THE PROFESSION the eighteenth century revolution in social science and the dawn of political science in America1 iain mclean Nuffield College, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK E-mail:
[email protected] doi:10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210071
Abstract The phrase sciences politiques was first used by Condorcet, and taken up as political science by Jefferson and Hamilton. The American Framers and their critics had to make up political science as they went along, in order to argue for (or against) a federal constitution from first principles. To do so, they drew on Scottish and French social science. We trace the influence of Scots thought (especially that of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith) and French thought (especially that of Condorcet) on the first generation of political science.
Keywords
history of political science; probability; Condorcet; Madison; Jefferson; Smith
T
he phrase sciences politiques was first used by the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794: cf. Baker, 1975: chapters 4–5; McLean and Hewitt, 1994: 3–31), and taken up as political science by Thomas Jefferson (1743– 1826: cf. Appleby and Ball, 1999: 148–9) and Alexander Hamilton (1755– 1804; cf. his numbers of the Federalist, notably #68). Earlier, David Hume (1711–1176) had argued, in the title of one of his Essays, That Politics May be Reduced to a Science (Haakonssen, 1994: 4–15). Douglass Adair (1974 and 2000) has shown strong echoes of
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Hume’s arguments in the writings of James Madison (1751–1836). The American Framers and their critics had to make up political science as they went along, in order to argue for (or against) a federal constitution from first principles. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams (1735–1826) contributed to all the subfields of political science as it is now recognised in the American profession (which I take to be American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory and political economy). The first three were children of the Enlightenment; Adams was its first
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Straussian critic. (More correctly, Leo Strauss was a distant descendant of John Adams.) The thought of the scientific Enlightenment reached the US by two channels. One flowed from Scotland, and the other from France.
THE SCOTS The first great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Adam Smith’s tutor, was Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow from 1730 to 1746. Hutcheson taught Adam Smith (1723–1790), whose best friend was David Hume. Hutcheson was an Ulster Presbyterian. Although the Presbyterian church was established in Scotland in 1689, it has never been established in Ireland; so Hutcheson had a vested interest in religious pluralism. While he was at Glasgow, the Presbytery attempted but failed to punish him for heresy. His offence, according to his students, was to have taught that ‘we have a notion of moral goodness prior in the order of knowledge to any notion of the will or law of God’. His students admitted that he had indeed taught that, but that the only alternative was to believe that if we had no notion of goodness apart from God’s will, we would have no more to say in praise of God than that his will is consistent with itself (A Vindication, 1738). It is conceivable that Adam Smith, who entered Glasgow University in 1737, was one of the authors of A Vindication. Hutcheson’s argument is impossible to circumvent. God cannot be the creator of morality unless that sentence is a tautology – ‘morality is that which God tells us to do’. In other words, Hutcheson recognised the need to supply a ground for morals independent of religion. The same need struck Hume and Smith. Smith greatly admired the ‘never-to-be-forgotten Dr Hutcheson’ as he later called him, although he disagreed with his
‘Hume created a religion-free morality, saw religion as a human artefact, and belief in miracles as a miracle in itself.’ philosophy. Hume created a religion-free morality, saw religion as a human artefact, and belief in miracles as a miracle in itself. Smith also treated religion as a human artefact, which arose at certain stages of society to satisfy human needs to explain the supernatural (Smith, 1976–, vol. 3, pp. 33, 49–50). Smith, Hume, and Hutcheson lived under a weak church and a weak state. Had they depended on the universities of Oxford or Cambridge rather than Edinburgh or Glasgow, they might have been silenced as effectively as John Locke, who fled to the Netherlands in 1683, was expelled from his Oxford fellowship in 1684, and did not publish his great work in philosophy and politics until after the change of regime – the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which his work was seen to justify – in 1689. The flight of James II in 1688 gave the Scottish Presbyterians their opportunity. The new king and queen, William and Mary, arrived in England by parliamentary invitation. James’ followers in the Scottish Estates also departed, to prepare for a military rising to restore him. The remaining Whigs drew up a long Claim of Right, accepting William and Mary as monarchs on condition that they accepted the Presbyterian church as the national church of Scotland. The ensuing revolt of ‘Bonnie Dundee’ failed, as did the attempt of James to return to power via Ireland. The establishment of the national church was confirmed in 1707, when the Scots negotiators insisted on adding an act for the protection of the Church of Scotland – drafted for the Scottish parliament by the General Assembly of the iain mclean
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Church itself. That Act remains part of the 1707 Acts of Union that constituted Great Britain in Smith’s time, and still do to this day. The state moved south in 1707, leaving Scotland to be governed by a succession of London-based Scottish managers. No monarch was again to visit Scotland until 1822. The church had gained establishment but lost the state power that had formerly allowed it to hang atheists. The Calvinists faced a counter-coup within the church in 1750, when a group of ministers who were good friends of Smith and Hume took control of the General Assembly from their parishes around Edinburgh. These ‘Moderates’ were certainly a minority within the church, but they were physically close to Edinburgh, and they could control the church, and hold the fire and brimstone, until they in turn were unseated in a counter-counter-coup in 1843. This weakness of church and state gave Hutcheson, Smith and Hume the space in which they could write and publish freely. It also impelled them to fill the vacuum left by the intellectual failure of hellfire moralism, and to think about first principles of government and economics. Hutcheson postulated a common moral sense, innate among all humankind. This view was influential in America, transmitted by Hutcheson’s writings and by his student John Witherspoon to his star student James Madison (McLean, 2003: 19). It reappears unmistakably in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal. Smith and Hume rejected Hutcheson’s ‘common sense’ ethics, but not his aim. Hume discovered public goods, and hence public choice, in 1738. Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common: becausey each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his
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failing in his part, is the abandoning the whole project. But it isy impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; y each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expense, and would lay the whole burden on others. Political society easily remediesy these inconveniences (Hume 1738/1911, vol. II p. 239; original Book III Part ii, chapter 7). The market fails to deliver some goods because, left to themselves, people rationally take a free ride. Therefore the state (‘Political society’) must provide what the market fails to. Two aspects of Smith are relevant. The first is his equilibrium economics, which led him, alone of British commentators, to realise that Britain’s ‘loss of America’ in the Revolutionary War could be to the advantage of both nations. The second is his argument in favour of religious diversity, which turns up almost unaltered in Madison, and is discussed in a later section of this article. In a much told, but little understood, story, Smith’s friend, Sir John Sinclair of Ulster, went to Smith in great alarm on hearing the news of the British defeat at Saratoga in 1777. The [British] nation must be ruined, said Sinclair. ‘ ‘‘Be assured, my young friend’’, replied the imperturbable philosopher, ‘‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’’ ’ (Sinclair, 1837: 37). By this Smith meant that the British defeat was not the end of Britain. Smith was not simply pro-American. He was too cool and detached for that. He served twice (1767 and 1778) as a special adviser to the British government on American policy. But nor was he simply pro-British. His writings on America contain two main themes. First, the American colonists are taking a free ride on defence. The British army protected their western frontier from the French, the Spanish, and the native Americans, to
