Explaining America: The Federalist

...Wills doesn't have the history of the period right...

...In any event Wills concluded that Richard Nixon, whom he irreverently dubbed "the last liberal," had by trying to revive individualism reduced it to absurdity...

...For virtue, as it has been defined in our centers of learning and in the media, has long had a distinctly leftist coloration...

...One imagines Wills to have been not greatly dissatisfied with such experiments as they were performed in the 1970s under the mandates of affirmative action and the new equality, which did indeed repudiate the substance of equal opportunity as liberalism had historically defined it...

...Nevertheless the proponents of the new Constitution in the ratification struggle, often in spite of themselves and in part spurred by political motive and social fear, shifted the theory and practice of American politics into an essentially modern pluralist mode...

...It is important therefore to recognize his historical researches for what they are: an extension of the campaign to discredit modern liberalism that has preoccupied him from his youthful experience on the right to his present role as learned apologist for the new egalitarianism...

...He argues that in this document, which most modern scholars consider to be a defense of pluralistic, interest-group politics, Madison did not in fact approve and seek to encourage competition between interests, but rather tried to discourage and even eliminate interest from American politics...

...Public-policy changes occur therefore not as a result of rational debate in the arena of electoral politics, as liberal theory holds, but through the witness and activism of the society's "spiritual elite," who predictably enough in Wills' account all turn out to be on the Left...

...The reason is that commercial, propertied interests were ranged behind this appeal, and it will not do for Wills to depict these capitalist interests in a favorable light or to identify himself with them...

...Wills concluded: The true spirit of the...

...Abstracting Madison's revision of republican theory from its historical setting, he denies the pluralistic content of The Federalist and makes its emphasis on public virtue into a shibboleth for attacking modern liberalism...

...This seems to be Madison's meaning when he writes in Federalist No...

...Still, one suspects that Wills would like the prophets who guide and teach us and the bureaucratic elites who rule us, as well as accommodationist politicians and the peace-loving public, to hear his plea for virtue in government...

...But best of all Wills liked those whom he called prophets-the long line of reformers and dissenters from William Lloyd Garrison to the Berrigan brothers, who saw evil and injustice in society and had the courage to fight them...

...Accordingly Wills ignored the usual sources of communal sensibility and endeavor in American history and instead carried his attack on liberalism straight to its revolutionary origins, arguing that the founding fathers were guided by a communitarian impulse rather than by liberal individualism...

...But Madison and his colleagues, though critical of excessive factionalism, did not seek to eliminate interest from American politics...

...On the contrary, recognizing the pursuit of economic interest as endemic to American society, they sought to sanction and stabilize it by creating an enlarged electoral arena within which it could operate...

...To suit his anti-individualist purposes, Wills might Three years ago Garry Wills' study of Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence so impressed the historical fraternity that it won several prestigious awards and earned its author an appointment as Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University...

...Hence the purpose of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was to curb the centrifugal tendencies that factionalism promoted...

...If the country would only take seriously this social impulse, Wills argued, if it would set aside its official individualism and the mystique of earning, "then the great lack of our political theory-its blindness to the facts of community life-[could] at last be repaired...

...In Nixon Agonistes (1969) Wills, at one time a National Review conservative, outlined the problem facing the non-Marxist Left as it contemplated the crisis of the liberal democratic state brought on by the Vietnam war and the black ghetto riots of the 1960s...

...In choosing our teachers, he added, we don't have to depend on the luck of finding contemporaries who can enlighten us...

...In wistful lamentation Wills asks: "Was it too much for Madison to hope that a government could be built on [public virtue] ? If so, it was a noble failure, which made sense in its own terms and its own day, if not in ours...

...Virtue consists in actions taken for the general welfare...

...A popular rhetorical device often employed by present-day reformers is to show that their cause had adherents at one or more points in the past, much as do lawyers, who argue from precedent...

...Therein lies the chief historical significance of The Federalist...

...Confessions of a Conservative showed that Wills' thinking about history had changed since the late 1960s, when, as was the wont of New Leftists in those days, he doubted its usefulness in the task of building a new community...

