The Lost Soul of American Politics

...It was because religion penetrated so deeply into the souls of American women that they were able to regulate the behavior of their menfolk "in the outside world of heartless competition and worry...

...socially conformist, the Americans could afford to be individualistic politically...

...Even in the most abstract realm of political philosophy, each century since the age of the Founders seems to mark a step downwards, as America passes from the naturalism of the age of Jefferson, which prompted the loftiest minds to pursue the life of politics, to the nineteenth-century transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, which led superior intellects to withdraw from politics, and on to the twentieth-century pragmatism of James and Dewey, which, as Mr...

...Such a state would not then need to rely on a full quota of republican virtue to keep it from corruption...

...And yet the realism of the Federalists was entirely free from the cynicism of Old World republicans...

...Tocqueville argued that democracy worked in America to an extent that it could not be expected to work in Europe because the prevailing ethical code of the American people was of a sounder and more austere kind than that of European nations...

...For those who took this more pessimistic view of human nature, institutional arrangements needed to be designed to prevent harm even more than to facilitate the doing of good...

...a nation which had (as it no longer has) a shared understanding of freedom...

...Diggins praises him for having been the "first to explore the relationship of Christianity to democracy" and to consider "how the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty worked together to strengthen the fabric of political society...

...For when Montesquieu gave up his early hope of finding the republican ideal brought to life in any modern state, he recommended a system of constitutional checks and balances which would prevent any one center of power in a state from becoming dominant, and hence despotic...

...in fact it was more Puritan than Roman, and more feminine than masculine...

...As Tocqueville explained the situation, it was religion which gave American women higher standards than those of their European counterparts...

...The eyes blink," Mr...

...The "spirit" of all law was, as Montesquieu put it, more important than the letter...

...Dig-gins puts it, to confront their own power and "the even more demanding problem of self-control...

...In fact there are many American schools today where history is simply not taught, and forward-looking "social studies" are used to encourage the young to swing cheerfully and mindlessly with the times...

...They found more than a hint of a solution to this problem in Montesquieu...

...they set a more austere example to their children...

...Diggins emphasizes more than most historians the importance of Calvinism, and I believe he is right to do so, since Calvinism shaped moral and social attitudes no less than the strictly political ones, and its influence came indirectly as well as directly...

...Behind this moral code Tocqueville discerned the presence of religion...

...moreover, it was the women of America who were the custodians of that morality, and the American family was the medium through which it permeated American society...

...On the other hand, John Adams, the Puritan, conscious of man's original sin, could see in history "no age or country in which republican virtue existed...

...If a Supreme Court bans school prayers today, can it expect to find God-fearing and upright citizens in the America of tomorrow...

...They had no doubt that the operations of an Invisible Hand would ensure that each man's pursuit of private wealth would contribute to the wealth of all...

...Diggins points out that the type of virtue which Tocqueville found in America was not that of the classical ideal...

...What mattered was that the American people controlled itself less through the authority of society and its unwritten laws...

...Madison, likewise, expected man to be animated by concrete desires rather than abstract principles...

...and in a country "where the marriage tie is most respected, and where the highest and truest conception of conjugal happiness has been conceived," the American male "derives from his home that love of order which he carries over into the state...

...But it was remarkably effective...

...The title of Professor John Diggins's book is well chosen, for The Lost Soul of American Politics is a history of political ideas in America and of the political experience of the nation which lived by those ideas, a nation which was virtually unique in the world in being a republic newly founded by philosophers...

...It would, however, still need a citizen body whose members, while pursuing their private satisfactions, understood and respected both liberty and law...

...indeed they were as confident as anyone of the splendid, nay, heroic vistas that were opening before them as the frontiers of liberty extended...

...Although populated by various sects, America was tied together by common bonds of religious sentiment that "provide the greatest real power over men's souls...

...it was American society, he suggested, which provided the solid base of American democracy, and therefore it did not matter so much that American politicians had declined into mediocrity since the age of Jefferson and Hamilton...

...This word, which is hardly ever uttered today except ironically, meant much to the Founders because they were all acutely aware of the ancient doctrine restated in their own century by Montesquieu, that the guiding principle of any republic must be a disposition on the part of every citizen to put the public interest before his private interest, and this disposition they called "virtue...

...A key concept which exercised the mind of all those who took part in political de.bates in eighteenth-century America was virtue...

...The American child, learning of the noble deeds, the intellectual achievements, and the spiritual elevation of the American people and their leaders in the early years of the Republic, can only experience a melancholy sense of loss...

...and he attributed the success of democracy in the United States to the existence of this quality in its people...

...Jefferson and others who shared the fashionable optimism of the Enlightenment believed that they could count on the American people having, and continuing to have, such republican virtue...

...Hamilton, the skeptical disciple of David Hume, thought it wiser to assume that men would put their own interest before the common interest...

...Their main problem, after they had used power to throw off the power of the British, was, as Mr...

...In the following century, Tocqueville discovered that America still had a high degree of moral discipline...

...Diggins has produced a work of formidable scholarship, controversial in some of its conclusions, but full of interesting suggestions as to what constituted the originality of American political thought...

...Experience gives no grounds for optimism...

...no grounds for optimism...

...Can American democracy remain secure in its hold on the people at home and compelling in its appeal to the rest of the world if it ignores what Tocqueville had to say about religion, morality, and freedom...

...The European child, invited to look back at the despotisms and corruption and the miseries which prevailed in the past, can have (at any rate, in non-Communist countries) the happy feeling that the world is better than it once was...

...thanks to their religion, they were more chaste and upright...

...Unlike his predecessor Montesquieu, Tocqueville did not ascribe great importance to political institutions...

...but the political theory embodied in the Constitution, and in the writings of the Federalists, is surely much indebted to Calvinism...

...The reader may well ask: Would it...

...institutions alone could not keep a republic intact...

...If the domestic virtue of nineteenth-century Christianity is to vanish like the public virtue of eighteenth-century classicism, has democracy itself a future...

...Recent historians of the United States have disagreed as to whether the "Lockean" tradition of English liberalism or the "classical" doctrine of republicanism contributed more to the ideology of the American Revolution...

...In other words, a certain common standard of morality was demanded even by those philosophers who did not think it safe to place too much faith in man's capacity for virtue, and in this respect the American people did not disappoint the Founders...

...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...Norton...

...The political ideas of the revolutionary moment-the thinking behind the Declaration of Independence, and much else that Jefferson wrote-did not perhaps differ greatly from those of the French Enlightenment...

...His most recent book is Jean-Jacques: The Early Life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (W.W...

...Diggins puts it, "no longer suggested political dependence but social control...

...Religion, Tocqueville observed, functioned first of all as a source of order and restraint...

...It is a history of decay...

...government was not needed to discipline a people which disciplined itself...

...Every American believed in the saving grace of work...

...Diggins comments, and he goes on to suggest that Tocqueville's generalization would "flounder" in today's America, in the face of "infidelity, divorce and the apparent breakdown of the traditional family...