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the exclusive benefit of the colonists, who did not pay for it: hence Smith’s proposal to Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, in 1767 that the colonists should be taxed to pay for their own defence. Instead, colonial taxation policy was captured by special interests that Smith deplored, in the shape of the East India Company, which tried to tax tea in Boston not for the benefit of defending the western frontier but for the private benefit of the Company. Hence also Smith’s startling proposal to Solicitor General, Alexander Wedderburn, in 1778 that Britain should concede American independence but at the same time ‘restore Canada to France and the two Floridas to Spain; we should render our colonies the natural enemies of these two monarchies and consequently the natural allies of Great Britain’ (Smith, 1976–, vol. 6, pp. 382–3). Scottish social and political science reached America through her fledgling universities, including The College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA: respectively the almae matres of Madison and of Jefferson. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish universities were at an intellectual peak; the only English ones, Oxford and Cambridge, in an intellectual trough of which both Smith and his friend Edward Gibbon wrote eloquently and sarcastically. Furthermore, the political links from Scotland and (Protestant) Ireland to America were much stronger than the political links from England to America. Ireland, Scotland, and America were united by what has been labelled ‘opposition Whig’ or ‘country Whig’ ideology (cf. esp. Adair, 1974). In modern terminology, we might call it centre–periphery politics. The nation- (empire-) building centre, in the shape of English government, was trying to impose uniformity on its resentful peripheries in Ireland, Scotland, and the American colonies. Thinkers in those
three places were country Whigs. Witherspoon had two careers, which at first seem contradictory. In Scotland before emigrating, he might be viewed as a ‘reactionary’ who opposed the liberal theology of the Moderates and campaigned to restore the fundamentalist Calvinism of the seventeenth century. After going to Princeton, he might appear as a ‘radical’, who not only taught Madison, but also urged colonists of (Ulster-) Scots descent to join the revolution. He signed the Declaration of Independence. But Evangelical Calvinists were just as keen on the separation of church and state as their Moderate rivals: they merely wished the courts of the church to have more power, and indeed to be backed by state power, as they were in colonial Massachusetts. That could indeed have had dire consequences, if Salem witch trials had spread across the United States. But Witherspoon’s star student Madison learnt from Adam Smith that this neither ought to happen, nor was it likely to, in an extended republic (below). As a Scottish country Whig, Witherspoon opposed state government of the church. As an American country Whig, he opposed colonial government of New Jersey. For his political thought see Witherspoon (1778); Scott (1982). Country Whig ideology was beautifully expressed in the last letter Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the Mayor of Washington, DC, declining an invitation to attend the Fourth of July ceremony in 1826 on grounds of poor health: May it [viz., American independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-governmenty . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the iain mclean
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rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God (TJ to Mayor Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in Appleby and Ball, 1999: 149). In a fine act of literary detection, Douglass Adair (1974: 192–202) showed that the image of ‘saddles on their backs’ comes from the dying speech of Col. Richard Rumbold, a former Cromwellian – and associate of the Levellers – sentenced to death for his participation in Monmouth’s rebellion against King James II in 1685. Jefferson knew that this letter was his dying speech. It is the manifesto to posterity of Jefferson the opposition Whig, like so many of the American revolutionaries seeing the revolt against the British Crown as the country against the Court. The rest of his imagery is distilled Enlightenment thought. ‘Monkish ignorance and superstition’ is pure Voltaire, Hume, or Smith. The country Whigs came to power in the United States under Jefferson and his friends, and enshrined their ideology in the Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments of the US Constitution. It was through Scots-Americans such as Witherspoon, or William Small – Jefferson’s tutor at William and Mary (Adair, 2000: 24) – that the country Whigs of America learnt the ideas and methodologies of the Scottish Enlightenment.