...The electoral system is nevertheless important because it provides a legal framework which legitimizes the demands of the prophets, as well as the decisions of the reforming bureaucratic elite...

...Yet the framers of the Constitution, in startling contrast, projected a republican government of continental dimension...

...Although that evaluation must be performed, the book is important principally as yet another salvo of Wills' unflagging campaign, steadfastly pursued since he achieved radical enlightenment in the late 1960s, to attack the principle of liberal individualism that lies at the heart of the American political tradition...

...Of course they have long been discredited, as Wills' references to the literature make clear...

...Indeed it would be misleading to examine it strictly from the standpoint of its contribution to historical knowledge...

...moreover, he was opposed to the individualist vision, believing all enterprise to be derived from public strictures and therefore obligated to publk welfare...

...The lesson Wills draws is that we should "listen constantly for whatever light is given us from human ingenuity and courage . . . [and] allow as much freedom of preaching and teaching as we can, within our large politics of compromise...

...no admissions board can exclude us...

...But Jefferson did not treat this as a fundamental right...

...In doing so they rejected as unrealistic the older ideal of an undifferentiated, homogeneous community possessing a single unified interest...

...In an expanded system of representation particular interests would be much less able to aggregate themselves into a controlling faction...

...If so, considering the large number of highly educated people who sustain the public interest movement, one suspects that Wills or some other savant will then remind us of the Platonic truth that virtue is knowledge...

...We go forward by seeing backward...

...He liked bureaucrats even more because they checked the abuses of businessmen, the dominant elite in American society, and solved the problem of distributive justice by creating new forms of property in welfare payments, education benefits, medical care, and other social programs...

...Yet for all its erudition in explicating the meaning of eighteenth-century political language, Wills' study depended on such a simplistic view of Locke as to vitiate the entire analysis...

...Regarding Madison as a profound thinker who has been incorrectly understood, Wills adopts the strategy of rescuing him from the wrong-headed interpretations of the economic determinists (Charles A. Beard), the disciplined party rule theorists (E.E...

...He is after all merely trying to rewrite history-a time-honored occupation of rulers, reformers, and revolutionaries of all political persuasions...

...Obviously, however, Wills thinks Madison's views are relevant for today, or else he wouldn't write a book about them...

...What is more, he does not care about the history of the period, for as in his other works his central concern is to repudiate modern liberalism and to rectify American political theory by recasting it in a communal framework...

...If Wills' Madison bears a resemblance to the centralizing reformers of contemporary liberalism, the identification becomes complete in Wills' discussion of the place of virtue in the political system...

...The metaphor seems apt, for in his newest book, Explaining America, Wills continues his assault on liberalism by questioning the view of the framers of the Constitution held by most historians and political scientists...

...Wills thought they could be even more admirable and useful, however, if they could be separated from the liberal tendency "to reduce all social lift- back to individualist terms...

...Heretofore it had been axiomatic that republican government could exist only in a circumscribed geographical area...

...Although he defined the purpose of politics in the limited terms that conservatives approve, Wills' description of himself as a conservative possessing deep regard for existing institutions was disingenuous...

...The acclaim accorded Inventing America will no doubt ensure a cordial reception for its sequel, Explaining America: The Federalist, the second of a projected tetralogy entitled America's Political Enlightenment...

...Perhaps so...

...His entire thesis about the intellectual origins of the Declaration of Independence comported with recent scholarly findings that located the source of revolutionary political ideas more in the writings of eighteenth-century English radical whigs or commonwealthmen than in the theories of John Locke...

...The proper historical conclusion, which Wills' fervent anti-liberalism kept him from seeing, was that Locke could not be exorcised from America's revolutionary origins, and that Jefferson and his fellow patriot leaders on balance encouraged liberal individualism as an actuating force in American politics...

...what if, he asks, George McGovern had won in 1972...

...Did Wills seriously believe that the institutions and procedures he professed to admire could be maintained apart from the liberal principles that sanctioned and justified them in public opinion...

...For the repudiation of modern liberalism once again became Wills' central theme in this intellectual autobiography...

