...“Professor Tonsor, I am interested in how you think about the American founding. The political philosophers I’ve read say that America was the product of the Enlightenment, meaning that it was founded as a classical liberal nation. According to this view, conservatism in America is just classical liberalism’s ‘right wing,’ pushing for freer markets in a free-market system and smaller government in a federal system. American conservatives are thus not like European conservatives who, in reaction to the French Revolution, sought to restore the ancien regime with its monarchy, mercantilism, and three orders. Since that old-world conservative tradition never existed in the U.S. after its founding, what we call ‘conservative’ looks much different from conservatism in Europe. Is it true that conservatism in America is just classical liberalism’s right wing and nothing more?”
Tonsor responded: “The question, as you ask it, is not well framed. It tries to make the founding an ‘either-or’ event: liberal or conservative? But the interpretive methods that characterize the humanities encourage us to think not in terms of ‘either-or’ but in terms of ‘both-and.’ Were we all liberals then? Were we all liberals in 1776 and 1787? That’s what you’re asking. From the viewpoint of the political philosophers who see the founding as the outcome of debate during the Enlightenment, we were liberal. Yet, taking in the longer perspective of Western civilization, we must ask: Were we conservative in any sense that is prior to and separate from liberalism? And the answer to that question is, yes, most definitely, if you consider our inheritance from the ancient world and Christendom.”
...Taking a deep breath I said: “There is truth in the claim of the political philosophers. Since we were the first nation established in the modern age, our political economy was liberal from the start. In the first place, we didn’t have a feudal or mercantile economy. We had a modern free-market system that owed much to Adam Smith and the Enlightenment. Second, we didn’t have a feudal or absolutist monarchy. Instead we had a mixed constitution that was the result of enlightened reflection [3] on liberal philosophers like Locke and republican thinkers like Montesquieu; the resulting federated polity balanced both the primacy of the individual (seen in the liberalism of the Bill of Rights) and the primacy of civic virtue (seen in the republicanism of the Northwest Ordinance, Article III). Third, we didn’t have a social order that looked like the ancien regime with its aristocratic privileges, noble titles, and laws upholding primogeniture. Traditionalist European conservatives—Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Pio Nono—hated what we were. They condemned ‘Americanism.’ Our natural aristocracy renewed itself each generation in a relatively mobile society where most could rise due to merit and a little luck. So, yes, in all these fundamental ways, we were not a conservative European nation but a modern liberal one that owed its founding institutions mostly to the Enlightenment.”
...“I’m surprised,” said Tonsor, “that you stop at medieval London. Remember that Protestant and Catholic thinkers engaged the Enlightenment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh, and Paris. They continually sifted and tested the Age of Reason in light of what Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and medieval London had to teach.[4] Out of that dynamic tension, out of that struggle between those who argued for continuity and those who argued for change, emerged the Founders’ syncretic worldview. The intellectual leaders of the American founding—Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison—stood atop the pinnacle of that worldview.”
The History Room
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Originally Posted by Chris
