Last weekend I got around to reading The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy by Douglass Adair. The book began as his doctoral dissertation in 1943 and went unpublished until 2000, 32 years after Adair took his own life. Not many Ph.D. papers are of wide interest so long after they were written, but Adair’s was something special. As his student Trevor Colbourn recalls, the list of eminent scholars who borrowed the dissertation from Yale over the years “resembles a who’s who in early American history.”
Adair was evidently unhappy with his place within the profession. He never published the great book his friends expected of him; he regretted that academia valued mediocre monographs over brilliant articles, of which Adair wrote more than a few. (See Fame and the Founding Fathers for proof.) He was a superb editor as well, who at the helm of the William and Mary Quarterly turned that journal into the flagship publication in early American history. Although he chose not to revise and publish Intellectual Origins during his lifetime, he derived from it material that would go into several illuminating essays.
Intellectual Origins was in part a response to Charles Beard and his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, which in the 1940s still colored the way historians saw the founding. Adair, like Forrest McDonald after him, did not simply discard Beard’s approach — the idea of considering the Founding Fathers’ economic interests still had some merit — but placed renewed emphasis on ideas as motive forces. Adair’s Founders were possessed by their reading of classical literature, with Aristotle, Tacitus, and Polybius informing their understanding of politics at least as much as John Locke did. Adair was also one of the first scholars to draw careful attention to David Hume’s influence upon the Founders, particularly Madison, who borrowed many of the elements he was to weave into Federalist 10 from Hume’s “Of the First Principles of Government,” “Of Parties in General,” and “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” In Adair’s telling, insights drawn from Hume allowed Madison to break away from cliches about “mixed government” and the need for republics to be of small scale. Hume showed that a large republic could encompass a variety of interests that would check one another (a view for which Madison found support in Voltaire’s observation that England had freedom of religion because of its multiplicity of sects) and that a sufficiently indirect form of popular government did not require as a check upon democracy a “permanent will” of the sort that Hamilton wished to institutionalize in an American king and life-tenure Senate.
Hamilton suffers at Adair’s hands, presented as a man whose ideas were hopelessly out of phase with his times. Indeed Hamilton was, in the words of Gouverneur Morris, “more a theoretic than a practical man.” But for Adair, he was the prisoner of his classical reading, anticipating at any time the eruption in America of bloodshed between rich and poor on the scale of the stasis in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War. Here one might dissent somewhat from Adair: Hamilton was hardly the only one who entertained such visions, and as Adair acknowledges he need not have looked back to Thucydides for illustrations of revolutionary violence. The Wilkes movement in England had at times threatened to become civil and class war, and only failed to do so because Wilkes was a libertine rather than an ideologue. Historian Iain McCalman has noted that the Gordon riots of 1780 “visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution.” These incidents were nowhere near the level of internecine strife that Thucydides describes, but they might reasonably have smacked of a foretaste of things to come.
Be that as it may, Hamilton’s kingly hopes were certainly impractical in post-revolutionary America, and a modified version of Madison’s plan prevailed at the Philadelphia convention. One of the surprising things about The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy is how tightly Adair focuses on Madison, almost to the exclusion of Jefferson. But Madison was the architect of the constitutional system that made the Revolution of 1800 possible. Because the Constitution did not establish a mixed government, the Federalists had nowhere to turn — no repository for their “permanent will” — once Jefferson and Madison had outmaneuvered them at the ballot box. (The Federalists did pack the judiciary, but judges were not supposed to be government.) The Constitution had been flexible enough when “loosely” construed to allow Hamilton to erect his program, with George Washington as de facto monarch and the Treasury secretary as prime minister. But as Adair describes it, Hamilton was undone by his own success: he created a narrow cultural and financial elite with a vested interest in “high toned government,” yet in the process he also fostered a broad base of opposition, which Jefferson and Madison marshaled. Would-be kingly and aristocratic elements lost out to popular forces in what was, after all, a more popular than fixed system.