THE FRENCH The American Enlightenment has a French accent too (although Madison reportedly spoke French with a Scottish accent he picked up from Witherspoon at Princeton). The American and French Revolutions intertwined. The French Re-
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‘It was through Scots-Americans such as Witherspoon, or William Small y that the country Whigs of America learnt the ideas and methodologies of the Scottish Enlightenment.’ volution was brought on by a threat of bankruptcy of the old regime. It was unable to raise enough tax revenue to pay for its military operations in support of the American revolutionaries. Two of the American rebels, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and Jefferson, had close and affectionate contacts in the salons of Enlightenment Paris; John Adams also sat there but did not enjoy them. Jefferson succeeded Franklin as American Minister to France. Both of them, as natural and social scientists, met the Marquis de Condorcet and empathised with him – an empathy he returned: see the Eloge de Franklin which he wrote on the death of his fellow academician (Arago and O’Connor, 1847–1849, III:377–423) and his letters to Jefferson in the massive Princeton edition of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Boyd et al, 1950–, vols XIV and XV). Condorcet, perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, was a key figure in the transmission belt between France and America. His friend Jefferson was another. Franklin, Jefferson, and Condorcet all shared the wish of Hume that politics may be reduced to a science. Condorcet was probably the first person to use the phrase science politique (as one of the sciences morales et politiques) and Jefferson the first to English it as political science. As is (only) now well known, Condorcet’s (1785) Essai sur l’application de l’analysey contains two startling innovations. One is the suggestion that
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both choices and choice procedures may be evaluated according to the probability that they produce the correct outcome. The probability that a decision is correct is an increasing function of two numbers, in Condorcet’s notation v and h–k. v (for ve ´rite ´) denotes the average probability that a juror is correct; h denotes the number of votes cast on the majority side, and k denotes the number of votes cast on the minority side. So long as v is greater than 0.5, the opinion of the majority is more reliable than that of any one juror. If we know v, we need only set h–k at such a level that the probability of the majority arriving at the wrong decision is held to an acceptably low level. Or we may intensively educate the population to increase their average enlightenment, something about which Condorcet wrote extensively. His efforts to design a secular science-based education system in France finally bore fruit under the Third Republic (1871–1940). Condorcet’s first innovation is now known as the Condorcet jury theorem. His second, more problematic for him but better understood now than the jury theorem, is his discovery of majority-rule cycles and some possible ways out. This is at the heart of Arrow’s (1951) theorem and the whole discipline of social choice, including the concepts of Condorcet winner and Condorcet efficiency. Jefferson and Madison understood the jury theorem, but they probably did not understand the problem of cycles. Jefferson not only spent time in Condorcet’s company, but also bought many of the books of Condorcet and other figures of the Enlightenment, shipping them out to Virginia either for himself or his friends. One such batch reached Madison in 1786, as he was preparing the memoranda on ‘Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies’ and ‘Vices of the Political System of the United States’, which were the seed of Federalist ##18–20 and 10, respectively, and which
informed Madison’s thoughts and strategies during the Constitutional Convention. In a challenging thesis, McGrath (1983) argues that Madison was a bicameralist because he understood the problem of cyclical majorities. If this were so, Condorcet could be shown to have had enduring influence on the design of institutions – not only in the USA, but anywhere that Madison was read. More cautiously, Schofield (2003 and 2006) infers that Madison may have learnt of Condorcet’s jury theorem through Franklin on Franklin’s return from Paris to Philadelphia in 1785 or 1786, and that this might account for Madison’s jurytheoretic argument in #10: paras 15–16. Elsewhere (McLean and Urken, 1992; McLean and Hewitt, 1994) we have traced the routes by which Madison