...Would Wills have been thinking of himself here-the journalist turned historian who challenged the historical profession by his researches into America's communitarian origins...

...Wills' principal concern, however, was to state his theory of American politics, and although his effort can hardly be called substantive or original, it throws light on the historical labors that he has undertaken...

...Thus in his effort to repair the deficiency in our political theory Garry Wills has turned to history...

...Wills did recognize that Jefferson acknowledged a right to private property...

...To begin with, he reminds us that Madison learned his political science from the Scottish Enlightenment school-especially David Hume-and thus rejected Locke's "selfish system" in favor of the affective and benevolent life of the family as the basis of the social contract...

...Consisting in affirmative action, environmental protection, hostility to business, and the like, it has been represented by public interest groups, issue organizations, and progressive political action committees...

...Representative of a virtuous minority, he would have aroused such deep resentment as to make it impossible for him to govern...

...Virtuous representatives in Madison's scheme thus refine public discourse, purging it of special interests...

...The rise of the moral majority will perhaps cause left-liberal public interest groups to alter their rhetoric and argue for a separation between morality and politics...

...Accordingly much of what he says about the theory of republican government as explicated in The Federalist is accurate...

...Wills is correct, then, in observing that the key to the Federalist plan of constitutional reform was an extended system of representation...

...More careful reviewers subsequently pointed this out, and also noted that although Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment writers placed restrictions on private property, these were fewer than had been thought necessary in the seventeenth century...

...More specifically he proposed the creation of "a newly articulated community" under the guidance and tutelage of'' founding fathers," who would be willing to experiment with new concepts of representation based on social and cultural rather than geographical constituhave adduced plenty of evidence of communalism scattered about nineteenth-century social history...

...Let it be said at the outset, however, that while this book like its predecessor bears the markings of scholarship, scholarship it is not...

...Revolution was communitarian...

...Considered on their own terms, he wrote, the techniques of liberalism-free elections, the economic market, the cultural habits of industry and self-discipline, the rules of academic freedom-were admirable and useful...

...Backed by the misguided silent majority, Nixon hewed to outmoded EXPLAINING AMERICA: THE FEDERALIST Garry Wills / Doublcday / $14.95 Herman Belz liberal beliefs despite widespread evidence of what Wills described as "a desperate thirst for community, for social bonds, new 'families,' communes...

...Schattschneider and James MacGregor Burns), and the pluralists (Harold Laski...

...In Confessions of a Conservative Wills states that it might be a bad thing to have too much virtue in government...

...The trouble is that it is unhistorical...

...For this, virtuous representatives were needed to prevent faction from dominating politics, and the way to bring virtuous representatives into government was to expand the boundaries of the republic...

...The Federalist party of the 1790s relied on this idea, and despite constant democratization it has persisted into our own time, although now it relies for its survival on the courts and regulatory agencies rather than on the legislatures...

...Virtue is preference for the common good, and in a republican society, it must be insisted on against the claims of individual private interest...

...More to the point of the constitutional problems of the 1780s, Wills asserts that Madison-contrary to the usual picture we have of him-feared an over-active citizenry, looked reverentially on and approved the inculcation of obedience to government, held to a unitary theory of sovereignty that denied any sovereignty to the states, and viewed the Constitution as "a very adaptable and flexible instrument reflecting the needs of social man...

...Of course the notion that the enlightened few could apprehend the public interest and implement it through wise legislation did not disappear with the adoption of the Constitution...

...Furthermore, Jefferson and the Scottish school never questioned the moral legitimacy of private property...

...The activists in these "disinterested" organizations, often backed by or in collaboration with federal bureaucrats, assume a lofty and imperious tone of moral righteousness that makes compromise in the traditional manner of interest-group pluralism difficult if not impossible...

...Arnold Beichman has cited in these pages* the errors of fact and judgment that Wills' anti-anti-Communism led him to make about the Soviet Union...

...If the politicians maintained the country, Wills declared, the prophets by initiating social change made it worth saving...

