The Federalist Papers' Vision of Civic Health and the Tradition out of which That Vision Emerges

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3511271
AutoresThomas L Pangle (University of Toronto, autor correspondente)
Ano1986
Volume39
Fascículo4
Páginas577-602
Data de publicação1986-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Western Political Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0043-4078 • E-ISSN: 2325-8675
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/106591298603900402
OpenAlexW2077754747
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas7
Referências citadas36

rT nHE BICENTENNIAL of the American Constitution invites us to reconsider not only the legal and constitutional theory that informed the framing, but also the more fundamental and difficult question of the kind of human being and the way of life the Founders saw the new regime as fostering. The inhabitants of the United States (and, increasingly, of the West in general) are willy-nilly molded, in decisive ways, by a specific political culture. To understand this culture that shapes us, to take a truly critical or free stance toward it, we need to gain as clear a view as possible of the intentions of those who designed the basic or original stratum. The original designers of a political system are of course not the sole shapers of a nation. They may not have fully understood even their own doings or the implications of what they achieved. Besides, in the American case the Founders were a widely assorted lot with differing opinions and varying intellectual capacities. yet the American Constitution has had an unusual staying-power, and an enormous formative impact on society; it was crafted and debated at a very high level of reflection and discourse; and its framers included a small minority of geniuses who seized the initiative not merely by conciliating and reflecting current opinion but also by creating and spearheading new opinion by seeing farther into, and articulating more perspicaciously, the roots of what was being generated. In what follows I probe the essays that constitute the most profound of the records left behind by these un-typical, and in a sense un-representative, statesmen-theorists. I view the Federalist Papers against the background of some of the major alternative visions of the human potential articulated in the previous history of political thought. My main purpose is not speculation about the genealogy of influences (though what I say will have implications in that regard), but rather the more precise delineation of both the basic choices the Papers make and the arguments, grounded in a conception of human nature, that may support those choices. I will try to show how, as we try to uncover the Federalist's vision of a healthy or sound human life and of the deepest needs and potentialities of human nature, we come to see and share in the central moral-theoretical difficulty with which the Papers wrestle

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Federalist · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Academic Freedom and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations · Law · Philosophy · Public Health Policies and Education · Service-Learning and Community Engagement