Madison

Without major compromises by all involved and the agreement to avoid the contentious issue of slavery, the framers would never have written and ratified the Constitution

By Joseph J. Ellis

In September 1789, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote in dismay to his old friend Thomas Jefferson, who was an ocean away in Paris. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which everywhere excite disgust against the state governments.”

Madison had come to Philadelphia four months earlier determined to create a fully empowered national government designed to replace the state-based system under the Articles of Confederation. Despite his own best efforts, however, the delegates to the convention, so he thought, had proved unequal to the task, producing a document that finessed the core issues behind a veneer of willfully ambiguous compromises. Madison regarded these political accommodations as loose knots that would soon unravel, predicting that the Constitution would be lucky to last a decade.

At the same time, Benjamin Franklin was expressing his own frustration with the document’s final draft but doing so in an upbeat tone that contrasted sharply with Madison’s stark sense of failure. No one—and certainly not Madison—could turn a phrase as deftly as Franklin, and his open-ended verdict was a classic statement of political wisdom in the wait-and-see mode:

I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present: but, Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it; for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change my opinion even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise . . . Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

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We are once again—as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers—a republic of property owners.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The Founders anticipated a limited but broader franchise in America. They provided that senators should be chosen by legislatures, whose members were typically selected by a large electorate, and that members of the House should be chosen by voters with “the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.”

The Founders had different ideas of the worthiness of commerce. Jefferson envisioned a republic of freeholding egalitarian farmers. Alexander Hamilton envisioned a republic on the path toward commercial and industrial preeminence. But Jefferson’s vision was a more accurate picture of the United States in the early years of the republic, where land was plentiful and labor scarce, where the large majority of white men were farmers and most of them owned the land they worked.

In this freeholders’ republic, it was natural to move toward universal manhood suffrage, to allow every white male adult to vote. Some states took longer than others to reach this goal—South Carolina still had the legislature choose its presidential electors until 1860. But the principle was widely accepted elsewhere: since almost everyone owned property, everyone should be allowed to vote. There was a danger, recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, that the poor would vote to strip the rich of their wealth and, in President Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “Spread the wealth around.”

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place.

Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.

Up through the end of the 19th century there did not seem to be a significant tension between universal democracy and property rights. The Founders’ vision prevailed.

A New Vision Based on Fear

But that was no longer the case in 1910. By then, another vision was being advanced, the vision of the Progressives—the vision of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, of political philosophers Herbert Croly and John Dewey.

The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.

I want to advance another thesis: That they actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution.

I want to advance another thesis: That Progressives actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution.

They did not know what we know today: that revolution wasn’t going to occur in America, as it had so often in Europe (multiple times in France, in many European countries in 1848, and as recently as 1870-71). Revolution would transform Russia in 1917-18. In the chaos and violence that followed World War I, Marxist revolts broke out in cities as productive and sophisticated as Munich and Budapest; Benito Mussolini’s fascists marched on Rome. The Progressives did not take the Marxist view that revolution was inevitable, but they certainly believed it was possible; Theodore Roosevelt was quite explicit about this threat. And they believed it a serious menace, as avowedly Marxist socialist parties gained millions of adherents in the expanding electorates of Europe.

The Challenges of Urbanity

This is understandable if we go back to 1910, and look at the America the Progressives faced. It was increasingly an urban country with an increasingly industrial economy, a country where great masses of people did not own significant amounts of property.

The United States in 1910 had 92 million people—it would pass the 100 million mark in 1915. This seems like a small number to us, living in a nation of 310 million, but it was an enormous multitude to the Americans of that time, a huge increase over the 3.9 million recorded in the first Census just 120 years before, in 1790.

Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep.

It was an America with huge and rapidly growing cities. New York City had 4.8 million people in 1910, nearly half of them in Manhattan—almost a million more than live there today—and half of those lived south of 14th Street. The subways were being built that would spread the city out in the next decade to Brooklyn and the Bronx, each of which gained more than half a million people in the decade, during which the population of New York City rose to 5.6 million. Behind New York in 1910 were Chicago with 2.2 million, Philadelphia with 1.5 million, and St. Louis, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Detroit each with about half a million or more. Altogether, one out of eight Americans lived in these nine cities, America was rapidly moving to a time—reached by the 1920 Census—when a majority lived in cities.