Adair is very good at drawing out the tension in Madison’s mind. On the one hand, the Virginian had come to a post-classical understanding of faction and interest that led him to a pluralistic (and national) political theory. On the other hand, he remained convinced that sooner or later the classical struggle between the poor many and the rich few would re-emerge as a result of concentration of population in cities. He subscribed wholeheartedly to the “yeoman farmer” ideal, both on account of his experience as a Virginian and from his reading of Aristotle, who had described small landowners as having a compelling interest in limited government:
They may subsist comfortably by labour, they would soon be ruined by idleness; they contrive a government, therefore, which requires as little expence of time as possible; and employ on all occasions, when it is practicable, the great machine of law to save the labour of man … Among such a people, government is carried on without salaries, without revenues, and without taxes. The affairs of the community, therefore, are left to assume this natural order; since men have no undue motive to engage them to abandon their own profitable concerns, in order to employ themselves in matters which will be much better managed without their unseasonable interference.
(Adair quotes John Gillies’s delightful 1787 edition of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. A later edition of the same translation is online here.)
America would not remain agrarian, however, and with industrialization would come class differentiation. Mixed government along the lines Polybius ascribed to Rome, with aristocratic and monarchical institutions (or approximations thereof) checking popular impulses, was the traditional solution to the problem of irreconcilable classes. Each permanent interest would have some institutional representation, and properly mixed the elements would balance. The poorer majority would not be able to expropriate the wealthier minority, but the former would have some say in government to protect them from depredation by the latter. Or so the theory went. What Madison did in proposing pluralism as a check on faction was revolutionary — he substituted a mixed people for a mixed government. The institutions of government would all be fundamentally popular, but in a tiered and filtered system.
Intellectual Origins doesn’t mention the national veto over state legislation that Madison wished to give Congress, but its purpose was also to ensure protections for minorities, even at the state level, against majority faction. Adair explains what majority faction had meant in the states prior to the Philadelphia convention: legislatures had in many instances acceded to majority pressure to issue paper money as a way of alleviating debts — or defrauding creditors.
“The Ancients were surely men of more candor than We are; they contended openly for an abolition of debts in so many Words, while we strive as hard for the same thing under the decent and specious pretense of a circulating medium,” Adair quotes William Grayson writing to Madison. “Montesquieu was not wrong when he said the democratical might be as tyrannical as the despotic, for where is there greater act of despotism than that of issuing paper to depreciate for the paying debts, on easy terms.” Though it might seem that small farmers would benefit from debt cancellation, Madison’s agrarianism did not lead him to inflationary populism. On the contrary: the Virginia elite’s experiences with heavy agricultural debts to British merchants had made Madison and Jefferson averse to debt in the first place. They prescribed private and public fiscal discipline, not printing-press bailouts, as remedy for the evils of debt.
A question that needs to be asked about Madison’s ingenious large-republic pluralism, however, is what it takes to sustain such a design. Pluralism should not be taken for granted as a natural condition; some arrangements are necessary to produce and maintain it. At first glance, the greatest threat to plurality of interests within a large republic might seem to come from the centralization of power, yet there are other, less direct but perhaps more pervasive, dangers. Pluralism, by scattering and diversifying interests, is meant to prevent intractable majority-minority dichotomies from arising. But a number of binary oppositions nevertheless proved to be very powerful in the antebellum republic: polarizations between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, North and South, free and slave states, frontier and coast, manufacturing and farming. And political parties would prove, both before and after the Civil War, to be adept at aggregating such polarities into intense partisan dualities — Federalist vs. Republican, Democrat vs. Whig, and Democrat vs. Republican, etc. Adair points to an irony:
James Madison and his friend Thomas Jefferson organized a majority party that coalesced across state lines and so was able to force its will on electors even twice removed from the people. How a situation arose in which Madison was forced to subvert his own electoral method must be discussed later. In theory, at least, he never refuted the ideal he shared with Hume, of sifting the popular will.
When I read this, I thought of a passage in Patrick Deneen’s essay “Counterfeiting Conservatism” in the current TAC:
Princeton political scientist Henry Jones Ford warned that the direct primary might take power out of the hands of party chiefs, but it would not result in a paradisiacal people’s democracy. … He foresaw the replacement of party operatives, who had historically chosen candidates on the grounds of local circumstance, experience, and party loyalty, with a “plutocracy” of monied interests that would increasingly be needed to finance expensive primary races. … The plutocracy of which Ford warned tends to reward candidates of ideological purity as they most neatly reflect a set of nationally defined partisan priorities.
