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The Framers: Not Philosophes, but Aristocrats
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14162 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
4,368 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
Now and again one encounters allusions to "the philosophy of the framers of the Constitution." Indeed there were lovers of wisdom among the framers; yet the fifty-five gentlemen politicians who gathered at Philadelphia two centuries ago were anything but abstract metaphysicians.
Three years after the Constitutional Convention had concluded its deliberations, Edmund Burke wrote that nothing was more consummately wicked than the heart of an abstract metaphysician who should attempt to govern nations by speculative political dogmas. He had in mind the French philosophes who had encouraged the French Revolution. But the delegates to Philadelphia had been a different lot altogether.
It will not do to attribute to the framers some peculiar "philosophy." With merely three or four exceptions, they were Christians, having one profession or another: That is, they took their primary assumptions about the human condition, consciously or unconsciously, from the Bible and (many of them) from the Book of Common Prayer. Probably all had been influenced by Pilgrim's Progress. Scarcely any of them had been affected intellectually by the French "enlighteners." They were not political theorists but men of much experience of the world, assembled not in hope of creating the terrestrial Paradise but rather to contrive a tolerable practical plan of general government: a plan for survival.
The founders of 1787 were not bent upon great alterations in morals and manners. Perhaps the most ludicrous thing ever uttered about them was by Rexford Guy Tugwell, a New Dealer. In Tugwell's judgment, the delegates at Philadelphia had assembled to undo the existing religion and the established mores of the United States. In his words, "The framers, meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, were there because neither the Ten Commandments nor the going rules for social behavior were any longer adequate."
Not one word was uttered during the convention's four months about the Decalogue; and in the seven articles adopted, nothing whatsoever was said about religion, except that no religious test should be required for holding federal office. This does not signify that the delegates aspired to establish some civil religion as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity. It is simply that their constitution was to be a practical instrument for governance, not a work of politico religious dogmata. As for subversion of "going rules of social behavior"--those fifty-five gentlemen politicians were themselves the arbiters of their generation's behavior, if not of their
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