The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin

CHAPTER 3. PHILANTHROPY AND CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS

CHAPTER 3 PHILANTHROPY AND CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS Franklin’s advocacy of virtue begins with qualities needed for individual happiness, but it always aims at a broader social good. Franklin shares with his early modern predecessors an insistence on the convergence of private and public interests in a well-ordered polity, but he places less emphasis than they on the need for coercive laws and more on the satisfactions of publicspirited activity. How does he understand human sociability, and how does he ground his hopes for a harmonious civic life? What is at work in the fact that, where Hobbes portrays human sociability as fundamentally chaotic and violent and dominated by the dangerous love of vainglory, Franklin presents humans as more benign and tractable, and vanity as a mere foible that is easily harnessed to good purposes? Man as a Political Animal Franklin certainly does recognize a danger in human pride, but like Locke and Montesquieu, he hopes that in the modern political economy the attractions of commercial gain and political liberty may deflect warlike and tyrannical ambitions into more constructive channels. In place of the glory of bloody triumph, he extolls the solid satisfactions of self-respecting independence and collective self-rule, a solution to the problem of vainglory that Hobbes does not pursue. But what of the restlessly ambitious who will never be content with an equal share of power? Did Franklin truly understand the ambitions that drove George 91 ;l: III, like greater emperors before him, to seek the glories of dominion even at great economic cost? In dismissing these leaders as blindly irrational, did Franklin take the full measure of their souls? There is some evidence that Franklin never did completely understand extreme human ambition. Consider the third of the essays he wrote in 1729 under the pseudonym “Busy-Body.” Here he claims that “Virtue alone is suYcient to make a Man Great, Glorious, and Happy,” and that everyone in his heart of hearts would “rather chuse, if it were in his Choice,” to merit the character of a decent, honest, trusted citizen, “than be the richest , the most learned, or the most powerful Man in the Province without it.”1 But if Franklin was naïve on this point, he was less so than first appears. In his Autobiography Franklin comes on the stage as a man eminently practical, reasonable, and modest in ambition, though eager for admiration, a man who could never understand why anyone would butcher anyone out lust for power. But his own ambition was greater than this persona suggests . He yearned to make his mark, if only as a writer; he suffered often from envy of others, fought hard and not always successfully to conceal his pride, and thought deeply about how he could gratify his ambition constructively within the constraints of his modest upbringing and the increasingly egalitarian society in which he lived. In the end, he found a way to satisfy this ambition and to win honor—even the honor of being the most famous man of his age—that was uniquely suited to a democratic society. At the bottom of Franklin’s thinking about ambition are his conviction that being a mover and shaker for good is the thing that best satisfies the restless desire for preeminence and his hope that education can persuade others of the truth of this. Ambitious people want power and riches, to be sure, but they want even more the adulation mingled with gratitude that comes of being a force for good in the world. Even the worst tyrants want to be honored as the fathers of their countries. “Almost every Man has a strong natural Desire of being valu’d and esteem’d by the rest of his Species; but . . . few fall into the Right and only infallible Method of becoming so.”2 Franklin is at his best in showing how everyone, great and small, can have some share in The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin 92 these solid political satisfactions. If he underestimates the extent to which many would welcome power even without gratitude and uncoerced honor, surely he is right that it is best to have all of these together, and that this cannot be done without attention to the true good of others. Franklin’s judgment as to the natural satisfactions of benevolent activity grows out of his belief that “Man is a Sociable Being.” He ridicules...