may have encountered Condorcet’s thought: Jefferson’s (1789) letter to Madison, anthologised as ‘The earth belongs in usufruct to the living’ derives both its formulae and its modes of reasoning from Condorcet, not (as the editors of the Jefferson Papers believed – XV: 390 ff) from Richard Gem; Jefferson sent Madison a copy of the Essai (Condorcet, 1785) to pass on to Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia. Madison had it for nine days before passing it on. It strains belief that even Madison can have taken in its lessons in that time. Schofield (2006) argues nevertheless that the wording of Federalist #10 betrays knowledge of the jury theorem. If Schofield is right, then Madison presumably acquired his knowledge of the theorem in conversation with Franklin, not in the nine days that Condorcet’s Essai sat on his desk. Another intermediary between Condorcet and Madison was Philip (Filippo) Mazzei, a disreputable Italian-Virginian who wrote frequently to Madison and Jefferson. Jefferson commissioned iain mclean
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Mazzei to write a four volume Recherches Historiques y sur les Etats-Unis in order to counter antiAmerican propaganda in Paris (much the same motive as for his own Notes on y Virginia). Mazzei (or Jefferson) inserted four chapters by Condorcet into this book, which Mazzei sent to Madison, unsuccessfully asking Madison to arrange a translation. Condorcet’s four chapters were called Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven a un citoyen de Virginie. Condorcet was indeed a bourgeois de New Haven – he was one of ten distinguished Frenchmen made a Freeman of New Haven at a town meeting in 1785. The citoyen de Virginie was Mazzei. These New Haven Letters argue for a unicameral national legislature, with representatives selected by a very complicated Condorcet-efficient procedure. Madison refused Mazzei’s request to get them translated, saying ‘I could not spare the time [and]y I did not approve the tendency of ity If your plan of a single Legislature etc. as in Pena were adopted, I sincerly [sic] believe that it would prove the most deadly blow ever given to republicanism’ (JM to F. Mazzei, 10 December 1788, Madison Papers (Hutchinson et al, 1962–) 11: 388–9; see also same to same 8 October 1788, Madison Papers 11: 278–9.) Thus, we have found no convincing evidence for the McGrath hypothesis. But Madison may have understood the Condorcet jury theorem: we cannot reject the Schofield hypothesis. By the jury theorem, the probability of a correct decision is a positive monotonic function of two things, the margin of victory and the ‘enlightenment’ of each juror (McLean and Hewitt, 1994: 35–40). Therefore, to improve the quality of decision making, the writers of constitutions should do two things, not mutually exclusive. They
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should raise the qualified-majority threshold required before constitutional decisions are ratified. And they should increase the enlightenment of the voters. One way of doing the latter was to extend the republic. Towards the end of Federalist #10, Madison notes that in an extended republic the legislature will comprise a smaller proportion of the population than in a state. As is well known, Madison and Jefferson both thought that the state legislatures tended to comprise selfish legislators (173 despots) who passed destructive legislation. If we compare the texts of ‘Vicesy’ and Federalist #10, both Madison’s deletions and his additions tell us about the progress of his thought between April and November 1787. He deletes from ‘Vicesy’ some pointed examples of the irresponsibility of particular state legislatures, such as his comment that an assemblyman of Rhode Island might not consider the effect of repudiating debts on England or Holland. He also deletes a fierce section on curbing religious passions, no doubt because it would not have helped in the task of the Federalist, namely in persuading the New York convention to ratify the Constitution. ‘Vicesy’, which is incomplete, tails off with a statement that [a]n auxiliary desideratum for the melioration of the Republican form is such a process of elections as will most certainly extract from the mass of the Society the purest and noblest characters which it contains. In the following six months, Madison completed the argument: an extended republic was more likely to elect ‘fit characters’ to office than a state, just because, the legislature being smaller in proportion to population, it would fish less deeply in the pool of qualified characters (Federalist #10, paras 15 and 16; Schofield, 2003 and 2006).
