The Founders' Honesty About Flawed People Let Them Accept Limits
The founders thought institutions could be reinvented, but not human nature, and that restraint saved them from the fate of other revolutions.
Joys of Compounding · America at 250: The Ideas of 1776 - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 39]As historians marked America's 250th anniversary, Brendan McConville, a historian of early America, offered an explanation for why 1776 turned out differently from almost every revolution that followed.
"They never convinced themselves that they could create a perfect human being," McConville argued.
By that, McConville meant a strange pairing in American thinking. One half was optimistic and Enlightenment-minded, the belief that society could be redesigned and made better through reason and self-rule. The other half was Calvinist, the Protestant teaching that people are prone to sin and self-interest and cannot be made perfect.
Historian Patrick Griffin added the background for that pessimism. Griffin said Americans a generation before, coming off the Great Awakening, a wave of religious revivals in the 1730s and 1740s, "had probably been the most religious society in all the world." That wariness about human nature stayed with them even as elite founders embraced Enlightenment ideas.
That combination, McConville said, kept them honest about limits. Even George Washington, who came to be seen as almost godlike as the embodiment of the cause, was discussed by his contemporaries as flawed and struggling. They remained unsparing in judging themselves, and so they did not promise a new kind of person.
Griffin, who cautioned that he was no expert on the founders, pointed to an essay by James Madison, he thought Federalist 51, one of the essays urging Americans to ratify the Constitution. Madison's point was that people are neither angels nor devils, and so government must restrain them. Americans could make the world anew, Griffin said, while recognizing that they could not make it perfect.
The result, McConville argued, is that the American Revolution is "by far the most successful revolution in global history" because it did not consume itself the way the French and Russian revolutions later did. Jefferson and Madison had imagined an enlightened republic of independent farmers, McConville said. By the 1820s something quite different had emerged, and "They're forced to come to terms with that, even when they don't want to."
That honesty did not mean innocence. Historian Frank Cogliano noted in the same discussion that Jefferson enslaved at least 607 people over his life. The founders' clear view of flawed humanity included their own failures.
Questions people ask
What does Calvinist mean here?
Calvinism is a form of Protestant Christianity that stresses human sinfulness and limits on human reason. In early America, shaped by revivals like the Great Awakening, that often meant assuming people would act selfishly and needed checks on power. That is why the founders talked about ambition countering ambition rather than trusting rulers to be good.
What is Federalist 51?
It is one of 85 essays written in 1787 and 1788 to persuade Americans to ratify the Constitution, with Madison as a principal author. Number 51 explains checks and balances: because people are not angels, government must restrain them, and government itself must be restrained. Its famous line is that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Which revolutions did consume themselves?
The classic examples are the French Revolution of 1789, which moved from reform to the Terror and mass executions, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which led to purges and one-party rule. Both began with promises to remake society and then turned inward against supposed enemies. The American Revolution, by contrast, ended with elections and a transfer of power.