The Liberal Republicanism of the Founders

This is a contribution to Symposium No. 1, our invitation to explore and explain the basic principles of a liberal outlook.

Editor’s Note: I asked Brad Thompson to let us share an excerpt from his book America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. We talk these days, with some urgency, about American being a “democracy,” and sometimes we forget to add the vital modifier “liberal democracy.” In this passage, Thompson looks at how America’s Founders approached this issue, and particularly how they created a new and distinctive conception of “republicanism” that differed from older uses of the term.—RWT

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American revolutionaries were proponents of the republican form of government. Traditionally understood, republicanism was concerned mostly with the question of who should rule. While republican government could assume innumerable forms, including adopting elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, it was most often defined as the rule of the people through representative institutions. Thomas Jefferson defined republicanism in the traditional way: “It means a government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority.” But this definition was not quite precise enough. Jefferson further refined it by suggesting that republicanism is the degree of the people’s “control...over the organs of government,” which is somewhat different from rule by the people. The people’s control over the use and abuse of government power, he said, was the “measure of its republicanism.”¹

Jefferson’s amendment to the traditional definition of republicanism was illustrative of a change that had taken place in the American revolutionary mind. This change actually transformed republicanism into something very different from the historical understanding of the term associated with ancient and early modern thought and practice. For Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries, republicanism was more than a form of government, and it meant considerably more than substituting an elective system of government for a king. As Thomas Paine put it, “What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government.”² This new American-style republicanism was a way of life grounded in certain moral and social principles as much as it was a political form. The Americans’ republican revolution led them, according to the Reverend Samuel Williams in 1774, to “form a new era and give a new turn to human affairs.”³

For traditional republicans going back to ancient Greece and Rome, the sacrifice of individual interests for the common good was the ultimate standard of moral and political value, which meant that the public and the private were drawn together as tightly as possible. The republican state was viewed as a unified and homogenous whole. For American revolutionaries, by contrast, the individual and his right to self-government and the pursuit of happiness was the standard of moral and political value, which meant that the public and the private were to be separated as much as possible. The new republican state was defined by its diversity and heterogeneity.

Revolutionary republicanism thus shaped the Americans’ conception of how to view the individual’s relationship to government; it defined how they viewed the structure and operation of their society and government. This new conception of republicanism pointed to a reordering of the moral, social, and political principles and institutions that would dominate American life for a century. This was no utopian vision, however. The Revolution of 1776 and the new republican ideology that came with it reflected and gave philosophic expression to a society that largely existed in America already.⁴

Jefferson was not alone in his modification of the traditional definition of republicanism. There developed in America during this period a new and improved understanding of republicanism that shifted the focus away from the question of who should rule toward the question of how men should live their lives in a republican society. Illustrative statements supporting Jefferson’s recasting of republicanism can be found in John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America and in James Madison’s tenth essay of The Federalist.

Adams distinguished between free and unfree republics. He defined unfree republics as those that violated the rights of individuals. A free republic—what he called “the best of governments, and the greatest blessing which mortals can aspire to”—adds two crucial criteria to the standard definition of the term “republic.” The most important criterion for Adams revises the general definition of a republic to include the requirement that it be “an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.” He distinguished a free from an unfree republic in these terms: “An empire of laws is a characteristic of a free republic only, and should never be applied to republics in general.” The rule of law, then, establishes the necessary but not the sufficient condition in the definition of a free republic. Adams well knew that majority-rule republicanism combined with the rule of law could still lead to unjust laws and an unfree republic. A second criterion was necessary. For Adams, the rule of law exists primarily to protect individual rights, particularly the right to private property. He defined a republic as that form of government “in which the property of the people predominated and governed; and it had more relation to property than liberty.”⁵ This American-style republicanism secured and protected private property by law, and it protected the property of all men, including the wealthy.

Adams offered what is surely one of the most sophisticated definitions of a republic written during the revolutionary period. His definition goes beyond a description of institutional arrangements or defining the locus of social power. Instead, Adams demands of republics that they fulfill certain ends or social goods. He defined a free republic as that form of government in which the rule of law protects the property and therewith the liberty of all citizens, not just those who rule.

James Madison was another influential proponent of the new American-style republicanism. His greatest contribution to republican theory and practice was to constitutionalize it. In the tenth and fifty-first essays of The Federalist, Madison sought to solve the traditional problems typically associated with the republican form of government, particularly the problem of majority faction. Too often, Madison lamented, popular governments ancient and modern (including America’s postrevolutionary republics) had passed laws “not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.” In other words, the traditional form of republican government too often inclined toward democracy (defined by Madison as “a Society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person”), which means that a majority faction was able to “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens.⁶ The intellectual and practical challenge Madison set for himself was to reconcile the republican form with the natural rights of individuals.

Like the views of Jefferson and Adams, Madison’s view of republicanism was shaped by the underlying moral philosophy of the Revolution and by the modern science of politics. Republican government was the form of government most likely to promote and protect the moral laws and rights of nature listed in the Declaration of Independence, but it still was not good enough. Madison therefore set out to devise institutional arrangements that could ameliorate the problems inherent in the republi- can form. He famously constitutionalized the republican form through a series of mechanisms meant to defang majority factions. In Federalist No. 10, Madison proposed two solutions to the problem of majority tyranny. The first was representation, the purpose of which was to “refine and enlarge public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” The second was to extend the geographical sphere of the republic and thereby “take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” which would dilute the strong impulses of passions and interests that lead to majority factions bent on violating the rights of minorities.⁷