And these cities were filling up with immigrants. In the 1900-1910 decade, America grew from 76 million to 92 million and welcomed some 9 million immigrants. Four million more would arrive in the next four years. More than half of America’s population growth came from immigrants, and for the first time many came from Eastern and Southern Europe, the vast majority of whom settled in big cities. It was a time when America’s giant factories employed great masses of immigrants. Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant was churning out hundreds of thousands of Model Ts—and Ford was organizing English and civics lessons for his workers, many of whom had little command of English.

In America, most farmers owned their farms. But most city dwellers did not own significant property at all. Most city residents rented rather than owned their homes; they cashed their paychecks for cash rather than have bank accounts; they depended on charity if they became disabled or widowed. It was the America of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie—a very hard America (as I used the term in my 2004 book, Hard America, Soft America), an America with plenty of competition and accountability, but which could be very unforgiving of mistakes and misfortunes. Millions made their way upwards, but most never accumulated significant wealth. They lacked the stake in their communities and in the larger society that property provides.

The Obama Democrats came to power with an assumption that in times of economic distress Americans would be more amenable to or supportive of big government programs.

For the Progressives, this was scary. Who could tame the urban masses? The post-Civil War politicians who built Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Station located them near Chicago to stamp out revolution if it came. And indeed there was rioting in the streets of Chicago during the Pullman strike of 1893, when President Grover Cleveland superseded the governor of Illinois and mobilized federal troops.

The Progressives and their progeny, the New Dealers—whether acting out of benevolence, hunger for power, or fear—were paternalistic; but they were also precautionary. Give the masses work relief, Social Security, deposit insurance, a floor on wages and prices, they thought, and the masses will not revolt or be attracted to the totalitarian faiths advancing in the Old World—the Communism that many intellectuals championed, the fascism that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote was “the wave of the future.”

The Progressives argued that economic freedoms were unimportant because ordinary people, lacking property, didn’t really have much economic freedom anyway. As such, property rights must be subordinated to human rights. It was better to guarantee people education, healthcare, food, housing—the domestic programs that Franklin Roosevelt advanced as victory in World War II neared in 1944 and 1945. Economic growth was a secondary concern at best. Roosevelt seems to have believed, as many Americans did at the time, that the era of economic growth was over and that the postwar years would see a return to economic depression. In any case, he was clearly focused on economic redistribution rather than growth.

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place. It envisaged not growth but stasis. It was widely believed that capitalism had failed and economic growth was a thing of the past.

Misreading History and the Progressive Overreach

Today we have a presidential administration and a congressional leadership which consciously seeks to expand the size and scope of government in the tradition set out by the Progressives and New Dealers. They came to power assuming that in times of economic distress Americans would be more amenable to or supportive of big government programs. This was a lesson they absorbed directly or secondhand from the great New Deal historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James McGregor Burns, and from Franklin Roosevelt himself.

Progressives argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional.

But as I argued in my 1990 book, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, and as Amity Shlaes argues differently in her book on the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, those lessons were misleading. It’s true that American voters in the 1934 and 1936 elections endorsed the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. But as the 1930s went on, opinion shifted. By 1937, most Americans opposed Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and were repelled by the sit-down strikes that resulted in unionizing the auto and steel industries. Majorities favored reducing government spending and controls, limiting the power of labor unions, and paring welfare programs—this was when the word “boondoggling” was added to the English language.

It is true that Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940 and that Democrats retained majorities in Congress. But polling suggests that if the 1940 election had been decided on domestic issues, the Republicans would have won. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term weeks after the fall of France, when Hitler and Stalin and Imperial Japan were allies in command of most of the land-mass of Eurasia—the closest the world has ever come to George Orwell’s vision in 1984. Roosevelt was an experienced and tested leader; the Republican candidate, though talented, was a former utility executive who had never held public office and had no experience in foreign or military affairs.

Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth.

The Obama Democrats today believe they have progressed toward the goals Roosevelt outlined for domestic policy in his last year as president, and are puzzled by the adverse public reaction to their programs. But the America we live in is a very different country from the America the Progressives and New Dealers knew and, in part, because of the impact of some of the public policies set in place by the New Dealers and their opponents.