...In an age when journalists try to make history by injecting themselves into events and shaping policy, we should perhaps be grateful for Wills' modesty and restraint...

...10: "Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests...

...The great Academy of the Past is open to all who would use it," he averred...

...Evincing his characteristic disbelief that anyone in his right mind could take the tenets of liberal ideology seriously, Wills nevertheless professed satisfaction with the existing political order...

...Accordingly, Wills reasoned, in enumerating in the Declaration of Independence the inalienable rights to which all men were entitled, Jefferson omitted any express reference to property...

...What he really liked about the modern liberal state was its intellectual flac-cidity and ideological indifference...

...For his own part, however, Wills did not abandon or try to transcend history, but rather set about rewriting it, intent on exposing the deceptions of liberalism and supplying the great want he had discovered in the American political tradition-its lack of community...

...In fact in many respects it agrees with recent scholarly findings, Wills' assertions to the contrary notwithstanding...

...or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other...

...Although he acknowledges the contribution of Douglass Adair, in order to make his conclusions appear fresh and original he treats the hoary notions of progressive historiography, in which democracy battles against aristocracy, as still current...

...you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens...

...Accordingly the supreme sin against the republic, the outstanding political evil to be guarded against, is factional and partisan activity which places the interest of private individuals and groups above the public good...

...His lucubrations have produced a new nation founded on a communal rather than a liberal individualistic spirit, and a political system based on public virtue rather than interest-group conflict...

...It was not only Wills' cleverness and ingenuity in textual criticism that impressed historians...

...Now critical of innovators who would forget the past, he wrote: "Insofar as we steer rationally into the future, we do so by our rear-view mirror...

...Most commentators have concluded that this result would follow from the increased competition among interests that would occur in an enlarged republican government...

...He substituted for it the felicitous expression "the pursuit of happiness," a term denoting not private economic accumulation, as nineteenth-century laissez-faire theorists would come to argue, but rather public actions for the common good...

...In assessing the contemporary situation Wills urged Americans to break their "philosophical bondage to the past" and "make history by refusing to rest in liberalism's self-deceptions...

...Nevertheless, as Wills perceives it, history remains relevant...

...He explained that he liked politicians, mediocre representatives of a mediocre populace, because they placed a high value on compromise and kept social peace...

...it involves sacrifice to the state and produces the public happiness to which each citizen is entitled as a natural right...

...If "a few uncompromising fools" willing to think the unthinkable can get a ten to twenty percent rating in public opinion polls, he noted, the politicians, eager to please even the visionaries, will give in to them for the sake of maintaining social peace...

...Wills isn't stupid, and his picture of Madison isn't all wrong...

...Wills argues, however, that the prevention of factional control can be attributed to the tendency of an extended republic to select judicious and impartial representatives who, uninstructed by their constituents, will be free to disregard narrow local and private interests and legislate for the common good...

...Lacking a genuine interest in history, Wills neither considers the political context in which The Federalist was written nor examines the social and economic dimension of Madison's appeal for virtue and wisdom in government...

...In Inventing America (1978) Wills depicted Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's most famous apostle of liberty, as an expounder not of the selfish individualism of John Locke, but of the social interdependence and community welfare theorists of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, and others...

...Madison's objective, and the very purpose of the Constitution, was to create a government that would uphold the common good...

...Having disposed of Lockean individualism in his book on Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Wills now seeks to eliminate from the American political tradition the theory of pluralism advanced by James Madison in The Federalist...

...But contrary to their expectations, the Utopian socialists who conducted experiments in communitarian living during the pre-industrial era conspicuously failed to inspire emulation among their contemporaries, and therefore can be deemed hardly capable of inspiring emulation in the late twentieth century...

...In the decade after 1776 conflicting factional interests dominated state politics and threatened, in the view of Madison and like-minded constitutional reformers, to undermine the experiment in republicanism commenced during the Revolution...

...After this venture into early American history, Wills essayed a volume on contemporary politics, Confessions of a Conservative (1979...

...In support of his thesis Wills performs a characteristically pedantic textual analysis of Madison's most famous essay, Federalist No...