Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (review)

Using a geologic metaphor, Alan Houston mines Benjamin Franklin's thought and actions, despite the scholar's acknowledgement that Franklin was neither a systematic thinker nor a "footnoter" (30). This idiosyncratic founder remains on the margin of revolutionary political history because he does not fit neatly into the era's major paradigms: he is not a classical republican; he is not a Lockean liberal; and his life cannot be explained by the Puritan concept of calling as famously argued by Max Weber. Franklin's understanding of citizenship was not based on mortal fear, as Hobbes and Machiavelli would have it, nor was it determined by benevolence, as Hutchinson would argue, but on utility—on humans' ability to assist each other. Houston emphasizes that this concept is much broader than mere economic rewards and includes anything that improves the quality of life for individuals and for groups, including friendship, knowledge, and freedom. Houston carefully distinguishes the politics of improvement from that of "progress," which is often deterministic, ultra-rational, and exclusionary. Instead, improvement is "less a philosophical doctrine or a political program than a set of priorities applied in comparative and contextual judgments" (16). Houston usefully explains how the idea of utility connects many aspects of Franklin's life and work, such as his pragmatic understanding of science, his accommodative approach to diplomacy, and his evolving opposition to slavery.

Although improvement advances interests, it is not natural or inevitable and therefore must be cultivated: it requires organization, negotiation, compromise, and sometimes a calculated measure of hypocrisy. For Franklin, commerce is the most productive model of social relations, and, because credit and debit drove trade in the American colonies, self-improvement was critically important. Creating, sustaining, and performing a virtuous character depended, not on the presence of grace, but on developing and maintaining good habits. Given the complexity of commercial society, Franklin's image of the self could no longer be simple, pure, and unitary, but was composite and frequently contradictory.

A fundamental moral imperative for Franklin was the joining of individuals into voluntary associations, and Houston uses Franklin's own 1747 Association, a large privately-organized militia, to demonstrate how he believed that voluntary organizations should serve mutual interests and treat its members equally. They should not rely—as classical republicans would have it—on virtue but on well-designed rules and procedures. Franklin applied many such beliefs to government, and in particular to the British Empire, which, he believed, should be a commercially-driven union of free and equal states. When Britain began to emphasize its political superiority and to rule its colonies by fear, Franklin first sought to repair the connection, and then, when he understood these efforts would fail, to establish union within the colonies themselves.

Overall, Houston's book does not produce a seismic shift in our understanding of Franklin, but he does connect his thoughts, words, and actions in a way that helpfully illuminates his fairly consistent approach to the world with which he interacted. Houston's Franklin is less acquisitive, less individualistic, less rational, more egalitarian, and more democratic than the Franklin we think we know, and for that reason Houston's study is quite important.