated system that had ruled them, they sought to achieve a
total transformation of government and politics. Their unlikely
experiment on the outer fringes of European civilization
threatened the stability of state systems throughout the greater world,
and it contained within it a force that would radiate out into
areas of social life they had not intended to reform.
In all of this, I believe, there are broad implications. In
the most general sense, what stimulated the Founders' imagination
and hence their capacity to begin the world anew was the fact
that they came from outside the metropolitan establishment, with
all its age-old, deeply buried, arcane entanglements and
commitments. From their distant vantage point they viewed what they
could see of the dominant order with a cool, critical,
challenging eye, and what they saw was something atrophied, weighted down
by its own complacent, self-indulgent elaboration, and vulnerable
to the force of fresh energies and imaginative designs. Refusing
to be intimidated by the received traditions and confident of
their own integrity and creative capacities, they demanded to
know why things must be the way they are; and they had the
imagination, energy, and moral stature to conceive of something
closer to the grain of everyday reality, and more likely to lead
to human happiness.
We have neither their need nor their opportunity to begin
the world anew. But we do have the obligation, as inheritors of
their success, to view every establishment critically, to remain
in some sense on the margins, and forever to ask, with Ellsworth,
why things must be the way they are, knowing, as he did, that it
is never enough to say they must be so -- one needs to know why.
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