Those policies—as modulated by the Republican Congress in 1947 and 1948, which eliminated wage and price controls, cut taxes, limited the powers of labor unions, and rejected public housing programs—helped to produce the postwar prosperity which neither the New Dealers nor their political opponents predicted. The housing policies of the New Deal helped to make a majority of Americans homeowners while the bipartisan G.I. Bill of Rights, shaped in large part by the American Legion, enabled millions to attend college. These policies helped produce the postwar prosperity that neither Roosevelt’s admirers nor most of his opponents anticipated.

And when macroeconomic policies produced the stagflation of the 1970s, politicians, Democratic as well as Republican, embraced deregulation, which squeezed out huge costs in transportation and communication. This reduced the costs of life’s necessities, which enabled more Americans to accumulate significant wealth over a working lifetime.

John Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

We live now in a moment where it is clear that some of these policies went too far. Policies to increase homeownership helped produce the housing-price crash of 2007. Poorly understood innovations in finance led to the financial crisis of 2008. The resulting recession is painful and is, I believe, being prolonged by the economic policies of the Obama Democrats.

But the fact is that we are once again, as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a republic of property owners. Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth. And that is why, I believe, American voters seem to be rejecting the policies of the Obama Democrats. Those policies, rooted in the Progressive and New Deal tradition, are designed to encourage a culture of dependence. It is the “soft despotism” of which Tocqueville warned us 175 years ago. The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The major political development of the last 17 months has been an inrush of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans into political activity, an inrush symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. It is fascinating to me that the tea partiers have adopted the language and in some cases even the costumes of the Founders. While the Progressives’ descriptions of a “horse and buggy” Constitution and their sense that giant auto factories and steel mills were the harbinger of the future seem tinny and out of date, the language of the Founders continues to resonate with the clear timbre of a silver spoon tapping a crystal glass. The majority of the American people seem to firmly agree with the Founders’ insistence that no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And so we can take satisfaction that most of our fellow citizens in our freeholders’ republic still hold these truths to be self-evident.

This article is based on a speech delivered at the Jack Miller Center Summer Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

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History for Dollars

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: June 7, 2010

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.

But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levee of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.

Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.

Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.

The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.

Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 8, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.

Socratic Method

“An extraordinarily fine collection of essays—wide-ranging, yet coherent and profound—that pays fitting tribute to the work of Thomas Pangle, one of the truly great scholars and teachers of our generation.”—Arthur Melzer, Michigan State University

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Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. The contributors write in awareness that a loss of confidence in reason similar to the one we are witnessing today– when the desirability and possibility of guiding our lives by the enduring, normative truths that reason attempts to discover –had occurred at the time of Socrates, who realized that the existence of genuine limits to what is knowable by reason opened up the possibility that our world, instead of having the kind of intelligible necessities that science seeks to uncover, could be the work of mysterious, creative gods or god–as devoutly religious citizens claimed it to be. His grasp of this great difficulty led him and his students–ancient and medieval–to attempt to ground the life of reason by means of a pre-philosophic, preliminary investigation of political-moral questions. Modern political philosophers later attempted to ground the life of reason in a considerably different, “enlightening” way. These essays examine both of these attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor. The volume is divided into five parts. The essays in Part I examine the moral-political problems through which Socrates came to ground the philosophic life as those problems first appeared in earlier, pre-Socratic writers. Part II explores those problems in their Platonic and Aristotelian presentations, and in the work of two medieval thinkers. Part III addresses the thought of Leo Strauss, the thinker upon whose work the recovery of both ancient and modern political philosophy in our day has been made possible. Part IV explicates the writings of modern political philosophers and thinkers with a view to uncovering their alternative approach to science and political life. The volume concludes in Part V with essays addressing contemporary problems enlightened by the study of political philosophy.