There you see both the re-emergence of the economic divide that Madison feared and, perhaps more important, the consolidation of national ideological conformity against local, pluralistic interests. Even before the advent of the primary, political parties served the dangerous function of compiling grievances into national polarizations, undercutting the diverse, states-oriented federation that the Philadelphia convention seemed to envision. Yet it must be said that at the same time as parties aggregate these divisions, packaging them finally as “us” against “them,” they also tame them, channeling (for example) social or economic conflicts into political symbolism. The result of this is both a partisan dualism that nationalizes debate and a peaceful but continual consolidation of power in the central government to which both parties are appendages.
In short, binary oppositions can smash the Union, as they did in the Civil War, but they can also strengthen the Union in the worst ways. The whole scheme of pluralism is defeated when these dualistic forces either grow to national proportions of their own momentum or are assembled into national programs by political parties. If pluralism is a balance, the rise of binary oppositions upsets the balance in either an “anarchical” (in the bad sense) or tyrannical direction.
A diversity of small-scale institutions is the means of maintaining pluralism on the large scale, and the intermediary institutions beloved by traditional conservatives fit this bill. But again, one cannot take the health and survival of these institutions for granted. If they disintegrate, the foundations of constitutional pluralism are undermined. From above, these institutions are menaced by national power. From below, they are threatened by atomization, an entropic individualism that breaks down small-scale institutions into a homogenized mass of elementary particles. Not only are individuals cut loose from institutions unlikely to be able to mount the kind of power necessary to resist encroachments from above, but the decay of civil society may leave a hunger for “community” that national power (or nationalism) swoops in to fill. Robert Nisbet has described this risk in The Quest for Community and elsewhere.
The Madisonian system, then, is jeopardized from three directions: from consolidated national power, from binary oppositions that take on national proportions, and from social entropy. All of these are potent forces, and even if they chip away at constitutional pluralism only gradually, over time they will still destroy the edifice.
Does pluralism have any defense? Patrick Deneen has been willing to contemplate “subsidizing localism.” But this calls to mind a warning from Nisbet in his 1978 essay “The Dilemma of Conservatives in a Populist Society”:
The same rush to Washington, D.C. for handouts or participation in the power structure is to be seen elsewhere: in the universities and schools; in the churches – eager for some new tax exemption or to promote some new welfare reform; in the labor unions; in just about every sector indeed of American society. The family is important: there must, therefore, be a plethora of Federal laws and agencies protecting women and children. The local community is important: there must, therefore, be a vast community redevelopment act passed by Congress and an appropriate bureau established. So it goes. Given present currents, one has the sense that if the move toward decentralization and localism did become major, it would culminate in some new Federal Bureau or Department, doubtless titled “Department of Decentralization and Localism.” But I am being cynical. The dilemma of the conservative is, however, a very real one. The great question that must be faced and answered by conservatives is that of the relevance in our time of such values as the family, neighborhood, locality, religion, social rank, voluntary association, and, alone making these possible, limited political government.
An attempt to use federal power to shore up local institutions would inevitably be co-opted by the political parties and the central bureaucracy itself. This has certainly been the case with federal programs intended to alleviate poverty or help families. The highly localist Black Power movement eventually became a colony of federal power. The Religious Right has suffered the same fate. These movements had goals seemingly as radical as those of today’s Front Porch Republicans. But they played the federal game, and it played them.
A more effective approach might be to arrest the forces of decay. This would entail resisting partisan attempts to compose national-scale polarities, while rejecting ideologies of consolidation and critiquing social atomism. There is a positive as well as negative aspect to this: devolution as a political program, regardless of the substantive results of devolution; affirmation of literary humanism and local ways as counterweights to homogenization — this is the kind of “cultural conservatism” that’s most needed — and, in the denial of party-think, the preservation of independence of mind and conscience. A book like Intellectual Origins can put all of this into perspective: Adair’s work is of enduring significance for the light it casts not only upon the origins of Jeffersonian democracy, but on the prospects for republican ideals today.
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