My Rock Songbook has slowed down of late, and there’s a reason. At Washington and Lee University, where I currently teach, we do this cool thing of having a month-long intensive class. The prof is supposed to pack this with a semester’s worth of material, and my class is an American Political Thought course. Trying to condense things down to a month is intense indeed, which is why my blogging, especially on the Songbook, has been light.
But I might as well blog on some of what I’m teaching, and thus, here’s this first segment of what we might call Carl’s American Political Thought Book Report.
Now I do not try to do this in one course, but the natural order of Founder-studies is three-fold.
First, you read some sort of book or essay, perhaps it is Thomas West’s Vindicating the Founders, or perhaps it is the excellent Introduction to American Politics textbook by Bessette and Pitney, that shows you why the Founders were great, why they cannot be dismissed as time-bound racists or sexists or any sort of stick-in-the-mud-ists, and why their thought remains compelling. You see the some of ways they were superior to today’s politicians and savants.
That gets you in the door. Second, your real study begins with careful reading of the Federalist Papers. Done correctly, you surely emerge from such study with the conviction that the Founders Were Awesome! You are seen wearing a red, white, and blue, WWTFD wrist-band, and maybe even sporting a powdered wig.
The third stage is the realization, perhaps through a book like Joanne Freeman’s, that, well, the Founders divided against one another, into the Democratic-Republican and Federalist factions, er, sorry, parties. Like some weirdly gruesome and symbolic episode in an Ovid poem, Publius splits in two, with the severed sides morphing into a pair of wrestlers intent upon strangling one another! Ugly stuff, and the more potentially disheartening to your faith in modern republican government to the degree you were initially inspired by the genius and virtue of “the Founders.”
Sorting out why the divide occurs inevitably takes you back to divisions that had always been there. One learns that considered from a certain angle, the Anti-Federalists actually had good arguments, and that these folks did not disappear, but tended to gravitate into the Democratic-Republican party. One sees that while the Convention amazingly (Providentially?) arrived at consensus about a new form of government, our greatest Founders walked into the Convention with quite a few remarkably discordant ideas. One begins to be shocked by how aggressively nationalist Madison was towards state power, and by Hamilton’s (more strategically provocative than sincere?) proposed imitation, albeit in republicanized manner, of the British monarch and House of Lords; one also has to consider to what degree these views remained with Madison and Hamilton behind the rhetoric of Publius, or why (in Madison’s case), they changed. Similar thoughts with respect to other major figures. Whether this is a fourth stage or what-have-you, you now have to sort through the whole political-intellectual landscape of the Americans, going at least back to the 1760s and into the British Whig writers, all the way up into the 1820s.
But let us stay, in this post at least, with the daunting-enough task of understanding the divide between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. I can recommend two books for this, one of which I use to begin my American Political Thought course.
The superior one is Lance Banning’s Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle. This gives you primary document selections from the early debates in Congress on debt assumption, the national bank, executive power, etc. Lots of landmark documents, like Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures or Madison’s Virginia Resolutions, judicious selections from the correspondence of major figures, and counter-positioning of these various letters and such on the main topics of debate.
That said, it is more for the advanced student. By not skimping on the nitty-gritty, spanning the entire 1787 to 1815-or-so period, and providing many of the key documents in full, the result is a 350 folio-page book. So what I assign is sort of an undergraduate version of this called Jefferson v. Hamilton, compiled by the Jefferson biographer Noble Cunningham Jr. It allows students, in under 200 pages, to grasp the main lines of debates, with the more-edited documents embedded in Cunningham’s simple narrative of the main events, events which can otherwise get bewildering for those unfamiliar with the era. I suspect both Cunningham and Banning (as both of them are scholars of Jeffersonian republicanism) of being a bit too partial to the Democratic-Republican side, but it is Banning’s volume, methinks, that ultimately better allows you to see that Hamilton and co., on a lot of the issues, had the better arguments, precisely because therein we see them more in full. That’s my judgment, anyhow. If you’d like a quicker secondary way to arrive at such a judgment, you might turn to the latest Richard Brookhiser biography, James Madison. But to decide for yourself, of course, you need to step into the documents yourself, into the war of words, that Cunningham and Banning select for us.
April 24th, 2012 | 6:51 pm
Terrific stuff Carl. You could also look more at Madison, whose career saw his a) short-term (which does not mean trivial) political considerations, b) policy preferences and c)respect for constitutional norms as he understood them, sometimes conflict. I guess you could draw a line between the Virginia Plan, The Federalist 39, The Virginia Resolution and Notes on Nullification, but even if you could craft an interpretation that avoids outright contradictions, you would still have some serious tensions I think.
April 24th, 2012 | 9:47 pm
Very good APT I choices, Carl. If you’re interested in introducing the students to the Convention debates without diving into the big Max Farrand volumes, I recommend Chapter 1 of Sid Milikis’ “The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2011″ or Charles Thach’s landmark study, “The Creation of the Presidency, 1775-1789.” Although these books of course give most attention to the writing of Article II, they both do a good job of describing the committee stages of the Convention.
Also, to jump-start the Carl Rock Songbook… what do you think of Johnny Ramone’s postumous autobiography, “Commando”? To me it pretty much confirms what I had already assumed about the guy, that he was awesome
April 24th, 2012 | 10:14 pm
Yeah, Pete, Madison’s shifts are something. The book I’ll look at next, Revolutionary Characters, by Gordon Wood, has its chapter on Madison titled “Is There A James Madison Problem?” Wood answers that no, correctly understood, Madison was consistent. But his evidence supporting this is ultimately scanty, IMO. Hamilton said the key was Madison’s deviousness–that doesn’t really answer the question either, but the new Brookhiser bio does show you how subtly tricky Madison could be at playing various political games.