Available for Pre-Order

List of Contributors
Timothy Burns; Peter J. Ahrensdorf; Arlene Saxonhouse; Steven Forde; Paul A. Rahe; Michael P. Zuckert; Devin Stauffer; David Leibowitz; Robert Goldberg; Christopher Bruell; Linda R. Rabieh; Richard S. Ruderman; Christopher Baldwin; J. Judd Owen; Waller R. Newell; Nathan Tarcov; Ross J. Corbett; Clifford Orwin; John W. Danford; Heinrich Meier; Fred Baumann; Robert C. Bartlett; Ralph Lerner; Bryan-Paul Frost; Laurie Fendrich; Donald Kagan; H. Donald Forbes; Norman Doidge

About the Editor
Timothy Burns, Ph.D, is an associate professor of government at Skidmore College.

Edmund Burke

Thomas Paine

By DAVID BROOKS

When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment — thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and Condorcet.

These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.

Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.

What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that.

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again.

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had.

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 25, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.

How the West Won

Revisiting the days of the Berlin Wall, Cuban missiles and Reaganite resolve

By WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY

The outcome of the Cold War may seem inevitable in retrospect, but it hardly appeared that way during the four decades of high-stakes conflict. In the West and in the developing world of former European colonies, many perfectly intelligent people, without any great ideological investment in either side of the debate, concluded that the Soviet Union offered a successful path to modernity while the U.S. and its allies faced crisis or decline. The Soviets had seemed to master the basic delivery system of a vast welfare-state apparatus—health care, literacy, housing and even, it was said, basic consumer goods—while the West was subject to the vagaries of free-market boom and bust, with widening inequalities in the private realm and evidence everywhere of public squalor. Only during the mid-1980s did reality shatter the illusion. Communism and then the Soviet Union itself collapsed from within. The totality of the Western victory prompts an interesting question: How could so many have gotten so much so wrong?

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With more Americans able to name the judges on “American Idol” than those of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told a Chicago audience Wednesday that there needs to be more emphasis on civics in government courses in the U.S. school system.

O’Connor, speaking at a Chicago Bar Association luncheon, also said that 80 percent of Americans would flunk the citizenship test given to immigrants, and blamed that on the lack required civics in government courses at high schools.

O’Connor is pushing to bring required civics in government courses back to the nation’s classrooms through her “teacher friendly” website, ourcourts.org. The site is designed for “eager to learn” middle schoolers because, she said, that is the age “when the light bulb goes on.”

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PRESERVING THE GIFT OF LIBERTY

Growing up, I never gave much thought to the importance of learning history. At that time in my life, it seemed to be nothing more than an exercise in remembering dates and names. But, later, I learned that it is about so much more. I found that among the great lessons and wisdom to be discovered from history are ideals, a philosophy of how one should live one’s life, and about what works and what doesn’t work in creating a free society where each individual can achieve to their own highest potential.

I learned that the freedom and opportunities our country afforded me are what allowed me to build a successful company and accumulate wealth. It was an America where, if you worked hard and focused, you could achieve to the best of your ability. Over time, I began to understand that the principles established in the American Founding made that possible. Concepts such as “all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and that governments are formed to protect those rights. These were the great promises pronounced in the Declaration of Independence and made into law in the Constitution.

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The National Archive website has a treasure trove of original documents. The list of the Top 100 includes many items that are familiar, but there are also some surprises. The “De Lome Letter” even received 97 votes.

The entire list appears below and is worth some investigation.

The Top 10 Milestone Documents:

1. Declaration of Independence (1776) 29,681 votes
2. Constitution of the United States (1787) 27,070 votes
3. Bill of Rights (1791) 26,545 votes
4. Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803) 13,417 votes
5. Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 13,086 votes
6. 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920) 12,282 votes
7. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) 11,789 votes
8. Gettysburg Address (1863) 9,939 votes
9. Civil Rights Act (1964) 9,860 votes
10. Social Security Act (1935) 8,157 votes

Results for the Following 90 of 100 Documents

11. Monroe Doctrine (1823) 7,795 votes

12. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 7,313 votes

13. 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868) 7,081 votes

14. Marbury v. Madison (1803) 6,155 votes

15. Articles of Confederation (1777) 5,785 votes

16. Homestead Act (1862) 4,540 votes

17. 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870) 4,479 votes

18. Marshall Plan (1948) 4,441 votes

19. Voting Rights Act (1965) 3,993 votes

20. Federalist Papers, No. 10 & No. 51 (1787-1788) 3,859 votes

21. United Nations Charter (1945) 3,496 votes

22. Treaty of Paris (1783) 3,278 votes

23. Thomas Edison’s Patent Application for the Light Bulb (1880) 3,267 votes

24. Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) 3,095 votes

25. President George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796) 2,950 votes

26. National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956)2,743 votes

27. 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Federal Income Tax (1913) 2,713 votes