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Hamilton makes an equally Condorcetian argument in favour of the Electoral College in Federalist #68. The Framers spent many days in September 1787 on the Electoral College. Madison had severe doubts as to whether the Electoral College as finally designed would work in a Condorcetian way. As we know, it did not. But Hamilton’s defence of the Electoral College is probabilistic: This process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications (Federalist #68: 8). ‘Moral certainty’ (certitude morale) is pure Condorcet (McLean and Hewitt, 1994: 36). Did Hamilton get the justification of the Electoral College as a filter from Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, or from Condorcet? Likewise, are paragraphs 15 and 16 of Madison’s #10 an application of Condorcetian probabilism? Or is it an independent invention of the American Enlightenment? The Schofield hypothesis remains open. Madison was not Hamilton’s first choice for coauthor of The Federalist. Hamilton first ‘warmly pressed’ Gouverneur Morris, a Pennsylvania delegate but New York resident (Madison Papers, 10: 259; Adair, 1974: 59–60). Morris would have been a more appropriate choice. He was an extreme nationalist, much closer to Hamilton’s views than was Madison. However, he declined, and at his third attempt, on or around 17 November 1787, Hamilton brought Madison in as coauthor of the letters of Publius, which had already reached #7. There was no time for Madison to present any new material. So he reworked ‘Vices y’, a note he had prepared and circulated to his fellow Virginia delegates in the spring of 1787. This duly appeared as Federalist #10 under the singularly uninformative title ‘The same subject continued’. By
‘Madison had severe doubts as to whether the Electoral College as finally designed would work in a Condorcetian way.’ contrast, Madison had until late January 1788 to prepare ##45–51, in which he takes a different line on tyranny and its prevention. Whereas in #10 the solution to tyranny is an extensive republic, by #51 it has become the separation of powers (Kernell, 2003). It is the latter that we normally term ‘Madisonian’ but the former is probably Madison’s true doctrine.
THE AMERICANS There remain some more strings to tie up. One is the diffuse influence of Adam Smith; another is the reaction of John Adams. Smith’s Wealth of Nations seems to have been too recent to make much impact on the Federal Convention or in the Federalist. He does not appear in the index of either (Madison, 1787/1984; Madison et al, 1788/1987). He attracted one loquacious American critic, former Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Pownall, whose Letter y to Adam Smith of 1776 takes strong exception to Smith’s chapter on the American colonies (WN IV.vii). Smith made some changes in the second edition, but did not reply directly (Smith 1976–, vol. 6, pp. 224, 250, 337–76). But after independence, Smith’s points may have been overlooked, and writers from the old regime, such as Pownall, were certainly ignored. However, another part of Smith’s work carries over, I believe, very directly, to American politics. Smith and Hume, as stated above, lived under a weak state and a weak church; iain mclean
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and they both wanted to keep things that way. Neither of them was a Christian. Hume was quite open about his unbelief; Smith was not. But both of them were keenly interested in the social control, for both good and bad, which an established church can exercise. They differed in their proposed solutions. In his History of England, Hume follows Hobbes in arguing that a state church is the best guarantor of public order. If churches depend on voluntary contributions from their adherents, then according to Hume Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sectsy . And in the end, the civil magistrate will find,y that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition, which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence, by assigning stated salaries to their profession, and rendering it superfluous for them to be farther active, than merely to prevent their flock from straying in quest of new pastures (Hume, History of England iii, 30–31, quoted by Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.g.6). Smith draws exactly the opposite inference. It would be in the interests of the state to let sects flourish: The interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous and troublesome only where there is, either but one sect tolerated in the society, or where the whole of large society is divided into two or three great sects; the teachers of each acting by concert, and under a regular discipline and subordination. But that zeal must be altogether innocent where the society is divided into two or three hundred, or perhaps into as many thousand small sects, of which no one could be considerable enough to disturb the publick tranquillity. (WN V.i.g.8).
