The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin, and: Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (review)

From today’s vantage point, Benjamin Franklin appears omnipresent in the American eighteenth century. A son of Massachusetts who can seem instrumental in almost everything central to the period, Franklin made himself pivotal—and wealthy—in the most dynamic and diverse province of British North America, helped to define its culture through bestselling almanacs, involved himself in imperial politics and bureaucracy, achieved scientific fame across the Atlantic, became a leading voice for American independence, and participated in designing constitutions for both Pennsylvania and the United States. And nearly alone among the founders, he had matured and made his fortune at the height of Walpole’s decentralized and war-prone empire of “benign neglect” and lived to see the new national government begin its work.

For all his ubiquity, however, Franklin remains mysterious at his core. This was true in his own time; he was an object of intense suspicion whom many thought especially devious. And the sense of his essential unknowability has seemed to grow since then. Like Washington but unlike many others, he did not survive to participate in the nation’s epochal reorientation away from the seaboard, and his tremendous versatility and a persistent misidentification of him as a proto-Babbitt contribute to the mystery. But the most essential reason for it lies in the written stance he adopted. With one major exception, he studiously avoided straightforward systematic argumentation; rather, almost all his nonscientific expressions—even in argumentative pamphlets, personal letters, and public statements—are indirect, arch, ironic, didactic, and presented through a near-seamless persona. This deliberate and habitual use of personas frustratingly veils what we, descendants of the Romantics, like to think of (and often desperately want to see) as the authentic person behind that authorial mask.

Franklin’s importance, ubiquity, and unknowability have given rise to a steady stream of scholarly and popular books about him, immeasurably aided since 1959 by the ongoing Yale edition of his papers. These include at least sixteen general biographies since 1970 (seven since 2000) and large numbers of more specialized works on his role as a scientist, diplomat, man of the Enlightenment, and political figure; a significant literature has also developed around his Autobiography as a literary work.

Until the two books reviewed here, however, none had directly approached the question of Franklin’s political philosophy. In part, this is for source reasons: his one attempt at anything like a philosophical treatise, the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, was a youthful work he later disavowed. His reliance on personas, described in the Autobiography as a deliberate tactic adopted to gain people’s cooperation toward achieving mutually beneficial goals, means that a political philosophy must be reconstructed from other genres. But the very reasons behind the growing literature on Franklin make increasingly important the question whether he had a coherent political philosophy behind it all and, if so, what it was. And, too, approaching Franklin this way can take us constructively back to the nation’s cultural and political origins without succumbing to the tautological given that Franklin must perforce be “America” prefigured.

Political philosophers Lorraine Smith Pangle and Alan Houston have taken on the challenge of reconstruction, and each perceives a coherent political philosophy behind Franklin’s public life and writings. But they represent very different approaches and reach very different conclusions.

Pangle’s approach will be less familiar and perhaps less congenial for readers accustomed to historical writing. Her aim is to offer a preliminary introduction to Franklin’s political philosophy and a preliminary evaluation of its suitability as a guide for contemporary Americans beset by the increasing fragmentation of public life. This effort fits, in turn, in the context of a larger discussion about modern Enlightenment...