Ken Kersch - American Political Thought

These affinities, antagonisms, arguments, and dissonances lent the American founding a multivalent – and sometimes contrapuntal – character that left Americans with a powerful but complicated ideational and institutional legacy.

1 Were the Puritans a force for progress or reaction? Was Puritan thought “liberal” or “illiberal”?

2 Is the American Revolution best understood as conservative or radical? Was it really revolutionary at all? In what sense?

3 How much of a distinction is there, ultimately, between the categories of “constitutional design” and “constitutional interpretation”?

4 How do the oppositions between Federalists and Antifederalists, and Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, map onto the politics of subsequent American history, including the present day?

5 Does it make sense to speak of the American founding as instituting a “democracy”?

6 Does it make sense to speak of any coherent group under the label of “the founders”?

7 Does the existence and acceptance of chattel slavery by the new nation vitiate any moral or political value that the American founding might otherwise have?

1 1. Early in the nation’s history, a number of states in the federal system did, increasingly controversially, require religious tests for public office. These were gradually eliminated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

2 2. Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (1819) was a deliberate exception. In designing UVA, Jefferson omitted the usual campus chapel, and replaced it with the Rotunda, a classical structure modeled on the Roman Parthenon, which served as the library, and was meant to reflect the “authority of nature and power of reason.”

3 3. See, e.g., Somerset v. Stewart (1772), a decision by Great Britain’s Kings Bench, written by Lord Mansfield, which declared chattel slavery a practice contrary to common law and right, “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.”

4 4. Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitments, and Constraints (2000); Federalist #1 (Hamilton).

5 5. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 US 316 (1819).

6 6. Federalist #78. This was another Hamilton argument reprised by John Marshall, in this case in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

7 7. See Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (1967).

8 8. See Herbert Storing, What the Antifederalists Were For (1981); Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalists and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (2012).

9 9. David Siemers, Ratifying the Republic: Antifederalists and Federalists in Constitutional Time (2002); Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow, Legacies of Losing in American Politics (2018).

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