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This already sounds like a prequel of Madison’s The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source (Federalist #10: 22). A section of ‘Vicesy’ dropped from the Federalist, because it would not help persuade New Yorkers to ratify, runs: The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, the strongest of religious Ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts, against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction, separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of religion, and while it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm of Government (Madison, ‘Vicesy’ #11, in Rakove, 1999: 75). But ‘Vicesy’ itself has its roots in Madison and Jefferson’s first political campaign together – namely, their campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia: The religiony of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable righty . The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed
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by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slavesy . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? (Madison, ‘Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments’, 1785, in Rakove, 1999: 30–1). The campaign succeeded, first in Virginia and then in the United States. The Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom (which Jefferson regarded as one of his three greatest achievements, and requested – successfully – that it be so recorded on his memorial) mutated into the Establishment Clause, part of the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That the USA is constitutionally barred from an established religion is probably Madison’s and Jefferson’s greatest contribution. Finally, we must look at the political science of the counter-Enlightenment. John Adams served with Jefferson as a Minister to Europe, in Paris and later London. Unlike Jefferson, he did not enjoy himself. Adams was a great scribbler. In his books, preserved in Boston Public Library, he maintains a continuous badtempered dialogue with the French Enlightenment. At the start of the page containing the translation of the Constitution of Pennsylvania, Adams writes: The following Constitution of Pa, was well known by such as were in the secret, to have been principally prepared by Timothy Matlock, Jas. Gannon, Thomas Paine and Thomas Young, all ingenious Men, but none of them deeply read in the Science of Legislation. The Bill of Rights is taken almost
‘Adams was always scathing of Condorcet and the Enlightenment, even in his serene evening correspondence with Jeffersony’ verbatim from that of Vay . The Form of Government, is the Worst that has been established in America, & will be found so in Experience. It has weakened that state, divided it, and by that Means embarrasses and obstructed the American Cause more than any other thing (JA annotation in Adams Library, Boston Public Library, 233.7. My readings do not always coincide with Haraszti’s (1952) at p. 328.) Adams was always scathing of Condorcet and the Enlightenment, even in his serene evening correspondence with Jefferson, which ran from their reconciliation in 1812 until their deaths on the same day, 4 July 1826. But when La Fayette harangued You and me, and John Quincy Adams, through a whole evening in your Hotel in the Cul de Sac, at Paris; and developed the plans then in Operation to reform France: though I was as silent as you was, I then thought I could say something new to him. In plain Truth I was astonished at the Grossness of his Ignorance of Gover[n]ment and History, as I had been for Years before at that of Turgot, Rochefoucault, Condorcet and Franklin. This gross Ideology of them all, first suggested to me the thought and the inclinationy of writing Something upon Aristocracy (Adams to Jefferson, 13 July 1813; Cappon 1959/ 1987: 355). In Adams’ view, all the social scientists of the Enlightenment, including Jefferson and Condorcet, were naı¨ve in their belief iain mclean
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that enlightenment would drive out superstition. Rather, he believed, social science must take human nature as it is, and not make plans based on Utopian assumptions. Adams’ scepticism is a fair comment on Jefferson and Condorcet, although not on Smith or Hume. Adams was the first Straussian critic of Enlightenment political science. More correctly, Leo Strauss was a distant descendant of John Adams.
CONCLUSION At one level, my conclusion that American political science derives from European writers is trite. Where else could they have gone for it? Indeed the European writer most often discussed at the Philadelphia Convention was probably none of those discussed in this article, but ‘the celebrated Montesquieu’ as it was customary to call him. While I do not deny that Montesquieu’s view on climate and on the possibility of a large state were influential,
I believe that the influence of Smith and Condorcet was deeper; both of them were much deeper thinkers than Montesquieu. The only other literature the Enlightenment knew was that of classical Greece and Rome: which indeed the Framers of the US Constitution and their enemies the Anti-federalists raided copiously to boost their arguments. But that literature was part of a common European heritage, also revered by thinkers and social scientists in Europe. All the first generation of political scientists, bar one, drew their inspiration from Scotland and France. The one exception, John Adams, drew his inspiration from the same source: but what Jefferson loved about France, Adams deplored. The Scottish Enlightenment in particular was entirely lost to view until a few historians of ideas, led by Caroline Robbins (1954) and Douglass Adair (1974 and 2000) disinterred it. Political science originated in the halls of the old College of Glasgow and the salons of Condorcet’s Paris.
Notes 1 Earlier versions of some of this material are in McLean (2003 and 2004). A fuller version of the argument as it relates to Adam Smith will be in McLean (2006).
