The Role of Republicanism in Framing the Constitution: Cure or Disease, Challenge or Goal

At least since James Kloppenberg’s 1987 article, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,”¹ it has been common to pay lip-service to the tripartite streams of theoretical influence—liberalism, republicanism, and Protestantism—that are often taken to have shaped American political thought during the Founding era. Of course, these three lines of influence are not the only ones emphasized by those working on the Founding, particularly historians. For examples, some scholars have recently emphasized the preeminent influence of British constitutionalism in the formation of American political thought and institutions (including Jack P. Greene and John Phillip Reid);² or some the powerful influence of British monarchical institutions and/or the first British Empire (Brendan McConville, Jerrilyn Marston, Eliga H. Gould, Mary Sarah Bilder, Daniel J. Hulsebosch, and Eric Nelson).³ Others have even challenged the view of the elite Founders as democrats (see Anthony King, Michal Jan Rozbicki, and William Hogeland).⁴

In contrast, the three books under review argue that the Revolutionaries and the framers of the Constitution were committed to only one stream of influence: republicanism (Weiner, p. ix; Robertson, p. 5; and Bodenhamer, p. 3). Indeed, in two of the three books, there is no mention of the formative influences on American political thought and institutions of liberalism, British constitutionalism and imperialism, colonial or early-national history, Reform Protestantism, English/British seventeenth- and eighteenth-century domestic political history, or the twelve-year Imperial Crisis that immediately preceded the colonies declaring independence.

Given the importance of republicanism to the authors’ accounts, one might expect, then, that they would have spent some time exploring the concept, its possibly contested and changing meanings, its sources and multiple senses when used in different contexts and historical epochs, and whose meanings of the concept were preeminent—and for whom—in the Founding era. None of this is done. Instead, in each of these works, readers are left to guess what conception the authors have in mind: a minimalist understanding of republicanism (that is, the absence of a king and the presence of popular sovereignty)? A particularly English/British understanding that developed in the seventeenth century among Independents around the New Model Army and that continued to enjoy prominence in the eighteenth century among British Commonwealth or Opposition thinkers? A more robust moral understanding popularized by Montesquieu in which political institutions are to inculcate and be dependent on a selfless virtue in the people and government? Or were they thinking of a politically radical variant that, by the end of the eighteenth century, would become difficult to distinguish from emerging nineteenth-century radicalism? Nowhere in any of the three texts are these subjects ever discussed.⁵

The framing of these works is still more open to question. As delegates to the Philadelphia Convention well understood, their bone of contention with Britain during the years immediately leading up to the move towards independence had not been with the British king or monarchy but with the republican component of the British constitution: Parliament’s House of Commons. Why, then, is republicanism the sole stream of influence that these authors choose to address? Moreover, why do both Robertson and Bodenhamer view the Philadelphia delegates’ commitment to creating a republican government that would act in similar ways to the British constitutional monarchy as a mark of their dedication to the Revolution while these same delegates—at least those desirous of displacing the Articles of Confederation—disdained state-level republicanism to which it had given support? At best, how to describe what the delegates were committed to...