Place, Theory, and the American Founding

Enlightenment thinkers prior to the American Revolution, including John Locke, thought one could reason one’s way to the best system of government.

Joining these Enlightenment thinkers is a long cast of characters, all of whom in one way or another sought not so much principles of right order and justice but rather universal systems. These thinkers include Jeremy Bentham, Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and nearly all thinkers in the Jacobin vein who eschew liberty and virtue for a programmatic but elusive utopia.

Is Montesquieu rightly considered among this group who propose a singular, transcendent political order?

Given Montesquieu’s influence among Americans in the wake of the Revolutionary War, the answer to this question has important implications for the American Founding. For if the US Constitution is a model borrowed from Montesquieu, then it is the ideological blueprint the post-liberals argue that it is and nothing more. And if it is a blueprint that can be unmoored from the American experience, then Americans who promote their constitutional order as universal in all respects have greater cause to export it as a one-size-fits-all plan for humanity.

But what if the US Constitution is a compromise document, shaped through prudence and moderation at a particular time and place?

These are the questions I explore in a review of Joshua Bandoch’s The Politics of Place for Law & Liberty

I argue that the best way to approach the debate about American founding principles is to steer it away from overly theoretical and reductionist approaches and toward specific events and particular experiences and the application of virtues like prudence and moderation recommended by Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Such historical treatment of the American founding would further a rediscovery of those principles and virtues associated with the American experiment in ordered liberty that is universal even as they are particular.

Go HERE, for the full review.