April 25th, 2012 | 6:04 am
Carl, thanks for the book list. “So many books, so little time, and money!”
The Anti-Feds are always a favorite in their grasp of human nature and their desire to limit the opportunities of opportunists.
April 25th, 2012 | 3:30 pm
Carl, were I spiteful student who had just completed your course, I might write in my evaluation that all that impressive reading you put us through seems a tad too survey-ish or historically abstract for those of us who heard you were a genuine liberal education man. How compelling is it, in other words, given the foundational changes in American political thought since the founding, to learn about the intricacies of Jefferson and the Antifeds’ disagreements with Hamilton/Feds over the Bank and executive power? Interesting stuff to say the least, but perhaps you could say more in future classes (or in this post) about why T. West would lump all the Founders together in his chapters on the family and property when comparing it to the political thought of contemporary liberalism? And what about Bessette and Pitney’s decision to wait until the final chapters of their textbook to discuss the Constitution’s institutions? Is this reflective of an Antifederalist or rather apolitical bias operating beneath what is otherwise a refreshingly constitutional (and constitutionally accurate) Am. gov textbook? And aren’t you being a bit harsh on Madison and Hamilton’s view of states rights given what that doctrine morphed into thanks to Calhoun (as Madison is obviously concerned about in his Virginia Report) and later with the centralization of admin authority? Or did you have us read all that stuff, Dr. Scott, because these original disputes are reflective of the kind of deeper theoretical problems that grip the nation today?
April 25th, 2012 | 6:29 pm
Brad, you’re right, one must get more foundational still, and CJ Wolfe has the right idea:
First rule, is: be nice to Mommy.
Second rule, is: don’t listen to commies.
Third rule, is: eat kosher salami
Those are the principles of “Commando,” in case you didn’t misspend your youth on too many rock songs.
But more seriously, Brad, I think there can be a case for morphing the Founders together in the way T. West does in the chapters on family and property. That is, I think there is are legitimate ways of doing “stage one” or 100-level Founder-ism, and West’s is one of them. But some clues need to be given the student that divides were there, and eventually one needs to move to the more advanced levels.
I’m glad you like the Bessette/Pitney text also. I do not see saving the three-branches chapters for the latter third of the book as a major problem–one can get around it by not discussing the LONG Civil Liberties and Civil Rights until after you’ve done the Judiciary chapter. They could cut some of the deliberation discussions–just gets too repetitive and long.
As for your other concerns, the course does get more theoretical/foundational, and I’m with you on the hostility toward Jeffersonian/Randolphian level states rights. I’m 80-90% with Hamilton on these debates, FYI.
April 25th, 2012 | 7:43 pm
Carl, it almost goes without saying, and I should have made this clear earlier, that it would be hard to find a better introduction to early American Political Thought than the one you have provided.
April 25th, 2012 | 8:17 pm
Carl, if you take into account that Madison could be rhetorically cunning (though perhaps not always as precise as he might always have wished in retrospect) and the changing political contexts, you can sometimes see deeper continuities in some of Madison’s statements. The tensions between the Virginia Resolution and Notes on Nullification don’t entirely go away, but they shrink. I’m thinking of a Madison “keeping it real” explanation of the two statements when I have a little more time.
April 26th, 2012 | 7:35 am
Somehow I forgot that the first rule of “Commando” is:
The Laws of Germany!
Man, how can I even hope to figure out things like the consistent political philosophy of James Madison if I forget crucial facts like that!
April 27th, 2012 | 12:30 am
The Bessette and Pitney text is great, and while I can use that book for my own class, I have to persuade others to use it. I have been trying to get it as a common text, but the quantitative and the (literally) Marxists in my department like any version to typical Harold Lasswell, or even Michael Parenti version of politics.
Since our community college department goes with common texts, I lose in favor of Bessette and Pitney. I also liked the Landy and Milkis text, as well as the Wilson and DiIulio texts. My favorite is still the Ceaser, Bessette, Thurow, et al., text, but it is out of print.
So I use some lame text that i don’t even read, and teach politiccal science from the appendices and detailed handouts I provide.
So basically I have written my own text book, and i provide it for my students.
Is it better than Bessette and Pitney’s? I can’t say, but while I emphasize the notion of “delibertation” I surely also point out the limitations to it. I also assign Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson Lecture about thumos and the limitations to logos giving reasons for thumos, and why thumos ought to be listened to nonetheless.
April 29th, 2012 | 10:10 am
[...] this guy named Pete Spiliakos says I haven’t been totally consistent on nullification and [...]
April 29th, 2012 | 7:32 pm
[...] this guy named Pete Spiliakos says we haven’t been totally unchanging on nullification and [...]
May 1st, 2012 | 12:34 am
It is hard to think that the convention arrived at anything *providentially.* You might ask Mitt. He believes in that sort of thing in the Great Nation of Futility. (Sorry, I’m a bit irritable, having noticed a few more amendments going down the drain lately.)
January 19th, 2013 | 12:39 pm
[...] usual Brookhiser virtue of a short biography. I talked about a few of its other virtues in my Founder’s Fight Club post. What I appreciate most is the way a sense of Madison’s fine-toothed political [...]
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