In Federalist Nos. 48 and 51, Madison identified several other mechanisms that can be used to prevent majority tyranny, the most important of which is separation of powers with checks and balances. By 1787, many American statesmen came to realize that the most dangerous branch of government in the republican form of government was not the executive but rather the legislative. It was “against the enterprising and ambition of this department, that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.” In Federalist No. 51, Madison explained how the new Constitution sliced (separation of powers) and diced (federalism) the powers of the government, thereby limiting the power and the ability of republican legislatures to violate the rights of individuals. He identified a variety of checks and balances built into the federal government (e.g., giving to each department a “will of its own”; giving to each department an independent source for the “emoluments annexed to their offices”; giving to the administrators of each department “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others”; as well as a variety of “auxiliary precautions” and “inventions of prudence” such as a bicameral legislature, an executive veto, and a division of powers between the state and federal governments) that would tame, channel, and sometimes smother the ambitions of unhinged majorities.⁸

Madison summed up the broad outlines of how he and America’s republican constitution-makers reformed and transformed the republican theory of government by securing liberty and justice. American constitution-makers created what they variously called complex or compound republics, defined by Madison in the following way: “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each, subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will controul each other; at the same time that each will be controuled by itself.”⁹

Defined and institutionalized by a written constitution, America’s new form of republican government represented a revolutionary advance in the theory and practice of government. The Americans reconfigured the traditional idea of republican government by resting it on a new moral philosophy summed up in the first and second truths of the Declaration, then by adapting this philosophy to the institutional developments brought forth by the Enlightenment’s new science of politics (e.g., representation and separation of powers).

Even the rancorous debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists in 1787 and 1788, which was fought largely over the nature of republicanism, was notable for what both sides held in common. To a man, they believed that the purpose of republican government was to secure the rights of individuals, and to one degree or another they all assumed that their republican governments should be controlled by written constitutions with separation of powers, federalism, bicameral legislatures, and various checks and balances. The differences between the two sides lay primarily in the amount of power they were willing to give to the state and federal governments.

American-style republicanism was unique because of the emphasis it put on limiting the political power of those who rule—including the rule of the majority—so that individuals could rule themselves more efficaciously. They well knew the truth of Madison’s observation that, “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”¹⁰ In contrast to the ancient Greek and Roman republics, the new American republics shrank the public sphere and expanded the private sphere. This American-style republicanism was better defined as self-government in the fullest sense of the term. It meant the people controlling the growth and power of government so that individuals could have greater freedom to be left alone and govern themselves.

The greatest achievement of the American Revolution was to free individuals from the arbitrary commands of government. The radical transformation in thought and practice that followed would have enormous implications for the development of a new American society in the century that followed.¹¹ Morally, the founders’ American-style republicanism insisted that men have a right to be free—free to pursue their individual happiness (material and spiritual) without the interference of others. Politically, it declared that government should be limited to protecting individual rights. By default and by intention, the Declaration draws a line between the public realm (what government may do and what individuals may not do) and the private (what individuals may do and what government may not do). The public realm is necessarily narrow and shallow, and the private realm is necessarily broad and deep. The purpose of the public sphere is to protect and expand the private sphere.

The success or failure of republican government was measured by the degree to which the government left individuals alone to govern themselves. Jefferson had more to say on this subject than any other revolutionary founder. During the second year of his presidency, he told the English theologian and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley that he regarded the American people as acting “under the unrestrained and unperverted operation of their own understanding[s],” and thus demonstrating to mankind that “degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.”¹² The role of republican government, Jefferson told another correspondent, was to expand man’s freedom and his ability for self-rule. It was therefore the responsibility of republican legislators to be “sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power” and to “declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.” In a free society, he continued, the actions of men should be limited in two ways: first, “no man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the law ought to restrain him,” and, second, “no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third.” Finally, after legislators and their laws “have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.”¹³

There was no single American mind on the question of the various forms that republican government might take, but there was universal agreement about the purpose of republican government. Not a single American revolutionary believed that government could legitimately transgress man’s natural rights. They all believed that the goal of government was to protect men in their peace and security, thereby expanding their freedom to govern their lives as they see fit. “The true foundation of republican government,” Jefferson declared, “is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management.”¹⁴ In a free state, laws must therefore be “reasonable, that is, not violative of first principles, natural rights, and the dictates of the sense of justice.”¹⁵ In 1818, Jefferson reported to the Commissioners for the University of Virginia that the purposes of a proper university education included the study of the basic principles and structures of government, which should promote “a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another.”¹⁶

In this new republican theory of government, the individual replaced the government or any part of it as the primary unit of moral and political sovereignty. American-style republicanism mandated the securing rights as the sole criterion by which to judge whether any particular government is legitimate or not.

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C. Bradley Thompson is professor of political philosophy at Clemson University and executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.

1. Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:19, 22.

2. Paine, Rights of Man, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:268.

3. Samuel Williams, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1774), available at Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-discourse-on-the-love-of-our-country/. 

4. The view of American revolutionary republicanism described in these pages is very different from the influential view presented in Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 46–90.

5. Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 4:370–71; 403–5; 370–71; 5:453–54.

6. Madison, Federalist No. 10, pp. 57, 61, 60–61.

7. Madison, Federalist No. 10, pp. 62, 64 (emphasis added)

8. Madison, Federalist Nos. 48 and 51, 334, 348–50.

9. Madison, Federalist No. 51, 351.

10. Madison, Federalist No. 55, 374.

11. For an examination of the new society created by the American Revolution, see Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

12. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, June 19, 1802, Writings of Jefferson, 10:324–25. The best discussion of Jefferson’s republicanism can be found in Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.

13. Jefferson to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:24.

14. Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:36.

15. Quoted in Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, 76.

16. Jefferson, “Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia” (August
4, 1818), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 334.