American Genius Studies: Benjamin Franklin at 300

In the wake of bestselling biographies, televised documentaries, and volumes by veteran historians of early America, one might easily conclude that Benjamin Franklin has been exhausted as a topic. Especially if one has mainly appreciative things to say. The tone of amazement at Franklin's brilliance and accomplishments, which suffused the well-designed traveling exhibit that debuted at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center in 2005–06, does also characterize these three most significant scholarly contributions of Franklin's tricentennial. But these deeply considered works also tell us much that is important. They depict a learned, cosmopolitan, philosophical Franklin whose early reading and writing are crucial for understanding his better-known years of international fame.

Jerry Weinberger, a student of political philosophy who has written on Francis Bacon, is especially well situated to explicate Franklin's intellectual roots and the subtleties of his œuvre, and he does so with verve. His radically skeptical, "slippery," and hilarious Franklin is at home with the moderns and the classics. Those readers familiar with the teachings of Leo Strauss and the writings of the so-called Straussians will recognize the genre at its best here. Franklin wrote "with great caution and ironic reserve" (4), all too aware that his Socratic questionings, his willingness to try out both sides of various debates, and most of all his unconventional views on religion could (and did) get him in big trouble. So he deftly discovered ways to write for the masses and the cognoscenti at the same time.

Weinberger's Franklin "teases" moralists for the sake of morality and criticizes believers for the sake of truth, rationality, and reason. He does the same to Deists. The Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), which Franklin wrote and published while a journeyman printer in London, is not the aberrant misstep into nihilism that Franklin later suggested it was when he characterized its printing as an error: it is rather a send-up that its audience took too seriously, a practical rather than intellectual pratfall. It was a rehearsal for later writings that exposed all manner of ideologues, whether pious or rationalist, to ridicule. Franklin's skeptical humor is so deep that he laughs at his own endeavors. The bone-deep irony makes Franklin's signature indirections, manipulation of personae, and reversals a kind of profound philosophical honesty in the writing. That he kept trying to do so publicly, in pursuit of the good, permits Weinberger to unmask Franklin as, underneath it all, a real philosopher-statesman. Here Weinberger's attention to the full range of Franklin's writings, in dialogue with the necessarily retrospective and self-justifying Autobiography, pays off mightily. Unlike many scholars, he usually treats Franklin's writings as the product of one mind writing in different circumstances, genres, contexts. He finds subtlety and multivocality interesting, not a problem to be explained away. In the wake of founding father biographers who sought to distill the essence of pithy old Ben through Poor Richard's Almanac and his autobiographical sound bytes, this is, to say the least, quite refreshing.

The philosophical approach favored by Weinberger, however, runs into some difficulties when it comes to Franklin's politics, a subject addressed directly in the last third of the book. He rightly objects to the tendency of historians to look for one great transformation in Franklin's politics to explain his journey from loyal Briton to revolutionary. He denies that Franklin was "a morally fervent partisan of equality" (253), seeing...