References Adair, D. (1974) T. Colburn (ed. by) Fame and the Founding Fathers, New York: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, VA, by Norton. Adair, D. (2000) The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Appleby, J. and Ball, T. (1999) Jefferson: political writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arago, F.X. and O’Connor, A. (1847–9) Oeuvres de Condorcet, 12 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot. Arrow, K.J. (1951) Social Choice and Individual Values, New York: John Wiley. Baker, K.M. (1975) Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boyd, J.P. et al. (1950) The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Main series 29 vols to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cappon, L.J. (ed.) (1959/1987) The Adams – Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Condorcet, M.J.A.N.de Caritat, Marquis de (1785) Essai sur l’application de l’analyse ` a la probabilite ´ des de ´cisions rendues ` a la pluralite ´ des voix, Paris: Imprimerie Royale. Haakonssen, K. (1994) Hume: Political Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraszti, Z. (1952) John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Hume, D. (1738/1911) A Treatise on Human Nature, 2 vols, London: Dent (Everyman). Hutchinson, W.T. et al. (eds.) (1962–) The Papers of James Madison. Main series 17 vols to date. Vols 1–10 publ. by Chicago University Press, thereafter by University of Virginia Press.
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Jefferson, T. (1789) Letter to James Madison, 6 September (‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’), in Appleby and Ball 1999, pp. 593–598. Kernell, S. (2003) ‘‘Introduction: James Madison and Political Science’ and ‘ ‘‘The True Principles of Republican Government’’: Reassessing James Madison’s Political Science’, in S. Kernell (ed.) James Madison: the Theory and Practice of Republican Government, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–13; and 92–125. McGrath, D. (1983) ‘James Madison and social choice theory: the possibility of republicanism’, Doctoral dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. McLean, I. (2003) ‘Before and After Publius: The Sources and Influence of Madison’s Political Thought’, in S. Kernell (ed.) James Madison: the Theory and Practice of Republican Government, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 14–41. McLean, I. (2004) ‘Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the De ´claration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen’, in R. Fatton Jr. and R.K. Ramazani (eds.) The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–30. McLean, I. (2006) Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: An Interpretation for the 21st Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McLean, I. and Urken, A.B. (1992) ‘Did Jefferson or Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’ Public Choice 73: 445–457. McLean, I. and Hewitt, F. (1994) Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Madison, J. (1787/1984) in A. Koch (ed.) Notes of debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, New York: W.W. Norton. Madison, J., Hamilton, A. and Jay, J. (1788/1987) in I. Kramnick (ed.) The Federalist Papers, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rakove, J.N. (ed.) (1999) James Madison: Writings, New York: Library of America. Robbins, C. (1954) ‘ ‘‘When it is that Colonies may rebel’’: an analysis of the environment and politics of Francis Hutcheson’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 11: 214–251. Schofield, N. (2003) ‘Madison and the Founding of the Two-Party System’, in S. Kernell (ed.) James Madison: the Theory and Practice of Republican Government, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 302–327. Schofield, N. (2006) ‘The intellectual contribution of Condorcet to the founding of the US Republic 1785– 1800’, Social Choice and Welfare, forthcoming. Preprint at http://polisci.wustl.edu/ fset_faculty.html. Scott, J. (ed.) (1982) An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Sinclair, J. (1837) Memoirs of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair, Bart., Edinburgh: Blackwood. Smith, A. (1976) The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 8 vols, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (Facsimile reprints of the edition published by Oxford University Press between 1976 and 2001). A Vindication of Mr Hutcheson from the Calumnious Aspersions in a late pamphlet; by several of his Scholars (1738) Glasgow. Copy in Special Collections, Glasgow University Library. Witherspoon, J. (1778) An address to the Natives of Scotland Residing in America, London: Printed for Fielding and Walker.
About the Author Iain McLean is Professor of Politics, Oxford University. He has previously worked at the Universities of Warwick, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Yale, and Stanford. Previous and current work on the eighteenth century includes Classics of Social Choice with A.B. Urken (1995) and Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian (forthcoming 2006).
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