28. President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address (1961)2,708 votes

29. Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan (1941) 2,663 votes

30. Manhattan Project Notebook (1945) 2,616 votes

31. President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (1865) 2,540 votes

32. Virginia Plan (1787) 2,356 votes

33. Social Security Act Amendments (1965) 2,234 votes

34. Check for the Purchase of Alaska (1868) 2,219 votes

35. Lee Resolution (1776) 2,057 votes

36. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 1,943 votes

37. Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944) 1,919 votes

38. Northwest Ordinance (1787) 1,844 votes

39. Federal Judiciary Act (1789) 1,828 votes

40. Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 (1916) 1,721 votes

41. Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) 1,657 votes

42. Surrender of Germany (1945) 1,554 votes

43. Act Establishing Yellowstone National Park (1872) 1,504 votes

44. President George Washington’s First Inaugural Speech (1789) 1,491 votes

45. Pacific Railway Act (1862) 1,451 votes

46. Surrender of Japan (1945) 1,434 votes

47. 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Direct Election of U.S. Senators (1913) 1,419 votes

48. President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918) 1,388 votes

49. Jefferson’s Secret Message to Congress Regarding the Lewis & Clark Expedition (1803) 1,387 votes

50. Treaty of Alliance with France (1778) 1,300 votes

51. Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933) 1,213 votes

52. Press Release Announcing U.S. Recognition of Israel (1948) 1,195 votes

53. Truman Doctrine (1947) 1,194 votes

54. Patent for Cotton Gin (1794) 1,135 votes

55. Missouri Compromise (1820) 1,120 votes

56. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Annual Message (Four Freedoms) to Congress (1941) 1,117 votes

57. National Labor Relations Act (1935) 1,116 votes

58. Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905) 1,091 votes

59. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 1,042 votes

60. Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces (1948) 1,010 votes

61. Lend-Lease Act (1941) 954 votes

62. Test Ban Treaty (1963) 936 votes

63. Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917) 895 votes

64. General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Order of the Day (1944)881 votes

65. Aerial Photograph of Missiles in Cuba (1962) 875 votes

66. President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress ‘On Indian Removal’ (1830) 865 votes

67. Articles of Agreement Relating to the Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia (1865) 857 votes

68. Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) 850 votes

69. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) 845 votes

70. Morrill Act (1862) 839 votes

71. Original Design of the Great Seal of the United States (1782) 787 votes

72. Interstate Commerce Act (1887) 723 votes

73. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Radio Address unveiling the second half of the New Deal (1936) 717 votes

74. Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States (1898) 691 votes

75. Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) 669 votes

76. Official Program for the March on Washington (1963) 666 votes

77. Compromise of 1850 (1850) 666 votes

78. Executive Order 10730: Desegregation of Central High School (1957) 655 votes

79. Transcript of John Glenn’s Official Communication with the Command Center (1962) 613 votes

80. Telegram Announcing the Surrender of Fort Sumter (1861) 604 votes

81. Treaty of Ghent (1814) 583 votes

82. Zimmermann Telegram (1917) 580 votes

83. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961) 567 votes

84. Tonkin Gulf Resolution (1964) 555 votes

85. Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 486 votes

86. Executive Order 10924: Establishment of the Peace Corps. (1961) 482 votes

87. Senate Resolution 301: Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954) 455 votes

88. Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) 440 votes

89. Wade-Davis Bill (1864) 405 votes

90. Dawes Act (1887) 372 votes

91. Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942) 334 votes

92. Pendleton Act (1883) 294 votes

93. Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry (1941) 284 votes

94. National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) 279 votes

95. War Department General Order 143: Creation of the U.S. Colored Troops (1863) 257 votes

96. Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) 251 votes

97. Boulder Canyon Project Act (1928) 213 votes

98. Platt Amendment (1903) 140 votes

99. Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State (1953) 136 votes

100. De Lôme Letter (1898) 97 votes

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